It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Today’s Badass is Chloe Angyal. Chloe is a blogger and freelance writer based in New York City. She writes at her own blog, and is an editor of well-known feminist blog Feministing. Her work has also appeareed in various online and print venus, including Slate, Salon, Jezebel, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Christian Science Monitor. In her writing, Chloe has covered a variety of topics, including body image, pop culture, women in politics and reproductive rights.

Here are her answers:

When was your feminist/activist awakening? Did you know you wanted to be doing the kind of work you are now, or did it come as a surprise to you?

Like a lot of people of my generation, I grew up with feminism in the water. My mom was a Second Waver who did feminist public health work her whole life. My dad did my hair for ballet on Saturday mornings and certainly identifies as a feminist. I was really lucky to grow up in that kind of environment. And there was a watered-down, commercialized feminism in the cultural water when I was growing up, too. I came of age in the “girl power” era in pop culture – I think the first Spice Girls album was one of the first CDs I ever bought myself.

But I didn’t explicitly start identifying as a feminist until I was about fifteen. I went on a three-month exchange to France, and I stayed with a traditional family in a tiny town in Brittany. For the first time, it occurred to me that my parents’ arrangement: two careers, two last names, sharing parenting duties (and, it should be noted, hiring a fair bit of outside help to make those two careers possible), was unusual. And, to me, vastly preferable. I remember being really annoyed when my host dad came home, plonked down on the couch and watched TV until dinner was ready, then went back to the TV after dinner as my mom cleaned up after the meal she had just cooked. I recently found my diary from that time and I wrote something like, “I’m so confused, isn’t France the birthplace of Simone de Beauvoir and modern feminism?”

That trip was significant for other reasons. I went from taking four dance classes a week to doing no exercise and eating a lot of rich French winter food. I gained a lot of weight, and I really hated it. I hated going home and being so much bigger than when I left, and feeling like my classmates and my family and friends were all judging me as some kind of failure. I hated how angry and inferior that made me feel – and I hated that something as trivial as two dress sizes could make me feel all those things. But then I read The Beauty Myth and I realized that it wasn’t actually trivial; it was political. And it wasn’t just me, either. Say what you will about what Naomi Wolf has said and written since that book (and believe me, there’s a lot I want to say about that), that book changed my life.

I didn’t know I wanted to do this kind of work. I wanted to be a dancer, actually. I’ve been a performer my whole life, and I really wanted to do that professionally, but my parents very wisely insisted that I finish college before attempting that. They wanted me to have a great education because, you know, ankles break, or in my case, spinal discs herniate, and that can end a dancing career. I think they were secretly hoping that during college I would find something more stable, and lucrative, than dancing. I found feminist writing, which is one-eighteenth of a modicum more stable and lucrative than dancing. Suckaaaahs!

But yes, it comes as a surprise to me, a happy surprise, that I get to do what I do. I have always loved to write, and I feel so grateful that I get to use that talent in a way that, hopefully, helps people and makes the world a better place.

You joined the Feministing team in 2009. Do you remember when you first started reading the blog yourself? What has it been like working with some of the pioneers of feminist blogging?

I started reading the blog in the spring of 2008. I was a junior in college, and I was in the eating disorder awareness and prevention group on my college campus, and we brought Courtney Martin in to speak. I was assigned the task of introducing her before her talk, so I started reading Feministing for a little bit of background. And I was totally hooked. I started reading it daily, and then it was my home page, and then I started reading Shakesville and Shapely Prose and a bunch of other great feminist blogs, and by the end of that semester I had decided that our campus needed its own feminist blog. I started it when I came back to campus that fall.

What has it been like working with some of the pioneers of feminist blogging? It’s been like a goddamn dream. I wish me from the spring of 2008 could see this. Past-me be so excited. Past-me would also wonder when and why future-me finally caved and started wearing skinny jeans, but that’s another story.

You are writing your dissertation on the portrayal of women, gender and sex in Hollywood romantic comedies. What led you to this topic? What is your favorite “good” romcom? What is the most distressing one you have come across?

The thesis grew out of a year-long series I did at Feministing. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the genre for a while, and in 2010 I decided I wanted to take a closer look at contemporary romantic comedies, so I saw and reviewed every single rom com that came out that year. About half way through I realized that I wanted to keep writing about them, and that I wanted to learn more about their history and their development. I wanted to figure out exactly how we ended up with the spate of particularly sexist rom coms we got in the last few years. And I’m certainly not the first scholar to write about popular culture or even about romantic comedies. There’s a whole body of literature on romance novels, and when I was doing my literature review, some of the most interesting stuff I read was about gender in horror movies.

There’s no such thing as a perfectly feminist rom com. There’s no such thing as perfectly feminist pop culture. But there are elements, glimmers of hope, in a lot of movies. For example, I love Emma Stone’s character in Easy A. I like that she’s smart, and observant, and self-aware, and imperfect. I love her relationship with her parents. I love their relationship with each other. The movie isn’t perfect, but it’s got more glimmers than your average rom com.

The most distressing rom com I’ve come across is Kate and Leopold, which stars Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. It pains me to say this, because Hugh Jackman is a gentleman and a scholar and a countryman and a total babe. But that movie is the worst. At the end, the educated, professionally successful independent woman goes back in time, giving up her family, her career – not to mention the right to vote, contraception and indoor plumbing – to be with the man she loves. It’s horrendous.

