Jezebel bites the dust

[ArthurbellaScott]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67372543

'Feminist media site Jezebel is suspending publication, as its owner reckons with a downturn in online advertising.
G/O Media chief Jim Spanfeller announced the move in a memo to staff, calling it an "excruciating" decision.
Founded in 2007 under the Gawker Media umbrella, Jezebel pioneered the sharp, dishy coverage that came to characterise many digital upstarts.
Its suspension follows woes at other new media firms.
Mr Spanfeller said he had hoped G/O - which also publishes sites such as The Onion, Jalopnik and Gizmodo - would be able to steer through "dark times" in the industry, but "could hold out no longer".
He said Jezebel's model did not mesh with the strategy for its other, more niche publications.'

I'd heard about this. Tbh I don't know anything much about it. Was it GC or 'be kind'?

It wasn't really either, it was TRA central, hating "TERFs and SWERFs"

No great loss then.

It was a very, very libfem, sex-pozzy kind.

The funny thing is all the red-pillers on Twitter are celebrating because they think anything called "feminism" is man-hating.

Mind you, they would never bother reading anything by a woman much less a feminist (Harry Potter doesn't count) but they're sure they know everything about it anyway.

Edit: I'm sure they were horrified when they grew up and realised that JKR was both female AND feminist.

Yep. No loss at all. I actually was pleased when I saw the news - never thought I would feel that way about a feminist publication but they fully threw women under the bus.

Same.

I had to look up "dishy" — I know it's a New York based reporter, reporting on an American publication, but I find it a bit irritating to sprinkle American slang in a business news article on an ostensibly British news site with an international readership. I read a lot, from a range of English-speaking sources, and have never come across it (in the American sense) before, so either I've got a very specific blind spot for that word or it's not widely used outside the US. I don't mind new words or looking things up, and it might make sense in a gossip or fashion feature, but regional slang in a straight business article is a bit odd.

I'm grumpy this afternoon 😅

I assume it comes from 'dish the dirt'. But I'd struggle to understand the American definition. I'd probably guess from the context, but it's a stupid use of the word imo.

Yeah, I guessed from the context too, and confirmed my inference with the lookup, and I know it's hardly essential to understanding the article anyway — it just got on the wrong side of me this afternoon 🤣

No great loss, it's been awful for a very long time.

Completely agree. Jezabel was one of the factors that made me realise something was going very wrong in our cultural institutions - all those so-called young "feminists" extolling prostitution and men self-declaring as women if they felt they had "girlie brains." It was horrendous.

I used to read Jezebel every day when I was a young un and it hadn’t been taken over by the TRAs / I hadn’t discovered Mumsnet yet.

Dishy to me will always mean a good-looking 70s poster/actor

Pop star!!

Why was it called 'Jezebel'? The traditional view that Jezebel is a sexually depraved woman hated by God is not borne out by her story as a loyal wife to Ahab. Weird name choice.

Blast from the past there!

I used to read Jezebel, The Mary Sue, and Pink Raygun every day until they went OTT LibFem and TRA. I ditched them about 10-ish years ago because their articles started to push ideology and to advocate things that were bad for women.

I’m glad I found FWR and other feminist websites (like Feminist Current) that aren’t more of the third/fourth wave attempts at subverted feminism.

I’m not sorry Jezebel is closing down.

I loved The Mary Sue but, over time, places like that and Jezebel and (shudder) Shakesville made me really concerned about the state of modern feminism.

Nothing more niche than a feminist magazine aimed at blokes.

'Dishy' is the kind of word your auntie might have used about Richard Chamberlain, circa 1977.

No great loss.

Dishy always makes me think of the Vicar on Keeping up Appearances. For gossip I've only heard it as a verb ie "dish it out." Shows how irrelevant Jezebel was that this discussion has turned towards random slang.

Same reason there was a feminist magazine called Bitch probably.

A post on Jezebel many years ago opened up for me this wonderful world where the female sex is erased but the male sex remains 'men' and 'boys'. It was about menstruators, and at that time using the term caused questions in the comments.

The answer given (probably by other commenters and not editors of Jezebel) was that it is not just women and girls who menstruate.

Which immediately made it clear to me that 'women' and 'girls' have been redefined without any public consultation, that the new definition of those words had to be based on deeply sexist stereotypes, given that biological sex is erased, and that, therefore, Jezebel no longer had anything to do with women's rights and so on.

It got much worse after that, but I haven't looked at the site for at least five years now.

Those who pointed out that red-pillers celebrate this do remind us of the widespread problem that many stamp group labels on everyone (a kind of -ism which is now not only limited to the old type racisms and sexisms) and assign individuals all the beliefs and characters of any randomly picked person or sub-group from that wider group.

Is this the new identity politics? In any case, it makes debate extremely difficult and contributes to the rolling wrath in social media, because we are all assigned group guilt and group opinions without being asked.

I didn't know Bitch ceased publication, too. Interesting, and suggestive of this era which is really quite deeply anti-feminist, both in the more academic areas and in that kind of popular culture.

As far as I can tell most US legacy feminist organisations are no longer about women's causes, with the exception of reproductive rights which, however, are now supposed to be about everyone's reproductive rights, even though male people's reproductive rights are completely different and do not result in the same policies, on the whole (as male people can't get pregnant and so can't be raped and forced to give birth, say).

Bitch showed me that feminism could be fun and irreverent after mostly reading Ms., which is important because laughing at the patriarchy is a powerful tool.

I don't know why things seem to have slid backwards.

I see Jezebel as exactly the same as Miss Universe. Both were exploitative shite that paid lip service to 'empowering' women.

Lovely to hear news of both dying on the same day.

Jezebel etc have all fallen prey to what Helen Joyce describes as an inevitability of identitarian politics which makes organisations turn 180 degrees against their founding principles: it effectively makes feminist orgs anti-feminist and gay rights orgs anti-gay.