Underneath His Bustle: An Insider On How Everyone’s Most Resented “Feminist” Website Actually Began

Last week, Rich White Man Bryan Goldberg announced that he’d raised $6.5 million in venture capital to start Bustle, a “women’s publication that puts world news and politics alongside beauty tips.” In response, everyone on the internet who has ever worked for, read, or vaguely heard of the scores of other popular, established, women-owned-and-operated publications of this kind announced that they were ticked off and confused. Why did Goldberg start this publication? What possessed him to frame it as the first of its kind? Why the heck did so many people throw money at him to start a women’s website, when they’ve been holding that funding back from actual women?

On August 15th, Goldberg posted an “apology” letter on startup blog Pando Daily, which has gone some distance towards repairing his epic gaffe, but not quite far enough. As Jezebel editor Jessica Coen told AdWeek, “I applaud the effort, but it does read like he was parroting what he was told in the comments. I find it hard to believe that he would do a total 180 and completely understand the issue over the course of 36 hours.” Former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers told Adweek that although his apology seemed “sincere,”  she’d wait and see if he ended up following through: “In terms of whether he addresses the issues: we won’t know until we see a product that really does work for the audience.” At Flavorwire, Michelle Dean excavates how precisely his apology failed to impress, zooming in on statements like “most women are completely open to the idea of a man starting a company aimed at women, and hiring a large team of women,” and citing his lack of “common sense and actual knowledge of your market.”

When I posted Rachel’s article about the launch on my Facebook page the same day Goldberg issued his apology, I got an interesting comment from a friend named Raphi (we have omitted her last name for this piece because she is currently job-searching) — it turns out that once upon a time, I’d been considered for a job at Bustle. Well, kind of: earlier this year, Raphi had gotten in touch with me to ask if I’d wanted to do some paid writing for a women’s site. I said yes, but when she got back to me a few weeks later, it was to regretfully inform me that her boss had requested fewer “smart” writers.

As revealed in Raphi’s response to my Facebook post, that boss was Bryan Goldberg. I asked her if she’d talk to me about her time at proto-Bustle, where she interned for three months before leaving for greener pastures. According to her recollections, Goldberg’s original vision was far different from the one we heard about last week.

Since Goldberg introduced Bustle to the public, he has positioned it as distinctly feminist (to quote his launch announcement, “you’re damn right this is a feminist publication”). Based on his statements and interviews, it seems fair to say that Goldberg has, at best, a rudimentary understanding of the concept of feminism — while it’s a broad and controversial term for sure, most people who have bothered to read up on the subject seem to agree that part of being a 21st-century feminist includes embracing intersectionality, questioning stereotypes, being aware of your privilege, and letting women speak for themselves. Goldberg’s brand of feminism involves “letting female writers cover Real Housewives AND the Middle East” and “accepting that women can care about makeup AND not care about yoga,” which may be why he seems to have trouble upholding those more central principles, even when interviewing potential employees. According to Raphi:

“Our first meeting was the weirdest job interview I’ve ever had. We met at Peet’s Coffee and he was very intent that I call his bag a briefcase. I guess some of his friends had called it a man purse and that had bothered him. Then he goes ‘So what makes you qualified to work for me? No offense, but you don’t look like someone who will cry if she can’t get her hands on the latest Gucci purse,’ so that should give you a pretty good idea of how he was approaching this whole thing. He talked a lot about making money and how great it is to be rich, then wrote a check to me without asking me to sign anything… I think he really liked showing people how easily he can throw money around. Then he said he basically only called me because I went to [a well-known liberal arts college] (he went to Middlebury and expressed distrust for state school kids). [Later] I specifically remember talking about body positivity and him and he was mocking it… he said [redacted] was really into body positivity and he was totally making fun of the idea of it.”

Of course, he’s far from the only women’s media professional with these priorities — Vogue, W, and other publications that cater to women who will die without the newest Gucci purse also don’t tend to be notably body-positive. But while there’s nothing officially “wrong” with launching a publication devoted to things like designer fashion and “bikini bodies,” it’s a far cry from what Bustle now claims to represent.