Earlier this year, you started the Tumblr “Men who Trust Women”, as a response to the increasingly anti-woman discourse around birth control, abortion and sexuality in the US. Can you tell us why you chose that name and what you hoped to achieve with the Tumblr project? How has the reception been so far?

The name is a reference to the late Dr. George Tiller’s motto, “trust women,” and to the original subtitle of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, “men who hate women.”

I was really dismayed by the fact that most of the men who were speaking publicly about reproductive health were anti-choice. There were some exceptions: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Martin O’Malley, Garry Trudeau. Bless those men, I’m so glad they stepped up.  But they were few and far between. With the exception of those few men, you could be forgiven for thinking that there weren’t any pro-choice men out there. So I wanted to create a space for those men to make themselves known. But, I didn’t want to use the phrase “pro-choice” if I could help it, because while I identify that way, and while I really value that term and that movement, that term is highly politicized, and I didn’t want this to be about red-blue left-right politics. I wanted it to be about what it’s about at its core: women are human and humans have rights. I wanted to make it as simple as I could: do you identify as a man? Do you trust women to make their own choices about their own bodies? Are you a man who trusts women? No labels, no barriers to entry. Trust women.

So far, the reception has been great. We had hundreds of men submit their stories, and now I’m working with a young filmmaker, Alexandra Steinmetz, to turn a couple of the stories into documentary shorts, which is so exciting. Alex doesn’t know this, but I’ve already bought a megaphone and a floppy old-timey director’s hat, like in Singin’ in the Rain. It’s going to be awesome. On a more serious note, I’m excited to put faces and names to some of these remarkable stories. Now we just need to raise the money to make it happen!

Do you have any new or upcoming projects that you would like to share with us? What are you working on and thinking about these days?

I’m really focusing on my dissertation, and my book, right now. At some point I’m going to have to lock myself away in a room like a monk and get them both done. Maybe I’ll buy myself a nice brown hooded robe for that. But that would look pretty weird with the floppy director’s hat.

Thank you for your time, and good luck with your thesis!

As you may know, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. As you may also know, conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a “slut” for testifying about the need for schools to provide birth control in their health insurance plans. But what exactly does the Limbaugh/Fluke controversy have to do with sexual assault or consent? The answer lies in the word “slut” itself, how it’s used, and how some defenses of Fluke may do more harm than good.

Often the idea of a “slut” is used to assume consent and to manipulate the definition of sexual assault — for example, a lawyer may try to use a woman’s previous sexual encounters as evidence that his client is not guilty of sexual assault. Or someone may sexually assault a woman because they heard that she “gets around,” is “easy” or is a “slut.” It’s also used to silence women — a woman who is sexually assaulted may not tell anyone, let alone report it, because others may raise questions about what she was doing in his apartment in the first place, for example. In the case of the controversy discussed above, the word “slut” was also used to try to silence Fluke from speaking about the validity of access to birth control, not from coming forward about sexual assault. What this shows us is that “slut” seems to be becoming a catch-all term, an umbrella insult that can be used against women in many different contexts.

How can we combat this and take the power out of the word?

One possibility is to stop defending Fluke and women who use birth control solely with arguments about women who are not sexually active who need the pill for other reasons. In her testimony, Fluke says that the students at Georgetown “students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens” because the school “does not provide contraceptive coverage in its student health plan”. The majority of her testimony focuses on the medical: a friend of Fluke has polycystic ovarian syndrome and uses prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Fluke mentions another woman who was raped and didn’t go to the doctor to be examined or tested for STIs “because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that – something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.”

Though birth control is a medical, health-related issue and should be treated as such, by focusing on the examples that she did, Fluke perpetuated the idea that only some people are deserving of birth control (similar, perhaps, to the idea that only women who were raped or whose lives are in danger are deserving of access to abortions). If she had discussed having sex responsibly instead of cases of sexual assault and medical conditions, would society have jumped to her defense when Limbaugh called her a “slut”? Was her saving grace the fact that she did not explicitly mention that sexual pleasure in and of itself is also deserving, so to speak, of access to birth control?

Though the passionate defense of Fluke and her mission would warm any feminist’s heart, the fact remains that they believed she needed to be defended against the word “slut,” which shows that the idea of a sexually active woman is still threatening to us. To be called a “slut” is only an insult because apparently society still believes that is very bad and wrong for a woman to enjoy sex and to have a lot of it (though the amount that constitutes ‘a lot’ is unclear).

By defending Fluke by with responses like “How dare he? She’s not a slut, she’s a respectable woman,” we give power to the term “slut” and therefore embed it more deeply into the vocabulary that society can use to silence women. Why aren’t we instead saying “so what if she is?” Don’t all women deserve access to the medical services they need regardless of their sexual behavior? Shouldn’t we be applauding “sluts” who are seeking access to birth control for making safe, responsible decisions?

What the Limbaugh/Fluke controversy shows is that the word “slut,” even in this post-sexual revolution society, still holds a lot of power, and the idea of a “slut” factors in to sexual assault and consent in major ways. Sex-positive feminists often discuss the idea of slut-shaming (see: SlutWalk)  and its harms, but perhaps an equally important goal is to work towards a sexual equality for men and women that allows women to be sexually active and to enjoy sex without having to worry that doing so may disqualify them from being a ‘legitimate’ candidate for birth control. This doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of reclaiming “slut,” but rather thinking about how we defend someone from the term and what the implications of doing so are.

