The List Is Dead; Long Live The List

the men in media accused of rape yesterday are tweeting their articles like normal while the women in media yell at other women in media

— darcie wilder (@333333333433333) October 12, 2017

One unfortunate result of the Buzzfeed piece “outing” the Shitty Media Men list is that it has derailed discussion about what to do with these shitty people in favor of a discussion over the ethics of the list’s existence. Don’t get me wrong, I think the demise of the list and the fact of it getting written about (it’s news!) were pure inevitabilities (Binders, anyone?). In some ways, of course Buzzfeed had to talk about it, because there were more names from Buzzfeed on it than anywhere else! And the wider you make the net, the greater the chance of complex conflations of abuse of power and physical sexual violence with things like “creepy af in the DMs.” So yes, of course it was going to get messy, but if you accuse it of messiness, you have fully missed the point of the list. It would seem to me that a few false positives is probably an acceptable price if you’re saving hundreds or thousands of women from harassment or worse down the line. The list is dead but I hope the spirit of the project lives on.