No worries, though, right? After all, Goldberg is only the CEO — as he pointed out in his launch announcement, his job “is to hire the right people… [not to know] the difference between mascara, concealer, and eye-liner.” When it comes to writing for Bustle, “the right people” are young women who “have spent much of their free time enjoying sites like The Hairpin, xoJane, Rookie, and Jezebel.” But why not, as Riese asked, hire the people who have spent their (under)paid-for time actually writing for those sites? Raphi, whose job included headhunting for writers, thought the same thing:

“We had a big database with hundreds of names of potential writers. He specifically wanted ones from small towns who would work for less than people based in SF or NY… he asked me to search for talented writers in Poughkeepsie or Pittsburgh or “other crappy cities that begin with P.” In one of our meetings we went through some of the writers I picked… some from Jezebel, HelloGiggles, xoJane, etc. He had them up on the projector and we went to their sites and rated them on a 1-5 scale. There was a list of criteria — ‘good grammar,’ ‘frequently updates blog.’ Then there were qualities he didn’t want — i.e. ‘angry,’ ‘man-hating.’ And everyone was rated on this scale.  He told me not to contact so many “smart” writers (I think he meant something very specific by “smart”) and that many of the ones I liked seemed to have big chips on their shoulders. He’d never heard of Bitch or xoJane, and I don’t think he knew about Bust magazine before I told him about it… I told him about Bitch and he snarked on the name and said ‘advertisers must love that.'”

We contacted Bryan Goldberg to ask if he could answer some questions about the hiring process and its evolution, but after asking us if we were aware that we’d already written an article about Bustle, he declined to comment. We also reached out to the senior staff of Bustle and have not heard back, although Goldberg did tell us that his editors were free to speak with us.

We would love their perspective, especially if Goldberg has indeed changed his focus along the way and is not just paying lip service to a bunch of “angry feminists,” otherwise known as the consumer base he is apparently now hoping to target. Looking at the bylines that have been appearing on Bustle’s homepage, it’s apparent that Bustle’s hiring hasn’t been restricted to Pittsburgh or Poughkeepsie; there are many writers from NYC and LA, and many articles about topics important to feminism. Something about Bustle’s philosophy of hiring has clearly changed since Raphi left — it could be that Goldberg came around to hiring “smarter” writers, that he eventually put someone else in charge of these particular decisions, or that Pittsburgh didn’t yield the writers he was hoping for. We’ll probably never know what happened (or why) without someone inside Bustle telling us. But it’s also clear that some things haven’t changed since Rahpi’s time there. For instance, many of Bustle’s writers seem young and inexperienced in the writing industry — which doesn’t mean that they’re not great writers, but does mean that Goldberg might still be hiring based on who he feels is “willing to work for less.” (A strategy employed out of necessity by publications without $6.5 million budgets.) Bustle’s contact page also informs us that right now, unsolicited submissions aren’t being paid at all.

Furthermore, Bustle seems to have hired at least two white men as regular writers, and the generally better-compensated behind-the-scenes positions are also filled by men: both their “Head of Product” and their Engineer, according to Linkedin, are white men.

Raphi’s experience also begs the question — why would a guy who doesn’t seem to know what feminism is, and who didn’t originally want to hire feminists who didn’t fit a certain mold, start a purportedly feminist website in the first place? Was it because, as he said in his “apology letter,” he “believes it to be important that women’s publications, especially ones with a feminist voice, are able to achieve commercial success”? Was it because he wanted desperately to “try to find great voices who have yet to achieve mainstream recognition”? Or was it because of the non-compete clause he signed when selling Bleacher Report to Turner Broadcasting for nearly $200 million dollars? Non-compete clauses are traditional elements of these contracts and prevent involved parties from creating a product that would compete against the product they just sold for a set period of time. Raphi cleared this up:

“He told me that his contract, when he sold Bleacher Report, stipulated that he couldn’t make another site targeting the same demographic (i.e. males 18-34). So that was why he decided to make a site for women… he said he was hoping to make “the biggest site for women” on the web, because he couldn’t target men anymore. It had nothing to do with actually being interested in women’s issues… he never used the word “feminist” to describe it to me at all. I found [his characterization of it that way in the launch announcement] sort of surprising… he clearly envisioned this as more of a Vogue/Cosmo-type publication, and along the way I guess figured that there was money to be made in co-opting feminism.”

This system is consistent with Goldberg’s intent in March 2013 when he boasted on PandoDaily “I’m starting another content company and I plan to make a fortune.” Not a feminist publication — a content company. Fortune noted:

“What kind of “content company” Goldberg has in mind doesn’t seem to really matter — at least to him, apparently. He offers no clue. “Content” is “probably the single best venture sub-sector to create,” he wrote. Statements like that, along with his repeated references to “the content space,” and his breakdown of the economics of “content,” make it clear that neither the pursuit of quality nor the desire to connect with readers in any meaningful way are part of his calculations.”