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Our interview partner this week is Crystal Ogar. Crystal is studying Women’s Studies and Film at Howard Community College and she is a blogger for SPARK Summit, a site dedicated to giving young women a change to connect and speak out against the sexualization of women in the media. She is also active in her community as a facilitator for the LGBT youth group Rainbow Youth and Allies.

Without further ado, here’s Crystal!

You are studying both Women’s and Film Studies. Did you start college with activism and social justice in mind, or has this developed out of your studies? What was your eye-opener that got you started in activism?

I’m majoring in Women’s Studies and minoring in film. When I started college, I didn’t entirely have activism and social justice in mind. When I took my first Women’s Studies class that’s when it clicked, I began to learn about the many discrepancies and challenges that women still face right now. That was the tip of the iceberg, but what really skyrocketed me into the world of activism and social justice was the website Tumblr. Where I was able to access information that I had never known before.

How did you get started with SPARK? How did you connect with them, and what has it been like to have that opportunity to speak up and network and organize?

The way I got involved with SPARK was by searching Tumblr (which changed my life) for feminist blogs and organizations. I came across a Tumblr user who had put together an extensive list of feminist blogs to follow and SPARK Summit was one of them. I looked into it and kept up with them and I was able to watch the live stream of the Summit in October of 2010.

A member of SPARK- Melissa was speaking about her experiences and sexualization in the media and she mentioned that she was on Tumblr. I jumped at the opportunity to get connected with her and we formed a friendship, she later told me that I should apply to write for SPARK and I was elated to even be considered and when I applied I got it!

Working with SPARK has been the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.  Honestly, SPARK has taught me so much about the sexualization of women and girls in the media (and how it affects their self-esteem and many aspects of their personality) and all of the ways we as consumers can speak out against and challenge it. Not to mention the supportive community of other young women who feel the same way that I do. I’ve made wonderful friendships and allies within SPARK and I’m eternally grateful.

How do you, as a young woman, experience the representation of women in media? What are some of the messages and images that you find most damaging, and how do you deal with them when you come across them in your own life?

As a black woman, I definitely experience the representation of women in the media in more ways than one. Black women and women of color in general are often fetishized or stereotyped in films and on TV, that is if we’re even present. And when we are the media relies on negative stereotypes (maids, baby mommas who can’t catch a break or stories that focus on solely our race and nothing else).

The ideal that women are supposed to fit into is a VERY narrow one and that is thin, white, and blonde. Which leaves out so many young girls. The media constantly tells you that you’re not good enough and to get there you have to do exactly what they tell you to make sure you can be apart of the fold. As an activist, I want to speak out for bigger girls, LGBTQ youth and everyone who doesn’t fit the media’s perception of what they should be.

The way I deal with these messages and images when I come across them in my everyday life is to speak up about it. I’ll tell my friends, my mom, anyone who will listen (or won’t!) Doesn’t matter, because it’s not okay for a select few to see the injustices of the media, we all need to be aware.

You have just attended the Women in the World Summit as a panelist.  Can you share with us what you learned from that? Which story or panel inspired you the most?

Women in the World was such an amazing experience (and one I wouldn’t have had if not for SPARK!) What I took from that weekend was that there are so many horrible things still happening to women in the world, but we don’t have to be alone to fight them. That weekend was not only about stories, but about solutions. One of the most inspiring panels for me was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Leymah Gbowee. She asked us why there are no angry American women?! When she and group of women in white held delegates in Liberia hostage until they agreed to sign a peace treaty.

[You can watch Crystal's panel here.]

Are you working on any new or upcoming projects right now? Or, which story/blog/news item/recent event has caught your attention the most right now?

I’m hoping to speak to The International Women’s Rights Collective (IWRC) at Harvard sometime in the next few months! And after Women in the World, I was able to make so many contacts and I was approached about being on a PBS show in D.C. and possibly ABC News!

So hopefully there’s a lot more in store and I’m so excited to see what happens!

(And I thought I’d throw this in, but a recent event that has caught my attention is the casting in the film The Hunger Games. I’m a big fan of the books and the main character, Katniss, is described as an olive-skinned, dark haired girl yet she was cast as a white woman. The casting call only asked for white actresses so women of color didn’t even get a chance.)

Thank you for your time and your great answers!

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

This week’s badass activist is Jean Kilbourne. Jean is a feminist author and filmmaker who is known for her work on the images of women in advertizing, as well as the images of alcohol and tobacco advertising. She is the author of Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel  (1999) and  So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids (2008, with Diane E. Levin), and she has produced several films on advertising strategies and how they affect us.

Let’s hear what she had to say!

You are a pioneer of media studies, especially when it comes to advertisements and women’s bodies. What drew you to this field and how did you get started with your work?

This is the question that I am most often asked.  So when I started writing my first book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, I decided to begin by answering this question.  Thus the introduction is a memoir that begins with my early childhood.

I can’t give as complete and elaborate an answer in this space as I did in my book, but I can say that many elements of my life led me to this work.  These include my early involvement in the women’s movement, my interest in the media, and some experiences I had as a young woman with modeling, beauty pageants, etc.  These experiences left me with a lifelong interest in the power of the image.

