It’s also galling to some to hear that websites like that can’t make money, even as they see constant reminders of how much certain forms of feminism sell. “Barbie,” which pulled in more than $1 billion at the box office, featured patriarchy as its villain.
“The ‘Barbie’ movie wouldn’t exist without feminist blogs,” said Anna Holmes, 50, the founding editor of Jezebel. “A lot of the topics that were covered on sites like Jezebel and Feministing, and a lot of the writers and editors who worked on those sites, have now been absorbed into mainstream media.”
Traditional women’s publications like Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Vogue now seem to operate their websites from roughly the perspective that Jezebel did 15 years ago, and multiple former Jezebel staff members now work, for instance, at The New York Times.
Ms. Holmes recalled a meeting she had with Gawker executives about her vision for the blog. They urged her not to use “the F word” — meaning feminist — thinking it would scare away readers. Ignoring that, Ms. Holmes encouraged her writers to explore gender politics so often that readers would come to expect it, trusting that Gawker executives weren’t paying close attention to what she was building.
Eliza McLamb, 22, and Ms. Hava, 26, are the hosts of “Binchtopia,” which assesses lowbrow cultural fixations with a highbrow vocabulary, summed up in their tagline: “If Plato and Aristotle had internet addictions and knew what ‘gaslighting’ was, they’d probably make this podcast.” Since starting it in their Los Angeles apartment in December 2020, they’ve amassed more than 40,000 weekly listeners and roughly 8,000 paid Patreon subscribers. Their subscriber tiers range from “Bestie Vibes Only” at $15 a month to “Sweet Baby Angel” at $5, bringing in roughly $40,000 monthly, which they said they also used to pay their two editors, manager and social media lead.