It makes sense, as Goldberg is great at content companies — Bleacher Report, his first venture, went from four college friends brainstorming in a coffee shop to a multi-million dollar enterprise in five years. He did this by prioritizing the “company” part over the “content” — by, as journalist Joe Eskenazi pointed out last year in his exposé of the company, “valuing site growth and pageviews over any semblance of journalistic “quality” or even readability.”  This is not to say that he plans on making exactly the same decisions this time — as Raphi told me, “he wants to make something better.” And to some extent, this does mean better content — Raphi reported that in a brainstorming document from early on, back when the publication was called “Lovelace,” Goldberg pledges that he won’t repeat mistakes like “producing poor quality content in the beginning” and including “too much fluff to boost pageviews.” Plus, better content can be a good business decision: Eskenazi quotes King Kaufman — whom he calls “one of the best and most cerebral sports journalists on the Internet,” and who was hired in 2011 to turn Bleacher Report’s reputation around — saying that “Bleacher Report reached a point where it couldn’t make the next level of deal, where [another] company says ‘We’re not putting our logo next to yours because you’re publishing crap.’ Okay, that’s the market speaking.” Bustle investor Dave McClure clearly believes Bustle will succeed due to its content: he told business reporter Jill Krasny that he’s “not too worried about the initial shitstorm” and that “if Goldberg is clueless about women’s issues, he’ll fail. If not, he’ll be successful.”

I have my doubts. Judging from interviews and my conversations with Raphi, Goldberg is pretty clueless about his target demographic. But the bigger issue is that Goldberg and his investors define “success” very differently than many of the the people their publication claims to represent. This isn’t a new problem: despite its financial dominance, Bleacher Report came under constant fire from media outlets and other sports publications because it was not, in the end, a real sports publication — it was a content farm disguising itself as one, by gaming search engines and “tapping the oceanic labor pool of thousands of unpaid sports fanatics typing on thousands of keyboards.” Real sports reporters were especially peeved, because people had invaded their sandbox: as Will Leitch put it, Bleacher Report “was created by business people trying to game the system, the type of people who refer to all work as “content.” They didn’t care what was in the content; they just wanted as much of it as possible.” This is a realistic — although unpleasant — market strategy when applied to sports, or fashion, or entertainment, but it seems malicious when feminism — a movement and a mindset inherently and historically resistant to the wiles of capitalism — comes into play. (And honestly, the last thing us indie feminist publications need is a website poised to conquer its ‘competitors’ with advanced SEO tactics.) If Bustle.com succeeds, it will owe that to Kate Ward and the other editors — despite Goldberg, not because of him.

In a post for PandoDaily from December 2012 entitled “Losers Exist: Don’t Hire Them,” Goldberg gave some advice on hiring new employees: “if the applicant hasn’t performed even the most basic due diligence in preparation for the interview,” he says, “then they have no common sense.” If Goldberg thinks his personal opinions, goals, and hiring practices (at least as of March 2013) are in line with the the values of the movement he just nabbed $6.5 million to represent, he hasn’t done his due diligence, and he definitely shouldn’t have gotten the job. Despite this, Business Insider says that Goldberg was able to secure funding from one source “in just two slides.” After getting this behind-the-scenes tour of the mind that made Bustle, I hope neither of those slides namedropped the “f” word.

Goldberg’s attempt to cash in on a movement he had nothing to do with and knows even less about brings real harm to the work actual feminists have been doing for years, and the publications in which they’ve been doing that work — and even if Bustle becomes the feminist publication of the future, everything the writers there accomplish will be undercut by the fact that he and his investors are the ones ultimately rewarded. Goldberg’s branding of what seems to be a polished content farm as a feminist publication for intelligent women also insults its readership by assuming that they won’t be able to recognize the same SEO-driven tactics that Bleacher Report relied on if they’re used in service of articles about slingbacks and Hillary Clinton. And for that, and for hurting, ignoring, speaking over, and stealing from those who truly deserve the title, I’d like to use a different f-word when it comes to Goldberg and Bustle.

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Cara

Cara is a former contributing editor for Autostraddle and a current staff writer at Atlas Obscura. She lives in Somerville with her girlfriend, their roommate, and a cat who can flush the toilet, and is generally thinking about gender, sustainable biodiversity, and/or rock & roll music. You can follow her on twitter @cjgiaimo if you want.

