Why Young Feminists Aren’t Just Online: A Response to Sady Doyle

Last week, I wrote a piece for Campus Progress about young feminists and how they engage with activism online. Later that week, Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle wrote a response post on her Tumblr saying, among other things, that "One of the things that happens, when you are on the Internet a lot, is that you begin to lose the distinction between stuff that Is Happening On The Internet and stuff that Is Happening." In other words, she was not amused.

In the interest of continuing the discussion about internet feminism and its impact, I want to open up a conversation with Doyle and address some of her critiques of my piece on young feminists and online activism.

I agree with Doyle's point that raising awareness can’t be separate from other forms of activism. In fact, raising awareness is an activist tool that often part of a larger campaign that leads to direct action. Most of the women I interviewed for my article understood this. For example, Carmen Rios, of Hollaback! and ConSensual, is part of both of those campaigns to raise awareness of sexual harassment and also develops tools to actually combat sexual harassment. What Doyle seems to forget that for an increasing generation of young people that are more and more connected to the Internet is that consciousness raising and direct action go hand in hand. Amy Edler , another woman I interviewed for the article, quit an eight-year stint as a waitress and now educates other women (in person!) about speaking up for their rights in the workplace. In other words, Doyle's accusation that the young women I interviewed for my article are only engaging in online activism is untrue.

Furthermore, when Doyle points out the real-world impacts of her own work, it sounds eerily like the work of many women I interviewed for my piece—she inspires people through her writing to take real action. "I can measure some of Tiger Beatdown’s actual, real-world impact; it has some, apparently," she writes. "But the impact comes in the form of individual letters: Girls who tell me that reading the blog got them to file sexual harassment complaints, or come to terms with their sexual assaults or abusive relationships, or generally just stand up for themselves.

Doyle also said that "I see a lot of 'raising awareness' and a lot of 'raising consciousness.' What I don’t see a lot of is raising funds: The Internet is a fantastic tool for finding support (not 'support,' not general good wishes, but actual, practical financial help) for small or scrappy or out-of-the-ordinary projects, but that potential isn’t explored in depth (or at all) in this article."

Perhaps Doyle forgot that the article is about young women—we aren’t exactly today’s millionaires, and often work multiple jobs to be able to do feminist activism and volunteering in our spare time. Feminism isn’t by any means a rich movement and relies heavily on volunteers, positions often filled by young women.

That doesn't mean young women are opposed to using the Internet for fundraising. When possible, we have used the internet to help raise money: One such successes was the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon which had hundreds of young women blogging, tweeting, and emailing friends, family, and coworkers asking for donations to support their local abortion funds. This is something that I hope we get better at—using the Internet as a way to fund our activism.

I’d like to think that all of the Internet activism that young women are involved in has a “real world” impact, even if they don’t blog for the “big feminist spaces” online like Tiger Beatdown, Feministing, or Jezebel. We write, blog, tweet to find community, which in turn strengthens our feminist ideals and aspirations and gives us confidence to go into our real live communities and make change.

The women I interviewed talk about having conversations with their peers in real life and not just online about feminism, about holding rallies in their communities, about starting their own on-campus organizations to fight anti-choice lies or a culture of sexual assault. If this isn’t feminism in action, or “real” feminism, as Doyle says, that I don’t know what is.