From the Comments: Mansplaining the Currency of Outrage

by saythatscool

Unsurprisingly, people had a lot to say about feminism and The Daily Show and Jezebel and Emily Gould and the attention economy yesterday. One very, very long comment came late in the game!

It read, in part:

The “summary of Gould’s article as ‘y’all are just jealous’ is facile to the point of being misleading. Ironically though, it serves as a perfect metaphor for exactly the kind of manipulative junk that makes the whole Jezebel cardboard cutout so distasteful, as Jez then went beyond the pale with a post that accused Gould of impugning their ‘reporting.’ No such thing actually occurred though, as (to cadge a term from old timey philosophy) Gould didn’t point a finger at the form of their argument but rather at the substance that it was made of. There wasn’t an accusation of poor reporting but just an accusation of a sort of emotional purpose behind that reporting. Just as at no point did Gould accuse the Jezebel writers of being jealous and catty, she said that they were encouraging those feelings in the online community, that they were unconsciously pointing people in that direction…. Marx used to say that money was simply fetishized power-that it was a talisman that represented something, and for the Jez community that fetishized currency actually is outrage and righteousness.”

[Ed. Note: Further commenters, however, go on to note the currency of outrage is widely accepted at all of today’s best Internet boutiques! That, as Emily pointed out, it’s not proprietary to Jezebel.

Also, then this commenter goes on to talk about: “But Jezebel doesn’t actually police that voice, or educate women, or pretend to debate any sort of truths which encompass any world that involves the 49% of the rest of us that apparently make up the female-mashing machine that is human existence.” Which, ack! Anyway, I couldn’t let this go by without qualifying, sorry! -c.

]