Cara has written 113 articles for us.

33 Comments

  1. This is upsetting for so many reasons, but the one that’s most striking to me is the issue of “feminism.” It seems to me that Goldberg sees feminism/women’s “issues” as so singular and basic that he assumed he could sort of just say the phrase “feminist publication,” write about a few things beyond makeup, and boom, step aside Audre Lorde. It’s like thinking you can throw on a sombrero and be an authentic Mexican. It’s really, really disturbing that his perception of what makes a good women’s publication is, essentially, that it involves women in some way, shape, or form — nothing more.

  2. this is ace, cara. perfect in all of the ways.

    honestly my prediction is that bustle will end up doing okay, because they ended up hiring some very smart women to write things. and they have the ability to pay additional smart women to write things. and when a bunch of smart women get together to write things i think it’s really hard for them to suck. they will produce good stuff. there are a lot of sites, like huffpo & buzzfeed, who despite overall corporate nonsense and mostly linkbait, still have the power to recruit brilliant content from time to time. and i will die of envy and bitterness as this happens until i eventually dissolve into an angry lesbian fist wagging in the wind

    or i will just write more top tens about peanut butter and blazers

  3. I am so not surprised that this slimeball wanted to start a site for women because he has a non-compete clause. Ugh.

  4. Thank you! This is a scorching cameo of the bizarre boy’s world of piratical finance. Goldberg feels too comical to be true. My eyebrows have reached the apex of my head. And yet Bustle is exactly the kind of “killer app”, click farming viciousness we all don’t need any more of. Let them produce all the polished quality “content” they like. But if the actual vibe isn’t there in actual woman-empowering structures in the organization, it will come out in the wash. With every year, we are getting better at sniffing out the spin, the jive, the McDisney corporate astrograss. Hopefully that’s where this wonderbread boy’s cynical misappropriation efforts will end up: in the turf.

    I’ve personally lost all patience with smirking snake oil peddlers trying to hook me on their whiz-bang opium. I’m done with shills for the plutocracy, the meat head kyriarchy. Bustle will not be on my reading list. Give me iron-fortified integrity for intellectual sustenance or GTFO.

    • Brighid: every word in this comment made me so happy on its own (particularly “astrograss” and “kyriarchy”) and then all together they were even better.

  5. Damn, Cara, this is so juicy. I was having a hard time believing this disgusting guy was real. Thank you for giving us the back story, which is so sad (the non-compete clause UGHHHH) and makes so much sense.

  6. I know this is petty and small of me, but I really hope it all just goes down in flames and he loses a shit ton of money.

    I wish that more women had been in a financial position to say FUCK YOU Bryan Goldberg, I am better than this.

    Because the more I read about him, the more I want him to slip and fall on menstrual blood and maybe break a kneecap.

  7. This whole bustle nonsense seems to me to be a little over the top. Yes is it annoying that this guy has created a feminist website without knowing anything about feminism. And yes it’s messed up that people gave him so much money when there are so many other amazing websites (*cough* Autostraddle *cough*) that could do wonderful things with that money. But I feel like the negative response to this guy is getting out of control. He’s a greedy businessman out to make a profit like hundreds of thousands of other people out there. Why get so upset over this dude? However, Bustle is hiring people and giving them an opportunity to work at their craft and to (hopefully) spread some feminist theory out there to an audience who believes all feminism is is burning bras. I just feel like there are better things to spend energy working against than some businessman. Also in “you do you” spirit he will make his website and Autostraddle will make theirs. I don’t know maybe I’m missing something about why Bustle is so horrible.

    • well i think we wrote one thing about it and that was that. we weren’t actively looking for another story to write on it, but this story came to us (cara’s friend having a very unique and intriguing insider perspective on it), and it’s a good fucking story on an issue we’re deeply invested in and care about. so we told it.

      • I’ll give you that, it is interesting to read about the inter-workings of this company. And maybe I should have been more clear and said that it’s not just Autostraddle that has been writing stuff about this. I just feel like a lot of people (not just the writers at Autostraddle) are upset by this and I feel like I’m missing why. So maybe I should have just said this in my above comment:
        Why are people so against Bustle? What information am I missing?

        • It’s the epitome of mansplaining. He’s telling feminists he can do their feminist websites better than they can. Yes, there are lots of other greedy businessmen doing their greedy business things, but they’re usually more subtle about it. Whereas this is a blatant slap in the face.

