by Chris Bodenner
Since the recent launch of Double X, the female-centric spinoff of Slate, a generational debate has erupted between its older writers and feminist bloggers elsewhere. Double X's Breslin reacts:
The sense I get reading Jezebel's dismissive, snippy critique, which seems to amount to "you're a bunch of old farts, blppph," or Tracy Clark-Flory's more considered missive is that the only way to judge a female-oriented site is by whether or not it's "feminist." What gives? Aren't we over that already? I could have sworn feminism was cultural road kill, at this point. And isn't it intellectually reductive and culturally retarded to imply that the only site for women worth doing is one that follows an abstract set of political rules upon which no one can agree?
It seems to me that "feminist" sites like the aptly-named Feministe are interested in having it both ways. They want all the power their feminist foremothers promised them—and the right to play full-time victims of the patriarchy. Get over it. Get on with it. I hope the feminist mantle doesn't fit Double X. I hope this site is bigger than that.
Feministe's Filipovic responds. Feministing's Valenti piles on. Meghan O'Rourke, founding editor of Double X, defends its mission.