I started collecting ads in the late 1960s.  I ripped them out of magazines and tacked them onto my refrigerator.  Gradually I saw a kind of statement about what it meant to be a woman in our culture.  And I saw patterns and themes, such as the dismemberment of the body.  I bought a copy stand and a macro lens for my camera and made slides from the ads.  Gradually I created a slide presentation and showed it to my students (I was a high school teacher at the time) and then to larger and larger groups.  In 1977 I quit my day job and launched my career on the lecture circuit.  In 1979 I made the first version of “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.”  I have since remade it three times (in 1987, 2000, and 2010).

I also started studying alcohol and tobacco advertising in the mid-1970s.  I was one of the first people to do this.  I created slide presentations and films on these topics too.  Although I am best known for my work on the image of women in advertising, my work in the alcohol and tobacco fields was equally pioneering.

What is your perception of the changes in the field since you first started your lectures? How have the strategies of advertisement changed, especially when it comes to the portrayal of women and the way women as consumers are targeted?

Advertising has become much more sophisticated and much more ubiquitous.  Marketers spend billions of dollars on psychological research and are able to target people much more narrowly than in the past.  The Internet and social media in particular make it possible for ads to be very tailored and targeted –for men and for women.

The invention of Photoshop has completely changed ads because now the image of beauty is absolutely impossible, artificial, and constructed.  But women and girls are still told that somehow we must achieve this perfection and that we should feel ashamed and guilty when we fail.

Another huge change came about from the deregulation of children’s television in 1984.  Children immediately became fair game for marketers and became valuable primarily as consumers.  Among other things, this has led to more rigid gender stereotypes than ever and to the sexualization of childhood and the hijacking of children’s sexuality.

As for the alcohol and tobacco issues, we have made progress in unmasking the tobacco industry and getting people to understand that smoking is a public health issue.  But the tobacco industry is still incredibly powerful and is targeting children throughout the world.

The alcohol industry is also very powerful.  There has been a great increase in the targeting of children and young people, especially via alcopops (sweet alcoholic drinks designed for and marketed to young people).  And the alcohol industry has greatly increased the targeting of girls and young women, with disastrous results.

What are your strategies for decoding images? Have we, as consumers, become any better or savvier when it comes to the way we process advertisements? When and how can we learn these strategies?

In some ways, consumers are more aware and savvier.  But there is still a great deal of ignorance and misinformation.  And most people still believe that they are not influenced by advertising (as I say in my lectures, I hear this most often from people wearing Budweiser caps!).

The United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that doesn’t teach media literacy in its schools.  We urgently need to do this.  There’s an extensive resource list on my website  that is divided into many different topics.  One is Media Literacy and there is a wealth of information from the organizations listed there about how we can teach these strategies.

The Media Education Foundation (the company that produces and distributes my films, among many others) has great study guides for its films on its website  and lots of handouts on topics like How to Deconstruct an Advertisement.  MEF has scores of excellent films, all dealing in one way or another with media literacy.

What role do you see the Internet playing in advertisement? Does it empower us to critique (for example, the way the Twitter community reacted to the Super Bowl commercials this year), or has it made us more vulnerable by making advertising more ubiquitous?

The Internet is a mixed blessing.  In some ways it does empower us to protest and critique and it certainly helps us to organize.  But it also is a gold mine for marketers and enables them to target us more and more specifically.  The Internet has also led to the mainstreaming of pornography, which I believe is harmful in many ways.

What are you working on right now? Are there any current projects you would like to tell us about?

I fairly recently remade “Killing Us Softly” (#4!) and that was a big project.  Next I hope to remake my film “Deadly Persuasion: The Advertising of Alcohol & Tobacco.”  I made it in 2004 and it needs updating.

I continue to enjoy traveling and lecturing.  I recently took a 3-week trip to Vietnam and Cambodia (and showed “Killing Us Softly 4” on a boat on the Mekong River!).  I’ll be speaking at the Edinburgh Festival at the end of August and am looking forward to that.

And I’m beginning to think about writing a memoir (along with the rest of the world!).

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Today’s Badass is Deanna Zandt. Deanna is an author, speaker and media consultant. She has written the book Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking and she appears regularly as a speaker at conferences and conducts workshops on using social media for activism. You can find out more about her and her work at her website.

Deanna took the time to talk to us about social media and social networking, and using both for activism. Let’s hear what she had to say!

You have specialized in social-media networking and online activism. What attracted you to this work? How did you get to where you are now?

Well, I was born a nerd with a weirdly strong, innate sense of injustice in the world, so I think there was a certain inevitability to the work I do, haha. My passions for making the world a better place and for technology innovations evolved relatively separately, though. I found feminism in its most basic forms as a kid (Amelia Earhart was the subject of my fourth grade living biography, ahem), and as I got through college and into the world, that feminist lens both informed the various types of activism I’ve taken up, and allowed it to expand into a passion for racial justice and other intersecting social justice issues.

I discovered the Internet in 1994 as a first-year student in college; when one of my friends showed me the Mozilla web browser that year, I remember hitting him on the shoulder really hard, over and over, yelling, “Oh my GOD! This is going to change EVERYTHING!” It was clear to me then that connecting people together through this strange series of tubes was going to revolutionize… something. I worked through the dot-com and its bust, and found myself often very angry and frustrated that there was such a huge commercial focus on these incredible tools. It was all about making money, selling things, a lot of garbage and excess. I was truly pained by a lot of it, and sat out on a lot of the “fun” stuff from those years.

