Feminism and The Internet

Hi friends. Welcome to Honeybee 2020 - a place where we continue to grapple with all things gender and power. A place where all of us at Honeybee are still recovering from the Academy’s (honestly unsurprising) middle finger to Greta Gerwig, Lulu Wang, Céline Sciamma, Jennifer Lopez and many many more. In the words of Issa Rae, “Congratulations to those men.” No more Four Men and Greta Gerwig shirts for us. (plug for Girls On Tops if you want to support female-led film projects and writing).

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, ISSA RAE IS IN GOOD COMPANY:

(2020) Issa Rae: “Congratulations to those men.”
(2018) Natalie Portman: “And here are the all-male nominees.”
(2018) Emma Stone: “These four men and Greta Gerwig
created their own masterpieces this year.” 
(2018) Sandra Bullock: “Here are the four men, and the one trailblazing
woman, who are nominated for achievement in cinematography.” 

We digress. 2020 is a big year - elections, elections, elections. Stakes and pressures are high, and in our interview today, Carmen Rios reminds us of the hard, serious, sometimes not fun work of collective liberation. But she also left us with this sage wisdom: “What can you do to make a difference? Whatever the fuck you want to do.” 

Carmen Rios is feminist writer, editor, podcaster, vlogger, thinker and badass digital Jill-of-all-other-trades straight outta Jersey (a fact she’s been getting more and more comfortable with). She cut her teeth in feminist organizing and has spent the last three years at the digital helm of Ms. Magazine, the original feminist media space for thinking and progress, after stints at Autostraddle and Everyday Feminism. Carmen is also the co-founder of Argot Magazine and the current host of Bitch Media's Popaganda podcast—and this year, she’s graduating soon to the uncertain-yet-exciting world of freelancing and agenda-advancing on her own terms (and hopefully working with even more people on even more things). We salute that, as 2020 is an exciting place to be when your true loves are feminism and the internet. 

ONE QUICK SHAMELESS PLUG: If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter, it would mean a lot if you’d forward or share it with anyone who might agree - growing the hb community is one of our 2020 goals :) 

ON HOW SHE GOT HERE AND ON BEING THE COVER STAR OF HER OWN MAGAZINES

It's been a long and winding road. I'm from suburban New Jersey, and I’m quite Jersey. I was always a super weird creative person. I was always making magazine covers in my bedroom on my super ancient 1998 PC. Of course I was always on the cover of the magazines. I wanted to do a lot of things. I wanted to work in a department store because I enjoyed the sound of heels clicking on tile floors. And I was trying to write novels about girls and dogs. It was always about a girl and her dog.

I always had a mom who encouraged that stuff. I ended up going to this art school for high school and learning about design, film, theater, all of the arts. I wanted to go into advertising, but for advocacy, which I had no idea existed. It does exist. It is not what I ended up doing. I went to American University in DC, so I did all of the political feminist things.I always say that it was an accident that I started doing digital media professionally, just because it was pure need. It was (sometimes slightly, sometimes much) older feminists saying ‘we know how to do the work we do, but we have no idea what Twitter dot com is and we don't understand how to do a digital campaign.’ And I was full of ideas, offering them up at low or no cost, so I ended up with opportunities to do projects that looking back on, it's just crazy. To think that when I was 19 I was helping Hollaback launch their global network that they have now…

I wasn't sure where any of it was going, but I knew that I loved feminism and loved the Internet. I lived on my computer and was super into activism. Then when I graduated, I could not find a job. I worked at a children's center for a time and confirmed the degree to which I do not enjoy the presence of small children.

ON MONETIZING FEELINGS AND FIGURING IT OUT AS SHE GOES ALONG

My first job was a digital organizer for the Feminist Majority Foundation. It changed very quickly into a communications job because everyone quit except for me. I got to manage a team because again, by happenstance, I was like the only one in the room who knew what had to happen. But in college when I came out, I got recruited to write for Autostraddle. The whole time that I was underemployed, unemployed and then when I worked for FMF, I was doing all this writing on the side for all these feminist websites, but still very much so was like, ‘I'm not a writer. This is like not what I do,’ even though that was clearly what I did.

