by riese, rachel & laneia
One of the more inspiring results of the kerfuffle surrounding Bryan Goldberg’s launch of Bustle.com has been the increase in attention towards a slew of incredible websites aimed at women — websites Goldberg neglected to acknowledge when declaring that the web had yet to see a women’s site featuring both beauty tips and news. But the women’s sites that have been garnering such mentions — from name-drops to editor quotes to spots on lady-blog-lists — are predictably limited. BECAUSE OF THE PATRIARCHY.
In just the past few days, queer women’s websites including Autostraddle failed to make this List of Bustle’s Rivals, CJR’s Required Skimming: Ladyblogs and Forbes’ The 100 Best Websites For Women 2013. That’s right, not one queer website on a list of ONE HUNDRED WOMEN’S WEBSITES. This is silly ’cause we’ve been operating Autostraddle for over four years now (longer than most of the frequently name-dropped sites), not to mention that the Forbes list includes sites that aren’t explicitly women-targeted, sites that are called “Pinterest,” sites that don’t get our traffic or AfterEllen’s, sites that don’t have THE BEST READERS IN THE WORLD, didn’t win Best Blog of 2012, haven’t started their own gay camp and haven’t printed boyshorts with “STRADDLE THIS” on the butt.
We usually channel our unattractive bitterness and jealousy into building houses for abandoned kittens and demolishing patriarchy with our bare hands (just kidding, we channel it into bitching with each other on Skype Chat) but today, when the Forbes list author responded to a commenter complaining about AfterEllen’s exclusion with, “we feel the 100 sites here are valuable (and entertaining) to women regardless of sexual orientation,” we were like “what do they think we write about?” and then Executive Editor Laneia joked that we should do a “listing of headlines for posts that other sites who ignore us must think we write.” You know, maybe they just don’t know that queer women are women, or maybe they don’t know that we also write about abortion and lipstick?
listling of headlines for posts that places who ignore us must think we write
1. Poetry About Your Girlfriend’s Yeast Infection
2. Eight New Kinds of Dildos For You To Gay Marry
3. Lilith Fair or Lilith Foul?
4. People We Know Are Gay Even Though They Think They Aren’t, Stupid Idiots
5. 35 Ways Of Looking at Ellen Degeneres’s Haircut
6. Cuteness Feeds the Patriarchy: Why You Need To Burn All Your Makeup and Hair Products
7. Does This Shirt Make Me Look Straight? How To Avoid Fitting In With Heterosexuals
8. Why Reproductive Rights Are Straight Girl Problems
9. It Happened to Her: My Straight BFF Crush Was Ostracized From Her Peer Group When Everyone Assumed We Were Fucking! LOL!
10. Make a Thing: Voodoo Dolls of Your Ex-Girlfriend Or Straight Best Friend Crush
11. How to Make Sure You Have The Coolest Set of Pronouns At the Potluck
12. Why Your Gender-Neutral Offspring Will Be Superior To Other Children
13. How To Avoid Ever Buying Things, Ever, Because Lesbians Hate Money
14. Seven Types Of Privilege You Didn’t Even Know Someone Could Have
15. Raise a Ruckus!: Being The Obnoxious Queer Moms At The PTO Meeting
16. Advanced Gluten Freedom: How To Eradicate The Last Traces of Gluten From Your Life (And Also Men)
17. Ode To My Pantry: Leftover Male Body Parts
18. It Happened To Me: I Was Best Friends With Someone’s Husband and He Fell In Love With Me Even Though I’m Gay
19. Top Ten Most Cruelty-Free Queer Studies Programs For Womyn-Loving-Womyn
20. How To Trick Straight Women Into Having Sex With You, and Then Kill Them!
21. This Long Rambly Mess About The Indigo Girls*
22. Birkenstocks: Best Shoe, or Only Shoe?
23. How to Overthrow Your Heteronormative Co-op/Farmer’s Market
24. You Think You’ve Thought of Everything You Could Possibly Paint With Menstrual Blood, But You’re Wrong!
25. Drum Circles For Dummies
26. God I Hate Men Even More Than I Thought I Could
27. It Happened To Me: Lesbian Separatist Commune
28. Shaved or Unshaved: Melissa Etheridge
29. Shaved or Unshaved: Rosie!
30. Shaved or Unshaved: You! — The Girl Gallery
*This is the current headline of an actual post Riese is writing that is still in the unfinished drafts folder. lol!