I started blogging in 2001 — a set of personal diaries here and there, and loved the platform immediately. Things started to spark in my head when I took one of the private diaries offline, I think in 2003. I had been blogging ridiculously detailed entries about my escapades in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (read: I blogged about boys), and though I disguised everyone’s names, I panicked that Someone Would Find It and took the blog down. The next morning, I got an email from a guy in London who wanted me to know that while he understood why I was taking the blog down, he was sad to see it go. Evidently he and his wife would read my blog on their lunch hours and then discuss the day’s entry over dinner when they got home. It was like a little soap opera for them (and believe me, it was a soap opera). This was the first moment where I realized, “Wow, these stories matter to someone.” Stories matter, period.

I’d quit my last 9-5 job in 2003 and was trying out a variety of skills as a consultant, but it always came back to technology. When social technologies really started to evolve from about 2005 on, it became clear to me that social justice folks needed to get on board with what was happening. It wasn’t just that their was great electoral-based work happening (a la Dean campaign… I think if you do the work that I do, you get some sort of demerit if you don’t mention that); there was just this explosion of ways that people could bypass traditional power structures and share their stories with one another. And we know that any kind of social change starts with stories. You can throw all the stats you want at someone, but if you put them in someone else’s shoes for a moment and give them the opportunity to empathize, they’re much more likely to take action.

Now, I get to spend my work time helping organizations figure out how to use a variety of technologies, not just social ones, to help them achieve their missions. It’s thrilling and incredibly fulfilling. Part of my job is a lot of group therapy: helping all of the stakeholders in a situation work out their hopes, dreams and fears, and then finding the tech that’s going to make it all work. My number one favorite thing to do is workshops and training, and I just love watching the light bulb go on for people.

You use a wide array of mediums in your work, from online networkingto workshops to your book (Share This, published 2010). How do these different ways of interacting, teaching and reaching out inform each other?

It’s part of the teaching ethos — realizing that everyone learns in different ways, and it’s helpful to try and reach everyone with means that they can utilize. I learn best by trial and error (insert lots of jokes about my dating life here), but others learn best by reading a book and having the space to digest information. You have to meet people where they’re at, especially when it comes to technology. It automatically calls up a lot of angst for people, especially women, and my aim is to help melt that all away.

You were involved in the online backlash to Komen’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, and you founded the Tumblr “Planned Parenthood Saved Me“. What is it like to be in the middle of such a process, to work with others and to see that you are making an impact? Is there a moment when you get something off the ground and you know that your activism is going to yield results? Any specific factors that determine the success or failure?

Oh man, what a project that turned out to be. I actually started the Tumblr as just sort of an example for other activists who were working on the issue– there was a lot of talk about money, about fundraising, and I wanted to make sure that stories were also getting told. So, I didn’t really have a plan like I would normally have. [Side-eye to my clients: don't even think you can get away with something like this. heh.]

This may make me a terrible consultant, and I may never work again if people read this, but I never really know what’s actually going to work when I help people develop their strategies. I basically make a lot of wildly educated guesses. I firmly believe that anyone that says they can make something “go viral” is full of s***. There is no way to predict these kinds of moments, but there are things that people can tune into when they enter the process.

The main thing is that we have this mistaken notion when it comes to activism and changing the world — we think that we can come up with this really awesome idea, and it will make people flock to us. “Build it, and they will come.” This is horribly wrong. World changing work is not about planting a flag and hoping for the best, it’s about finding the threads of passion that connect people– looking for what people are already feeling — and weaving those threads together. This accounts for the success of moments like Planned Parenthood Saved Me (you can read about the first few days here) and We are the 99%. Of course, timing is everything, too, and you have to be ready to drop everything and run with it when the moment strikes.

Personally, the Tumblr was an incredible emotional journey. Reading those stories as I was approving them, it was just a non-stop sob-fest in my office. I’m eternally grateful for the bravery that those women showed and the stories they chose to share with all of us.

Okay, so I have a Facebook account and a Twitter account. How can I get involved? What is the best way to enter into the world of online activism?

Congratulations! Welcome to the wonderful world of digital engagement. My name is Deanna, and I’ll be your guide.

In many ways, it depends on what you want to do. One of the biggest things that I stress with my clients and students is that it’s not just about getting online and hoping for the best; online activism is just like offline organizing, where you have to start with a goal and work backwards from there. You figure out which tools are most appropriate for the goal you’re trying to achieve. And keep in mind the communities that you’re trying to reach, and what tools they’re using– for some, like reaching media, Twitter is a great connector. Others like Tumblr are good for using humor and reaching younger people. (The average age of most social network participants is older than you think– only 18% of Twitter users are under 24, and Facebook’s fastest growing demographic in 2010 was women over 55.) Keep your communities in mind as you select your tools.

If you’re just generally looking to become more political in your online activities, there are a couple of things that I suggest. First, think of yourself as a listener, and as a curator of news for your community. If you’re passionate about closing puppy mills down, you can act as a curator of interesting and compelling news about puppy mills. It’s not just about signing petitions and calling representatives; it’s about sharing the stories that move people to eventually take action. You can’t just walk into a party, stand on a chair, tell everyone to call their Senator to vote no on a bill. (I mean, you could, but really…) Social media is like a party in that sense– it’s about participating, listening and building solid relationships in your community.