I decided to move to LA just because I wanted to pursue that life and see what happened. I drove across the country and I wrote about that, because I had to monetize every single feeling I ever had when I was first coming up on the Internet. And then stepped into the job at Ms., which has been an incredible experience that showed me basically everything that there is to know about nonprofit publishing and feminist publishing. I got to meet so many cool people and do all these cool things and got to hone my skills like video, writing, editing. That brings us to now. Now, I don't really know what is next except more writing, more storytelling, more figuring it out as I go along. That's what I've been doing professionally for 10 years: Figuring it out as I go along.

ON THE MOVEMENT WITH A CAPITAL M

The upsides: I'm not trying to say that I'm like Patti Smith, but it's been exciting being in platonic love and relationships as so many interesting people for the last 10 years and watching as more people like me are now starting to transform and take control of the movement. I love watching younger women and women of color and queer women and women of different economic backgrounds really come into their own power in this space. That's what makes contemporary feminism so awesome, is that because of the work that was done by the women before us we have this immense privilege of being able to add all these layers into feminism. I've been very excited to see that instead of us being like, ‘we're here, too, we are actually running things, and being able to look across the room and be like, I knew her back when.

The downsides: omen of our generation have this understanding of activism as a form of work. The rise of self care is awesome because I came into the movement following models and wanting to embody the same kind of strength, stoicism and power that I was watching other people model. Over the last decade I've really realized just how deeply ingrained the martyr complex is in feminism, how deeply ingrained burnout culture is in feminism. There's all these ways in which these traditional models of work and power still rear up in the Movement. That's something that's always been a bummer. This celebration of the martyr and the person who is sacrificing. The idea that this is supposed to be your entire life.

I understand the historical tension of ‘well, for us, this was our entire life because we literally lived in a landscape where we had so many things we couldn't do.’ And now for us, we can do those things and we want to have those experiences and those things that weren't available to us for so long. I feel like pleasure and freedom were not available to women for so long. And are still unavailable to so many of us that it's important that a movement is built around the idea that we now get to have that in addition to the passion and the fire and the work that we do.

I probably also would never sleep if I had no legal rights and was basically erased by the state when I got married. Those things would change my outlook.

“What can you do to
make a difference?
Whatever the fuck
you want to do.”

Carmen Rios

ON FEMINISM, THE INTERNET AND THE COMPLICATED NATURE OF “WOMEN'S” MEDIA

I always liked the Internet because I felt it was a really democratic way to engage and be involved. I was a teenager in the suburbs without a lot of means and with literally no connections, who was very passionate in 2007 about Hillary Clinton (because some things don't change). It's crazy to imagine this now, but the Democrats used to have a blogging platform on their website where random people could have blogs, and I had one, obviously it was the most eloquent and beautiful thing that had ever existed. But for me, the Internet was this way to be connected to this big world that I couldn't access because I was just a girl at home on a computer, in a room that didn't even have four walls.

The Internet has made it so that feminist perspectives that used to be only available in three or four places are now everywhere. We see feminist perspectives even in like the magazines and publications that most of us hate, never read or aren't interested in. It's been really cool watching women's media become feminist media. But the downside of that is that now there's this loss of what is posed vs. what is an authentic orientation. It's very tempting to celebrate a magazine like Cosmo having a feminist reinvention. But then when you really drill down, it maybe doesn't always have the most system-dismantling perspective.

The idea of feminism as a commodity has become more widespread, and it becomes hard to distinguish. When you're getting feminist perspectives on a corporately-backed site, it's hard, or feminist-agenda publications to get the money they need to survive. But it’s a good problem to have.

ON WOKE TEEN VOGUE

I follow Teen Vogue. When Teen Vogue hard core embraced feminism in 2016. The reaction was what I found jarring because it was almost ‘look, finally a feminist magazine.’ I remember being like ‘but there's so many.’ The idea that it was the first real one because it was seen in some ways more legitimate than an indie magazine. But we've had feminist magazines like Ms., which has almost been around for 50 years, or Bitch. Feminism has a legacy magazine. So what was surprising was people acting like they had never seen feminist media before. It was a subversion and I mean it still it catches me off guard.

