Some topics of online discussion (especially those that produce heavy emotional investment, such as feminism) go through this process at an accelerated rate. The tedency to select material that produces an immediate, visceral response selects against thoughtful, nuanced discourse and prompts quick, rash, emotional responses. This raises the temperature and sharpens the tone of the forum, which tends to drive out people who are uncomfortable with vitriol, who as it happens tend to be thoughtful, considerate, long-sighted people, and a vicious cycle arises in which anger and self-righteousness become the dominant emotions and the level of thought and craft put into submissions plummets.

Worse, as the bandwidth of the forum increases and takes up more and more of the participants’ available time, less and less of the participants’ time is available to consult other forums, and the community of participants begins to close itself off from outside sources of ideas. This easily leads to a group form of impaired reality testing in which small differences of opinion among the participants become magnified out of all proportion and new ideas (the products of this heated, closed community) are embraced without critical examination (because an ideological bubble has been formed that prevents testing ideas against external reality).

Mind you, none of this is unique to feminism — it’s a chronic, systemic problem that dates to the beginning of Usenet — and maybe to the invention of the mimeograph machine. Feminism merely seems to be particularly prone to it because it inspires such passion.

Your comment prompted me to go into TypePad and do a full search on my archives.

I found that I’d blogged about Iraq 27 times in 2007 alone. Admittedly, most of those posts were about the non-gendered politics of the Iraq war, or the larger non-gendered military strategy.

I did publish an interview an article in Salon this month with Nina Berman about her prize-winning photograph of a wounded Marine veteran at his wedding and her larger project of doing portraits of wounded Iraq vets.

Also, during the same week as the posts about the NYT Magazine article, I revisited the suicide of Col. Ted Westhusing (an officer serving in Iraq) and an Iraq Slogger article by a psychiatrist addressing the elevated incidence of PTSD in combat photographers compared to print journalists covering wars.

So, I’m really not sure what your point was.

There’s some sexism for the Feminazis to chew on.

But when the big thinker shows up, he tends to muscle common sense out of the way. For example, you refer to those you disagree with as “scolds”. But, really–you’re nothing but a tedious scold in this post. Seriously–isn’t your prose here a lot more screechy and strident than Lindsay Beyerstein’s over there?

It seems to me that Lindsay Beyerstein’s piece, though critical, was mild in its tone and reasonably generous in its praise of both the photographer and newspaper.

Reading the comments on the post, I think I made the right choice. There were comments discussing her lips, where her hands where, and on and on. Much too flaky to be really feminist. I had visions of armies of women with magnifying glasses pouring over the photo!

Sorry, I was just getting over this stuff then this picture came out and I feel as if I have to defend her all over again.

The photo is fine, and I don’t view it as non-PC. But it’s wrong for the subject of the article.

- Temple

All of the photos with the article are “atmospheric” for want to a better word: A woman staring out of her kitchen window. A woman slouched on a couch. A woman sitting in the drivers seat of a snow-covered pickup truck. A on a playground swing with her toddler. And so on and so forth.

I haven’t read any of the accompanying posts, but I agree Shaun – what’s the big deal? I’ve encountered much of the same ultra-PC attitude when I occasionally visit some of the feminist sites. I think the really need to reexamine their priorities on what’s important to women’s rights and what is not important or not as important.

You’re welcome.

I cannot stress enough that Lindsay has the right to blog about whatever she chooses and is a damned fine reporter and writer. She also has an awesome eye for visuals, which I have occasionally picked up and used (with due credit, of course) on my own blog.

I don’t want to dump this entire matter on Lindsay, but do find it kind of weird that Suzanne’s situation caught my attention last fall, I contacted her mom and used something that she wrote as one of about a dozen posts I put up at my own blog in honor of Veteran’s Day. Lindsay, in fact, wrote a nice guest piece for me about how Canadians celebrate that holiday in a far more reflective way.

My issue is more generic: While I cannot recall a single post on the agonies of women soldiers in Iraq on a feminist-centric blog, nor can I recall any of them doing anything about Veterans Day. Kinda strange when you consider that the military is, to an extent, one of the few places in society where there playing field isn’t quite so skewed.

It seems like some much of feminist blogging is ghettoized to particular blogs. Blogging politics or culture with a feminist identity is difficult and rare.

Oddly, this seems to be a problem throughout the “progressive” blogosphere. On Dailykos there are plenty of women, but few see things in terms of a gender dynamic.

And I’m so conflicted by the culture of the progressive web. Things like this, from just about everywhere this week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-FcX0tVf7E Funny satire yes, but as a feminist I take exception. I’m just surprised few others do.

That word’s still cool in your world, right? And what do you say about a chick who flies by the name of “Majikthise”? When Doug Adams penned it, it was funny; when a woman–especially a feminist–uses it as her nom de cyberplume, am I supposed to take it as “irony,” or an implicit, subconscious, sexual intimation of Wasserstein-inspired power?