Some practical tips to get folks going:

• Used saved searches in Twitter to keep tabs on your favorite issues. The advanced search options are pretty nifty, too. Check those saved searches regularly to find the conversations that are already happening on things you care about, and join those conversations.
• On Facebook, search works a little differently, but can still be valuable. You can also seek out Pages from organizations that you care about, like them, and help them spread the word on the work that they’re doing.

Note: if Twitter makes no sense to you, I’ve got a set of guides that might be useful. And here’s a good set of Facebook best practices for nonprofits.

Are you working on anything right now that you would like to draw our attention to? Or are there any projects that you would like to drum up support for?

Always hustlin’! Hee. I’m really excited to announce a new series of Social Media for Social Justice workshops launching in San Francisco on March 5. More information about it here, space is limited, but still available! We’ll be having them in NYC, DC and Chicago over the coming months. Sign up for my (very infrequent) newsletter to stay in the loop, and include your metro region for events in your area.

I’m also working on lining up my next round of speaking gigs and workshops, so if anyone’s interested in bringing me in to speak to their organization, school or event, get in touch with Jen Angel at Aid & Abet (Jen at aidandabet dot org). If folks want to talk to me about developing online strategies for their organization, drop me a line directly.

And, in my alternate universe reality, I’m an artist and performer working on a new series of semi auto-biographical comics, which I hope to turn into a theater piece before too long. Fingers crossed!

I had no idea about any of this until a friend and colleague of mine wrote this very needed piece on the media’s (non) reaction to the mounting evidence around “Bradley” Manning’s transgendered identity.

In the mainstream media coverage, Private Manning is described as a gay male with a gender identity disorder and an alterego named Breanna. In alternative media–outlets that revere Private Manning as an international hero and whistleblower–she is referenced with male pronouns, as popular figures such as Glenn Greenwald proclaim that “he” deserves a medal and Michael Moore writes a series of blogs about “his” courage and frequently proclaims that “he” is responsible for instigating the global uprising against corruption, the kyriarchy and all subsequent uprisings.

Still, as Emily Manuel wonders in her article, why are we so reluctant to embrace a transgendered hero? Would Breanna Manning deserve a medal as well? Why has the media–in the mainstream, alternative, and even activism-oriented press not embraced or even entertained the idea of “free Breanna Manning”? What does it say about our media that it is easier to keep transsexuality hidden, reverting to the time honored image of the heroic man rather than accept and welcome new images of a hero?

There are plenty of reasons and alleged justifications–as B. Manning is in prison, potentially for life the sad reality of the current political climate is that her gender identity may be held against her. However, let us set aside the legal proceedings and simply look at the media–the beat, the intersections, the surrounding conversation, and who it is holding this conversation. In the realm of national security, the sad truth is that it is largely men.

My theory–which is not intentioned to be sexist, man-blaming, or negative against anything besides the system that privileges men and institutionalizes sexism and gender injustice–is the following. Men–the Michael Moores and Glenn Greenwalds quoted in our media and their predominantly male audiences (who can most closely relate to their male perspectives)–want to see themselves in “Bradley” Manning. In solidarity, admiration, and support many progressive, liberal men embrace Bradley Manning as the hero and are reluctant to sift through issues of gender identity–simply because these do not concern them. This further institutionalizes national security as a “male” issue–unintentionally making modern day national heroes conform to a male mold, and ignoring the political implications of intersectional identities.

Perhaps it is time to change this. Perhaps it is time to make traditionally separate journalistic beats like “national security” and “gender justice” intersect, challenge our media and ultimately work through these ideas to make a more just world–where a hero is defined by an action and isn’t referred to as a man when she asks to be referred to as a woman–and that this request isn’t too much for journalists to handle.

Free Breanna Manning.

In the meantime, yesterday was the TedxWomen Conference in both L.A. and N.Y. A bunch of fantastic speakers participated, and you should check out the videos of the talks!

One talk you should definitely take a peek at is that of fellow documentary filmmaker, technology enthusiast and all around inspiring woman, Tiffany Shlain. Check it out:

You can read more about her, and find other talks, here.

And you can find her on Twitter as @TiffanyShlain.

I am excited to announce that my new film, xoxosms will be premiering at the 22^nd annual New Orleans Film Festival on Sunday October 16^th. If you will be at the festival, it will be opening for the documentary (A)Sexual at 2:20 PM at the Theaters Canal Palace, 333 Canal Street in New Orleans.

If you can’t make the festival, the film will be streaming online all weekend, starting October 14th – 17th at www.xoxosmsfilm.org

xoxosms follows the story of Gus and Jiyun, two star crossed lovers in a digital age who meet, connect, and maintain their relationship predominantly over the Internet. It raises the questions of intimacy and love, and whether or not this is possible—or in some instances better—over a digital connection.

I’d love to hear from you! Is there such a thing as “digital intimacy”? Can online love work in real life? What is a connection? Check out our newly designed website, watch the film and let us know what you think on Twitter, @xoxosms—don’t forget to hashtag #xoxosms. Spread the word with our Facebook invite.

Thanks, and hope to see you at the theater or on twitter using #xoxosms!

