There are a lot of ways to cover the Komen/PP firestorm–too many, in fact. For the purposes of my work here, I’m going to focus on what made this brouhaha different than any other concerning Planned Parenthood, the lessons learned if you’re on the defensive, and the lessons learned if you’re on the offensive.

The culture of this particular moment

I’m going to first spend some time investigating why it was that this particular attack on reproductive health and Planned Parenthood was so explosive. Planned Parenthood has been under attack for quite a while, and especially in the last few years– those working on reproductive freedom issues won’t likely soon forget the US House trying to defund Planned Parenthood altogether in 2011, for example. (And we won’t forget Stephen Colbert’s completely amazing takedown, either.) So why was Komen’s move so incendiary? And what can we learn from it?

Invariably, I know people working with social media strategy are eventually going to be asked to reproduce situations like Komen/PP. They’re going to be asked to make this new campaign GO VIRAL. Let’s get this part out of the way: Nothing can ever be made “viral” on purpose, period. Anyone who says differently is selling something.*

Here are the salient points about This Moment for future campaign work:

1. Komen mistook the community of breast cancer survivors and cause supporters as their own community and supporters. People who are involved in working towards a cure for breast cancer are coming to this work often for very emotional reasons: because they have survived, or they know someone who has– or hasn’t. They appreciate that Komen is leading the charge, but their passion ultimately centers itself on breast cancer.

Katha Pollitt points out in her Nation piece, by the way, that Komen’s origins are activist and feminist in nature:

Breast cancer activism began as a feminist cause, after all: the initial impetus, back when Komen was founded in 1982, was the silence and shame surrounding the disease, the lack of research funding and the general sexism pervading treatment. Those are all feminist issues, and were structured as such in public discourse at the time.

This has been mainstreamed in many ways, and particularly the pinkwashing campaigns have normalized breast cancer as part of our everyday conversations about women’s health and cancer in general. (Pinkwashing is problematic for a number of reasons; I’m not going down that road here, but read the piece at the link above if you want to know more.)  In any case, Komen’s championing of breast cancer support on multiple fronts gave the organization the impression that people cared about Komen. They don’t. They clearly care about Komen’s money and that it always goes towards supporting breast cancer initiatives, though.

Will Komen be able to fix this? I don’t know. As a colleague pointed out to me in an email:

I doubt that Komen can regain the trust and support of the millions of disappointed women. Komen’s former meme was “We fight breast cancer for you and the people you love.” A new meme has been created: “We are part of the nasty culture wars that have hurt so many, and we care more about that than about whether you die from breast cancer.”

2. Furthermore, emotional connections in general matter. Planned Parenthood has an incredibly emotional relationship to their constituencies: the women for whom they provide services, and of course, the advocates for reproductive rights and justice. Look at any of the stories posted on the Tumblr that I created, Planned Parenthood Saved Me, and you’ll find people not referring just to the services that they received, but more so, the care, understanding and non-judgmental support. More on the Tumblr later, but the bottom line here is that Planned Parenthood has carefully cultivated that emotional connection into a relationship. When the crap comes down in a relationship, friends are there for each other. PP’s constituencies felt personally attacked by Komen, and responded as such.

How was that different than the legislative attacks of last year? Mostly because so many more women outside of PP’s traditional constituencies were involved, but I’d also say that this felt particularly jarring to core activists and supporters. This wasn’t the usual social conservative attack: A non-partisan organization (albeit one with a dubious history, about more of which we’re learning every day) caved to anti-choice pressure. That hurt.

While an organization can’t create this kind of attack for themselves, what they can do is this: Create your community before you need them. Leverage emotional connections to your work into real relationships.

3. A reconnection of reproductive healthcare as real healthcare was made in the wider mainstream community. This one is harder to quantify– or at least, I’ve been having trouble quantifying it. There are two parts of this: that women have assumed for the last couple decades that care of their ladyparts is automatically going to be covered under other healthcare provisions; two, that Planned Parenthood has morphed in the public consciousness as a healthcare provider to an abortionplex (as depicted by The Onion, a satirical newspaper. Also, see the Yelp reviews.). Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh talk about this in their excellent Salon piece:

For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns. [...]
The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services.

Both of these common-culture frames/memes — assuming care and demonizing Planned Parenthood– have contributed to the chipping away at reproductive health and freedom. The emotional pain of the moment combined with the chipping away led many women outside of traditional activism spheres to their a-ha moment last week.