        • i think rachel and cara have already said anything i could say about why it matters, and real good too

        • Even aside from the reasons why Bustle is offensive on principle — namely that a man was given enormous amounts of money for doing a much less impressive version of something many women already do — it actively hurts women’s publications already in existence. As Cara does a really good job explaining, Goldberg’s publications are content farms, which means that instead of actually writing words about the things people want to read about, Goldberg’s ventures do trend analysis to figure out what people are most likely to click on, and then design headlines that meet that, and then throw together a few paragraphs that are related to the headline in some way, but aren’t actually news or really even readable. This article explains it well.

          What this means in terms of Bustle is that if, say, Hillary Clinton announces that she’ll run for president in 2016, actual women’s news media will work very hard to put together good coverage of this issue — with analysis, explorations of her policies, investigative journalism about the campaign. They’ll figure out a way to do this on shoestring budgets. Bustle will use their millions of dollars to pay analysts to figure out what shock headline would garner the most views, and with the information they get they’ll publish a 300-word “story” entitled something like “You Won’t Believe What Hillary’s Election Would Mean For Millions of Innocent Schoolchildren”. And because of the SEO gaming they can afford to do, that “story” will be the top ranked Google result for everyone looking for news on Hillary Clinton for that day. The excellent journalism that so many women did but couldn’t afford to sleazily promote will be on the third or fourth page of Google results. Bustle and Goldberg will make hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad impressions from just that article (because in online journalism, clicks translate pretty directly into money) and the women who wrote real journalism make nothing from it. Which enables the same thing to happen the next time news breaks. And so on, and so on. Journalism depends on readers to continue existing, and because Bustle has the money to do so, they’ll leech away readers and views that would otherwise have gone to real women’s publications, and in doing so, leech away money that would have gone to real women’s publications, which perpetuates the first thing, forever and ever amen. In addition to rubbing in our face the fact that we have no money and no safety net, they’re helping to ensure that we’ll continue to be without any money or any stability.

          There are a lot of other reasons that Bustle is emblematic of a lot of really bad stuff, a lot of which are outlined in this post by Cara and the one I wrote last week. But trust us, it’s definitely real. Feminist and women’s media have seen a lot of shit over the years, and if every single one of those publications is saying that something’s not right, it’s pretty safe to say that it’s not.

        • Wow, Rachel, that was a really helpful explanation of how this works; thank you. Eyes opened.

        • adding to what rachel is explaining (brilliantly!) — within the LGBT world this has actually already been happening with the launch of Huffpo Gay Voices. It’s not a secret that HuffPo games the SEO system, and since their launch, 9 times out of 10 when a gay story breaks, they’re the top search result on google news. we used to get huge stats boosts via google news on the reg; that hasn’t happened since huffpo gay voices and buzzfeed lgbt entered the game. bustle’s already showing up on google news results — it was three months after our launch that we got approved to show up on google news, and then another 2-6 months before our stories showed up with any regularity. I’m not sure how that’s gone for other small sites.

          facebook shares are the most beneficial driver for us and most content sites. (please share our stuff on facebook!) but also, facebook now makes page owners pay to have their posts reach their full audience, and you can pay extra to have your posts reach a wider targeted audience. Bustle has been paying to promote at least some of its posts since launch. for a few thousand bucks (which very few indie publications have), you can guarantee your post showing up in the feeds of millions of potential readers. (LGBT sites specifically have a disadvantage w/r/t facebook though, as many humans don’t want to share gay content or even like gay pages on their facebook profiles. we have shit-tons of tumblr followers, but a relatively small number of facebook fans.)

          I’d also like to expand upon in online journalism, clicks translate pretty directly into money — it’s important to note that this too means different things for different kinds of publications based on their varied CPMs (cost per thousand impressions). this varies depending on whether it’s a direct sale or a network ad, but needless to say, sites without robust ad sales & marketing teams end up settling for 10% of what their competitors demand.

          b/c the ad game is rigged, we focus more on affiliate sales, donations, merchandise and camp. for ads we do best with content sponsorship. we’ve kept growing ’cause our content is really good. But it’s def more complicated and massively more time-consuming turning traffic into direct contributors/customers than it is having traffic itself as the endgame w/r/t eyeballs on ads. luckily we love you and i think vice versa!

        • I’m not really against Bustle itself. I visited the site out of curiousity, and it seems fine – It covers a wide range of stories and seems feminist and LGBT friendly (for example, it uses female pronouns for Chelsea Manning, which many major news sources have declined to do). Their coverage does seem a pretty superficial – lots of a short descriptions of current events, not a lot of in depth analysis – but overall it’s not bad. Hopefully it will give more female writers an opportunity to share their work with a wider audience.