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

This week, we spoke with Akiba Solomon. Akiba is an author, editor and freelance journalist. Aside from her regular column at Colorlines.com, she has also written for a variety of publications, such as Glamour and Redbook.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you view your position at Colorlines? Who would you like to reach and what would you like them to take away from your posts? Have you experienced any support or resistance for the subjects you tackle in a way that surprised you?

I’m the gender columnist at Colorlines.com, which means I cover news, culture, health and politics relevant to the intersection between race and gender. It’s a very broad beat, and I tend to feel overwhelmed if I consciously target any reader. So I concentrate on writing with sensitivity, clarity and accuracy and hope people understand my points and intention. I want people who read my work to come away with enough information to formulate their own opinion. If they agree and feel validated, that’s a bonus for me. But if they disagree that’s fine, too.

You presented a side of the Texas gang rape case that was otherwise not talked about very widely. Why do you think the mainstream media mishandled the reporting so badly?

I don’t think all mainstream media did a poor job. The Houston Chronicle’s Cindy Horswell did a hell of a job reporting and writing about this case.

I think overall the problem with the coverage, however, was a lack of depth. If national media outlets didn’t want to devote real resources to this story, they should have left it alone. (I’m thinking of The New York Times here.)

You can’t just drop a straight news reporter into a town as small and interconnected as Cleveland, have him quote a few people who are trying to protect their friends and family members from life sentences and expect to get a story that doesn’t blame the victim. And if an overwhelming number of townspeople truly do blame an 11-year-old child for a gang rape, THAT’S your story.

Your focus can’t be, “How is the town reacting?” It should be, “How was gang rape [aka "running a train'] normalized to the extent that so many boys and men participated in it and recorded themselves doing it?” Or, “Even if the participants believed that what they were doing was consensual and legal, why would it ever be OK for middle school boys and young adult males in their mid-20s to participate in the same sexual activity?” Or, “Why do people keep asking where her mother was – or where the boys’ mothers were? What does that say about how we view male culpability?” Or, “What role did race play in dehumanizing this victim and her attackers?”

I guess what I’m saying is that this wasn’t a straight reporting job but it was treated as such. Unless you devote resources, time and care to a story like this, and you truly search for the story behind the story, it’s too tempting for most reporters to coast on the most basic narrative. In the case of rape, the narrative pivots on the behavior, attire, sexual history, appearance, immediate reaction, recall, race, class and alleged motives of the female victim. In this economy, and with the erosion of even basic journalistic practices, this is going to get worse.

You’ve written quite extensively on the DSK case and advocated for Nafissatou Diallo. Can you summarize the lessons we can learn from this case about the kind of culture that we live in? What makes it especially difficult for survivors, especially women of color, low-income and/or foreign born women to talk about their experiences?

Hmm. This is really difficult to summarize. I would say that if an accuser is female, poor and of color, we live in a culture that will scrutinize her more than the rich white male who has allegedly raped her. This case says that rich, powerful white males are at greater risk of false accusations than poor, powerless women of color are of being raped. If something goes wrong, it’s the woman’s fault, because she’s greedy, a liar, a prostitute or a pawn in a political entrapment plot.

I would say that many, many people think rape is about sexual temptation and desire rather than power and violence. That’s how you get seasoned writers commenting on the appearance of the accuser, and readers posting about how “ugly” she is.

I think low-income women of color, particularly immigrants, are so vulnerable because they often lack of job security, they fear deportation and they know that law enforcement criminalizes them. If you know you’re going to be scrutinized and you already feel confused, ashamed, terrified and humiliated by the rape, why would you bother?

It’s almost safer to stay quiet.

You have voiced some ambivalence about the recent SlutWalk movement. Can you explain your feelings on the movement? Do you have any thoughts on how something like the SlutWalk could be more inclusive and truly intersectional?

I’m happy that so many people have found a way to address sexual assault victim-blaming and assert their personal power. Anything that empowers folks – particularly people who have been victimized in this way – is positive. I don’t condemn the early marches for not being “more inclusive” or “intersectional”. They were organized through social networks. If the organizers don’t have broad, diverse social networks, their march is going to reflect that. That said, this isn’t a movement I would participate in. It doesn’t speak to me. I know from the “n-word” debate that trying to appropriate dehumanizing, dangerous language doesn’t make it less powerful or insulting; just more common.

Do you have any projects you are currently working on that you would like to talk about here? Or is there anything going on in the media/pop culture/the blogosphere that’s on your mind a lot recently?

I have a book I co-edited about Black women and body image called “Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Lips and Other Parts”. It was published right before the huge social networking explosion and has since lapsed from printing. My co-editor and I are working on ways to get this book and message back out there because it’s very relevant. As for the blogosphere: my constant struggle is with information overload. What’s been on my mind is how to sift through the political gamesmanship and the crazy that the presidential election is going to spark. It’s already a big racist mess and it’s going to get worse.

Thank you for your time and your candid answers, Akiba!

This week, I spoke with David Zhou and Vivia Lu, who are the founders of Microaggressions, a user-generated Tumblr blog that let’s people talk about their experiences with microaggressions.

Let’s talk about Microaggressions. Can you describe how the site works and what it does?

David:
Currently, Microaggressions is an interactive submissions-based project. Each post includes a short contextualization and the psychological impact on the person. We have a handful of editors who help us select and edit each post to provide a collage of events that depict the volume of daily disempowerment endured over time by people who identify with oppressed social identities.