Lessons learned: if you’re under attack

So, the mob has lit their torches and gotten out their pitchforks. What do you do? Assuming you’ve already built your community before you need it, there are a few other things to keep in mind.

1. Say something. Komen chose to remain silent, and as pointed out by Raven Brooks over at the Netroots Foundation, they allowed the conversation to get away from them. What could they have said? “We’re listening. We hear you. We know you’re upset, we’re here for you.”

I was reminded in this situation of a problem that my dear friend Jaclyn Friedman faced a few weeks ago. She wrote a column about Blue Ivy, and in it, didn’t use a racial justice lens on Black women’s sexuality. This upset a lot of people, understandably, and Jaclyn was faced with a lot of angry tweets. So, she tweeted that she was about to get in a car and drive to an event for a few hours, but didn’t want people to think she was being silent. She also tweeted that she was genuinely listening to concerns and wanted to take time to process and respond properly. When she did respond, she posted an apology that has since been held up as a shining example of how to handle this kind of situation. While not everyone was satisfied, many people who previously were angry with her took the time to support and thank her.

2. When you do finally say something, don’t do it in plastic. Komen posted a video that was widely criticized as flat and inauthentic. It reminded me of watching people who dance who’ve recently been taught how to dance. They’ve got all the moves down, but it’s awkward–they’ve got no flow. People at this point don’t want to hear about numbers. They don’t care, frankly, about understanding you at this point. They want you to understand them.

Also weird: they never mentioned Planned Parenthood in this video, as if mentioning PP would make the entire Komen organization evaporate instantly. This is clearly straight out of an old-school PR book: don’t mention the enemy! Time to get that memo out again: old-school PR tactics don’t work in social media. You’re in a conversation.

More tips can be found at my post on #AmazonFAIL from 3 years ago (these rules haven’t changed!), over at Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop, and Raven’s post at Netroots Foundation.

Lessons learned: if you’re on the attack

Again, we’re assuming here that you’ve already built your community before you need it. I can’t stress enough how important this is. You might also want to look at Beth Kanter’s Ladder of Engagement to understand more how people become involved with your organization through digital channels.

1. While you can’t create these kind of opportunities on the fly, you can be ready for them when they happen. Removing barriers to effective, nimble organizational response is key. Planned Parenthood had an email out almost immediately, and their social media followed suit.

2. Don’t forget targeted, multi-pronged approaches to digital activism.  While a lot of yelling and screaming on social media may make you feel better as an individual, you have to ask yourself: Does an organization like Komen really care about loose cannon spray? I don’t think that they do. In that vein, a lot of people with whom I work started talking right away about how to hurt Komen financially, using a targeted set of strategies to shame current donors into withdrawing support, and to raise money for Planned Parenthood.

I also started wondering what kind of activism could be done with women who don’t have any money to withdraw or re-donate–those who would be most affected by a lack of services at Planned Parenthood. It was with that impetus that I created the Tumblr blog, Planned Parenthood Saved Me, as a storytelling vehicle. Numbers and statistics don’t tell stories; people do. That’s how we relate to one another. Collecting these stories in one place became a powerful messaging tool: for Planned Parenthood itself, if they wanted to use it; for journalists looking for the human side of this story; and, of course, for the women who have lived through horrific healthcare experiences, who were saved by PP, as a tool of catharsis and support.

What else can we examine here? Leave your thoughts, ideas and lessons in the comments, or ping me with them on Twitter.

THE INTRO

For background on the #dearjohn campaign, check out these posts from Sady Doyle and Amanda Marcotte.

If you’re not on Twitter, but you’d like a helping hand through the sign-up process, go here.

If you’re new to Twitter, and want an introduction to basic concepts– retweets, hashtags, and mentions, oh my!– go here.

THE GOODS

One of the more attractive social media tactics when it comes to creating a stir is to use hashtags. Hashtags, in the case of campaigns and politics, can be useful to:

• collect all the tweets about a particular topic in one place;
• put pressure on public figures to respond to a topic (because of the above);

What’s a hashtag? It’s an agreed-upon keyword preceded by the pound sign that’s added to your tweet. In this case, we’re using #dearjohn. No special skill is required–just type it into your tweet, or copy and paste it.

Tweets with the #dearjohn hashtag should convey one or more of the following:

• A sense of urgency about sexual assault and reproductive rights.
• A personal story–storytelling is what gets to people, not isolated facts and figures.
• Deep conviction. You don’t have to tell your story to be authentic, but your words should be your own.

UPDATE: Check out Sady’s newer post for content ideas and guidelines.