          I do have a problem with Bryan Goldberg, and with the fact that this man was able to raise so much money so quickly, when women that have put years of hard work into feminist publications have no access to venture capital. The quote from him about how much of an epiphany it was for him that some women like interior design but not yoga seems too ridiculous to be real. Goldberg clearly knows nothing about feminism and is only in it for the money. He just doesn’t deserve this opportunity.

  8. So, as much as I’d love to see this site fall flat due to the uproar and backlash, we all know what will happen then, right? The rich white men dishing out venture capital will take it as proof that women-focused media doesn’t make money and therefore isn’t worth investing in again. *headdesk*

    • Yep. It’s the same self-fulfilling prophecy crap that happens in movies/TV, too. Dudes make a terrible movie that happens to star a woman or women, it inevitably fails BECAUSE IT IS TERRIBLE, dudes decide that women can’t sell movies. Lather, rinse, repeat.

      Actually, now that I think about it, this is exactly what happens in just about every sphere of life. Dudes (I’m saying “dudes” specifically, btw, because there are actual men out there who are wonderfully, totally decent) rig the game to fail so they can throw up their hands and say “WE TRIED, but women just don’t [fill in blank]!”

      • i have been threatening to cry out of frustration and real sadness every time anyone has brought up bustle over the past two weeks, but your comment crystalizes everything wrong and bad with the world so clearly and quickly that now i think i actually will cry. fuck.

    • I KNOW!! These were my thoughts exactly. This makes my blood boil!

      I don’t think it’ll flop, though. To play devil’s advocate, in all likelihood the audience he’ll end up reaching will be a very mainstream demographic of women with no or little prior interest in feminist theory, but who are bored with the usual fashion/domestic-related women’s media drivel. Which may actually be a good thing since it could lead them to explore other media publications with a more feminist backbone, especially if Bustle’s content lacks depth of coverage.

      This might just be wishful thinking. I’m admittedly an optimist. But to be sure, I doubt Goldberg will kill/replace the competition, because actual, involved feminists tend to be grassroots-oriented. We tend not be satiated with snippets of pseudo-feminism, and very good at sniffing out bullshit.

      If there is anything positive that is sure to come of this mess and out of my anger about goldberg shitting on our scene, it’s the increased intensity and pro-activeness with which I will continue supporting actual women-owned media, and I hope everyone here feels the same.

  9. cara this is such a great scoop, and really really excellent investigative reporting. i’m so proud that we got to run this on our AWESOME FEMINIST WEBSITE THAT IS OWNED BY A WOMAN AND RUN BY MANY WOMEN. and yeah, we all knew goldberg was a typical mansplainy jerk dudebro, but it is SO satisfying to hear from a source that those suspicions were right on the money (6.5 million dollars of it?).

    oh and i’m really glad you write for autostraddle and not bustle.

  10. Thank you! I think this applies to many groups of people who do not fall into the “white cis straight male” demographic when wanting to open up publications of any media that tries to speak and lend a voice to a specific demographic.

    When I heard about bustle I was so frustrated because places like Autostraddle, Crunk Feminist Collective, Racialious, and many other voices I feel like are being seriously hijacked. I HOPE they get great female writers, I HOPE it really does expand the vision of what feminism means and I HOPE they talk about diverse feminist issues and not fall into the whole #solidarityisforwwhiteomen type of feminist dialogue and if they do…let someone know.

    I just feel “ugh, this shit again!” I will continue to support AS and all the other sites I participate in because this is important to me. It’s unfortunate that speaks gets the bigger microphone and hopefully one day this model can dismantled because I truly believe there is room for all voices so long that advance feminist discourse and stay inclusive.

  11. this guy = ughhHHHH

    before, i was very frustrated with the situation and the website’s history, and didn’t care too much about Goldberg, but after reading this i am turning into the man-hating feminist he hates/fears so much

  12. excellent article

    this guy and his whole business is so gross
    to quote my bff, “no limits dude, the patriarchy has no limits”

  13. Content farms add 0 value to anything or anyone. It’s a shame that they’re taking attention and advertising dollars away from sites like AS, XOJane, The Hairpin and even Jezebel.

    Feminist my ass. Fucking non-compete clause. Thanks for writing this Cara.

Comments are closed.