Feminists of the World, Unite!

Or at least get together once a year to kibbutz, argue and bemoan the state of mainstream media at the a conference, Women, Action and Media, where I endured flying 6,000 miles roundtrip, a time-zone adjustment (more precisely, I did not adjust) and two short days clocking hours of concurrent sessions to take in as much as possible.

I don't know if I'm paying more attention to this but women seem to be getting savvy about marketing themselves. Some of my fave feminists, like Andi Zeisler from Bitch, Jessica Valenti at Feministing and Allison Fine have books, along with their online presence.

A new writer (to me), Courtney Martin, has a new book coming out called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, a topic that never seems to get old and spans pop culture and media criticism. I also ran into Rita Henley Jensen, founder of Women's eNews. Aside from being a Columbia Journalism School grad, and an award-winning journalist, she is a domestic abuse survivor who was a welfare recipient. One reason she founded the Web site that covers stories about women, by women (in English and Arabic) was inspired by her disgust with the New York Times coverage of the Welfare Law of 1996 (she is careful not to call is welfare reform), when the paper of record only profiled women of color as welfare recipients.

On the other hand, Ellen Goodman decried the lack of political content of women's media -- the old boy network is now in new media, with bloggers linking to each other on political issues, and the dearth of political women's blogs. Instead there are the popular mommy blogs, which Goodman called "the personal as apolitical" in her keynote address to the over 400 crowd of women from nonprofits, media organizations and feminist writers.

While we may not have the discipline of the lockstep right -- or the feminist response to Ann Coulter yet to handle smack downs at Fox News -- I couldn't help, as I circulated around after a meeting of freelancers, that this conference fulfilled a need, that once in a while, it's actually nice not to be part of the mainstream.