Consider also monitoring the #dearjohn hashtag (how to do that is explained below) and retweeting posts that you agree with. Amplifying powerful messages and diverse voices goes a long way towards building critical mass.

It’s also helpful to include the Twitter handles of people that you want to hear your message. House representatives who are sponsoring the bill should be considered first–start with @SpeakerBoehner himself. A list of the rest of the co-sponsors–all 173 of them!– can be found here (click on “Co-sponsors” under Representative Christopher Smith). You can use GovLuv to find the Twitter handles of the representative you wish to mention. Consider also sending messages of thanks to representatives who are speaking out and standing up for women in this fight. UPDATE: Amaditalks on Tumblr compiled the whole list here.

You might also think about starting (or joining an existing) an act.ly petition to collect #dearjohn tweeters in yet another online location.

A word about decency/politeness: You don’t have to be nice in your tweets when confronting folks that support HR3. But calling names, making false or libelous accusations, etc., only hurts the rest of the movement. Be outraged, but keep your head on straight.

A word about trolls: If you’re new to this kind of thing, you might not have had much experience with trolling behavior. Basically, a troll is someone who actually isn’t interested in having a productive discussion, and only posts extremely inflammatory comments to derail the entire conversation. Ignore them. Block them. Do not, repeat, do not respond in any way, shape or form–do not even tell them that you’re blocking them. Trolls are vampires: they are emboldened and strengthened by any response to their antics, and you will inevitably be weakened. I know it’s hard to ignore them. But trust me, it is the only way.

To see the running log of all #dearjohn posts, you can do a few things:

• Keep coming back to this post and clicking on #dearjohn
• Look at the top of your Twitter page–there’s a search box. Enter #dearjohn into it, and when you see the search results, you’ll notice a button at the top right of the results–”Save this search.” Click that. Then, to find it again, look at the top of your Timeline for the “Searches” link. Click on it, and you’ll be shown a list of your saved searches.
• For more advanced options, you can perform an advanced Twitter search here: https://search.twitter.com/advanced

I’ll continue to update this post as the movement builds and evolves. Have a tip for me? Feel free to @me on Twitter, or drop a line.

Both of these frames are problematic. It’s challenging to articulate exactly why, but I’m going to give it my best shot–because language has evolved within the same power structures we seek to tear down, we don’t always have the words to describe the problem.

Human rights within both frames are treated as a commodity that is traded. This is based on our market understanding of what we do with commodities: we accumulate, we spend, we give, we win, we lose. But if we really believe that certain rights are inalienable to humans, we can’t and shouldn’t commodify them. By doing so we support a power structure where rights are doled out and taken away at the whims of the dominant paradigm.

It also, in a deeper metaphorical sense, suggests that women aren’t necessarily fully human– they must be given the right to vote, or they must fight and win it for themselves. It’s not assumed that women would naturally vote in the grand scheme of things. We think so now (mostly), but if we continue to use this language, we support the antiquated structures that keep women from being recognized fully as humans.

If you’re into this kind of thing, by the way, and have the patience for heavy academic text, I highly recommend Women, Fire & Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. There’s a section called “Anger, Lust & Rape” that is truly disturbingly insightful as to how unraveling language can reveal our darkest cultural secrets. I’ll see if I can get in touch with George and post the piece here.

Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:

This is a big one: you need to find people who don’t look like you, don’t necessarily think like you, and don’t come from the same places that you do. Creating a thrivable ecosystem–whether that’s an organization or a whole society–is like the evolution of a species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety–new strains of DNA–and you create a stronger species. It’s no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you’re going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

We need you to be aware of the privilege you bring to the table – whether that’s your race, gender or your tech privilege – and make sure you’re using it responsibly and thoughtfully. Diversity is a strategic imperative for achieving collective goals. As diversity scholar Roosevelt Thomas notes, we all make better decisions–as individuals and as a society–when we account for differences and tensions.

But Johnson sort of, well, pretty much derails from the outset in his attempt. First, and I’m not going to focus on this too much, but “stalking?” Really? C’mon, we know that the world is loaded, painful and supports a culture of dominant violence. Not okay. But, moving along…

Where the argument really goes awry for me is in Johnson’s othering of the woman he follows. He’s turned her into an exotic creature on display, and taken away a little bit of her humanity. For more on exocitization, check out Racialicious’ extensive archive of awesome. There are plenty of ways to talk about race without placing people into positions that feel more like targets than participants.