Ultimately, we are trying to show connections between daily personal experience and larger, systemic and institutional injustices in society. We are also trying to show intersectional experience between various social identities, particularly race, socioeconomic class, gender, sexuality, religion, body issues. At the same time, the project is not about showing how ignorant people can be in an effort to demonize them. It’s really about showing how their actions can create and enforce unsafe spaces that have larger social effects. We are hoping to publish a parallel blog that provides in-depth long-form analysis of the issues at stake.

How did you get the idea to start Microaggressions? Was there a
particular event that sparked the idea, or was it more of a gradual process?

Vivian:
David and I ranted to each other during an otherwise lethargic class about microaggressive experiences from our lives. Eventually we started a meticulous record of microaggressions that have happened or are happening to us. This was somewhat in response to an incident on campus at the time where a student government party running for office had plastered campus with flyers reading, “Two Asian Girls at the same time,” which really upset some of our friends who saw that it evoked pornographic fetishization of Asian women and lesbians, while others completely denied that it was inappropriate in any way. (We’ve written about this experience, and will post an essay soon on the site about it.)

This was our middle ground and answer of sorts, where we wanted to show that some of our friends’ anger was coming from a lifetime of similar microaggressions that relate to larger histories and systemic injustice. We began with incidents that we remembered from our own lives where gender, race (we are both Asian American), class, and sexuality hierarchies were enforced by people around us, beginning with elementary school teachers, family, and peers. Originally entitled “Notes on Everyday Life,” this document eventually became the first posts of our blog when we decided to share it online and ask our peers for their experiences. While we had the idea during college, we brought the idea to life several months later when we had time to look for the online platforms and services that could facilitate our project. Once we had it up, we emailed about 40 friends, and the site took off from there with the help of social networks.

What has it been like being the founders of such a relatively well-known project? Have you made any connections with other activists, and with contributors to your site?

David:
It’s been really exciting and challenging. We get questions, feedback, requests, and critiques every day that expand our thinking about allied and intersectional activism. It’s also been wonderful to meet other folks doing similar work and talking about how we can collaborate. We’ve involved people we’ve only met online into the project – for comment moderation and the upcoming site redesign, for example.

We’d like to take some of the project offline – into print media and conferences – in order to engage audiences who might not be connected to the social justice blogosphere. We really appreciate when people reach out to us!

Have there been any contributions that particularly touched you?

Vivian:
The fact that people submit and spend their time contributing to the project with experiences from settings as mundane as work and intimate as family is really touching to me. David and I would have long fizzled out if we were just posting our own experiences. Most recently, I really appreciated that we recently were contacted by a concerned individual to create a separate trans* tag, and have since received a lot of trans microaggressive experiences to post.

We have a little number on all of our posts that count how many times people have reblogged/liked it, and while the numbers vary drastically from post to post, I really appreciate the ones that don’t get liked/reblogged as much. They’re usually a much more subtle or “everyday” submission, and less particularly shocking/immediately WTF bloggable, which really represents the bulk of microaggressions that really wear people down in their day to day lives.

What experiences have you yourself had with such microaggressions, and how do you deal with them when they come up?

Vivian:
In a way, our upbringings were primed with experiences that have opened our eyes to these invisible oppressive actions.

I grew up in Colorado and began thinking critically about race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality mostly when I moved to NYC for college. I was initially shocked at the visibility of racial segregation of NYC neighborhoods – even simply taking the 7 train to Queens and slowly watching all the white people get off. I was also initially shocked at street harassment I received that was intensely racialized and gendered. This opened the door for me to question a lot more about the ways in which social identities impact individual lives. It was a heartbreaking and devastating process, where I re-learned American history not taught in public grade schools and re-remembered my own childhood experiences and realized the different ways in which social identities I hold affected how people treated me and my family. Because so many of these microaggressions had happened so long ago, the only way to record and recognize them was for me to write them down. For microaggressions now, it depends on the safety and comfortability of the situation, as many of our submitters explain. Most of the time, I don’t call microaggressions out. Sometimes, I’m so bored and numb from unoriginality (Where are you really from? / That’s an interesting major for you.) that I give up.

David attended a private high school in NYC of extreme class privilege, where he witnessed a lot of blatant oppressions along race, gender and class. Growing up in those environments caused us to meet in student organizing circles during college, where we saw even more microaggressive actions by the nature of our work.

What do you both do aside from running Microaggressions? What are some other projects you are working on?

David:
Besides the blog, there’s a lot that we’d like to do with the project. Right now, we’re in the middle of a site redesign that will eventually enable us to launch a parallel blog on the site with in-depth analysis of systemic injustice through personal memoirs/creative writing, essays, and artwork. The redesign will also allow us to integrate better search options and technical features. In addition to the redesign, we are also working on releasing print materials for education about various issues related to microaggressions, for which we’ve gotten many requests. These materials can hopefully be used in classrooms, workplace trainings, diversity workshops, etc. to provide an engaging, interactive way to teach issues of privilege and power.

As for ourselves personally, we aren’t “full-time activists or organizers.” Vivian spent this last year working as family shelter staff at a NYC domestic violence organization, and I taught in Korea. We are both starting graduate school this year – Vivian in sociocultural anthropology and I in computational biology.

While we’re not professional organizers, we believe that our politics are full-time. Anyone can be part of this project if they have experiences to share and the time to listen and reflect.

Thanks for taking the time to share your answers with us!