I love seeing, like Elle or Marie Claire do that kind of stuff. But I also noticed, those magazines walk this weird line. For example, Teen Vogue is super feminist but here’s a paid ad by Facebook who may or may not be a Russian asset. There's like this tension, they’re welcome in this movement, but it's gotta be allowed to criticize them and call them out for what they are. You’re just as likely tos see Elle or Marie Claire profiling Nikki Haley and Meghan McCain just as quickly as they would profile Elizabeth Warren or Hillary Clinton. And that to me is a no no.

ON REASONS SHE'S HOPEFUL

With 2020. I'm a little depressed by how things have been shaking out. But I feel like my 2020 story is my 2016 story is my 2008 story, they’re all connected. The day in 2008 where Hillary Clinton conceded, I was home watching it on TV. My mother was home. And we're crying. And she was like, ‘I don't think I'm going to see a woman president in my lifetime, because if it couldn't be her, I just don't know who it could be.’ I was like, ‘how dare the world make my mother think and say that.’ So I started doing feminism. So I went to college and wrote every paper about Hillary Clinton for like two years. I was a business major, communications major.

And in 2016 I became the one who said ‘Oh, God, if not now, if not her, who and what?’ It was extremely exciting to see so many women run for president in 2020. Even if a lot of them have since suspended their campaigns, it was really exciting to see that not be the big deal. People acted like seeing a woman run for office is like seeing a dinosaur in the wild. So I'm hopeful that it's not abnormal anymore. 2018 showed us that, and hopefully 2020 down the ballot will also show us that. It is depressing to me that voters still lean on the old white man as a safe bet to win. But the positions - we've really moved the needle. It's crazy to think that now what we're talking about is how fast can we get to government funded universal health care like at the time.

The years since 2016 have shown me that the resistance is fertile and we are moving that needle, even if it is slower than we all wish it was. So I'm hopeful for that.

RANDOM, RELATABLE THOUGHTS

I think about dial-up sound a lot. I sometimes Google it. We were so humble and patient back then. It was the equivalent of having to churn your own butter.

ON WHO SHE'S OBSESSED WITH

My obsession with Hillary Clinton never fades. I would say that I have a lot of passing obsessions right now. My AOL screen name was “alwaysobsessed.”

ON WHAT SHE'S READING

Lately I've been reading a lot of Hunter S. Thompson books and thinking a lot about storytelling in the most wild and unbridled sense, and being a character and putting that character back into the story. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is so good and also so timely. Like, ‘oh, so that's how an evil person gets reelected.’

The real truth is that the first time I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I was an adult. I read the book and the whole time was just like, ‘please drink water. No, stop. Stop doing that.’ I was uncomfortable because I just kept imagining how physically painful it was to be on that many drugs for so long. And then I drove into the desert a couple months later and stayed in a tiny house with no Wi-Fi and no TV. And I only brought that book, and I suddenly, oh my God, Hunter S. Thompson Stan.

That said, I'm reading a thousand books at all times. I have the new Eve Babitz collection and I got some Tom Wolfe on my shelf. And then at the same time, all of these like books about women or by women about the American West. A book coming out about Calamity Jane, a book I've been meaning to read about women in rural Texas.

ON WHAT THE REST OF US CAN DO TO HELP

There's all kinds of super practical things that I can and will say, like support feminist media. It's super easy to get a feminist magazine delivered to your mailbox. Amplify feminist voices.

If you are online, there’s the simple act of retweeting a woman. I try very hard not to ever tweet men on Twitter dot com. I also don't try to interview them as experts. If you're in the media, there's tons of things you can do to make an actual difference.

ON JUST DOING YOU

Yes, I'm concerned about our collective liberation and I think we all have a lot of work to do to get us there. And we have to continue to do the very serious, very not fun, very not lighthearted stuff like dismantle oppressive systems socially and institutionally.

But I also just think that we all get better at doing that work when we are searching for liberation as people and just really trying to free ourselves. Removing ourselves from oppressive situations and systems - just be focused on doing that for ourselves and encouraging and empowering other people to do it. I think it's so powerful to just say, ‘I'm going to wake up, I'm going to live for myself and I'm going to cheer on other people who are living for themselves’ and stop supporting all of the things that tell us that we should live for money, power, or whatever else.

Like, just doing us. What can you do to make a difference? Whatever the fuck you want to do.