Interview with Amanda Marcotte

My interview with Amanda Marcotte is here. As this interview was conducted for my paper, I couldn't really supply a lot of the hilarious bits from Marcotte's book. This had to be edited out, but it gives a concise feel for the book:

On the evidence of her new book, It’s a Jungle Out There, she is a Fight Club Feminist. As in the famous scene in Fight Club in which Brad Pitt announces the rules, Marcotte’s prefaces her book with her own rules:

“Why are people so mean to feminists? Because so much of feminism is the fine art of calling bullshit, and calling bullshit makes people uncomfortable. The first rule of understanding bullshit is that people really love their bullshit.”

The interview was done before the flame wars, and before Seal purged the book of the racist imagery in the cartoons that were used to divide the sections of the book. That's a long story, especially for those of you not following it. In brief, I like Marcotte, I like her work, I like her temper - but in the controversy about her, BFP, and the appropriation of the work of WoC bloggers, her temper has lead her to uncharacteristically underestimate her own bullshit as a white woman. That said, I am particularly pissed off at the shit stirrers who seem to think Marcotte bears the burden for the racism of the whole power structure in America, when she has always tried to reveal it when she sees it. For instance, she was out front in the 'victimization' controversy when Clinton's supporters took to making invidious comparisons between the mild 'victimization' of blacks and the truly awful victimization of women in America - as if one should really feel that Scarlet O'Hara was the victim of Tara - and she has always been vocal about it. Instead of the use of gentle persuasion - to say, look, you are missing the point here - it all became immediate denunciation of Marcotte. On my paranoid days, I think this is because Marcotte's been pretty clear about her preference for Obama, and this is payback by the Clinton people. But on consideration, that isn't right. The exaggerated response is about a silent and amplifying wrong - the lack, in the liberal/left press, of people of color - there are investment firms that hire more African Americans and Hispanics than you find writing for, say, the Nation -and it came out against Marcotte.