This is largely about power relationships. Pretending that they don’t exist or don’t influence our decisions on how we interact with one another — especially when we’re different genders, races, sexualities, etc.– just mires us in he-said-she-said. It also perpetuates our bias, prejudices and social systems into the wild, open frontier of the Internet, and that’s a crying shame.

We’re living like fish in water on the Internet right now: We don’t know, or we’re not willing to recognize, that we’re soaking in the same social structures we’ve been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. We’re porting our understanding of the offline world–with all our prejudices, biases, and hierarchies–onto the blank canvas of the Internet. But all we can see is the blank canvas; we remain convinced that the Internet is a pure meritocracy and that if you just work hard enough, you’ll succeed at whatever it is that you’re trying to do. We’ve got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

Lest I be a big ol’ bully and just rant about what’s wrong, allow me to offer some excerpts from my book that illustrate what I think is a healthier, more productive way to go about things. I’ll start with an example of where I was called out on my own voyeurism–shortly after the Philadelphia pool incident in 2009, and after listening on Twitter to lots of people of color share stories of childhood discrimination.

To share that kind of intimacy requires some sort of explicit or assumed “safe space”–a forum of sorts, where one can express views without threat of abuse or harassment. Safe space requires a tremendous amount of trust, and that trust allowed the people sharing the stories with each other to extend the conversation past the sound bite moments that get played out in media and other traditional public forums. “Usually when people of color talk publicly, it’s about our feelings, our mistakes, and being frank about our shortcomings,” says Ludovic Blain, director of the Progressive Era Project and a longtime social justice activist. “Often when white folks speak in the same setting, it’s about their initiatives and how they’ll make it right. That’s perverted. In the case of the racist pool, the scene was the same: people of color discussing heart-wrenching issues in front of whites. But those people were also doing a rare thing–publicly discussing what whites had done wrong.” The empathy based on shared experience, combined with trust that the conversation would be productive, brought this moment to a more necessarily intense place.

Additionally, people decided to share their stories for many reasons: to release a painful memory and get it off their chests, to connect with others who had experienced similar racism as children, to potentially educate those who needed to hear their memories, and more. Thus, the voyeuristic aspect of the experience was strong. My whiteness was hidden for a moment (via my silence, not sharing a common past experience), and social networks allowed me to enter a conversation that otherwise might have been altered by my presence. I was able to benefit regardless of whether the sharers intended for me to, and that cultural voyeurism needs to be clear when discussing issues that deal with bias around race, gender, class, and other kinds of privilege.

Later in the book, I discuss the kind of cross-pollination of culture that I believe Johnson originally intended to challenge his readers with.

To be clear, we won’t ever eliminate our biases. But we can begin to be explicit about what we learn about ourselves and our social spheres when bias rears its ugly head. Social technology researcher danah boyd suggests a series of questions for that explicit discovery process: “None of us is going to be unbiased. There is no way to be unbiased. The question is: Can you account for your biases? Can you recognize when they get in the way? Can you open up a dialogue, even if it makes you uncomfortable, with people who aren’t like you?” Opening ourselves up to that process and beginning to break out of the way we’ve been thinking about how we assume the world operates (simply because it’s operated like that for a long time) is crucial. We need to listen as selflessly as possible to what others are sharing and make sure that we’re not perpetuating restrictive social structures. … It makes me realize that often those moments are not about me at all–they are about larger injustices that I have a role in changing or stopping altogether, and it’s my job to figure out how to do that.

…

It’s important for people of all stripes and places to engage with those who are different from themselves, but to be blunt, it’s extra important for those who are a couple of notches up on the hierarchy to go through this exercise. Remember, you’re not there as part of some sociology experiment, but because you get that progress is possible only when we participate.

A crucial part of cross-pollination exercises is realizing that your role as ambassador is not to defend your position in the food chain. That’s where a lot of us get into trouble–I know I have. Your job is to recognize what privilege you bring–whether it’s your gender, your class, your race, your sexuality, etc.–and figure out how best you can use it to enable justice for people who don’t share your privilege. Jessica Hoffman, editor of make/shift magazine, pithily captured our collective responsibility to engage in self-reflection in an article she wrote about a white feminist’s role in other social justice movements: “Inexperienced because of privilege, we hadn’t thought well on our feet, and we’d been in a certain denial about how bad things might get; we’d been pissed and well meaning, but not useful [emphasis mine].” It’s the job of all of us to be useful.

Johnson’s utter failure to be useful is instructive of the larger systemic issues we face, not the least of which is the truism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A tweet from last year comes to mind on why this is true.

It was also pointed out to me that it seems like I’m saying that confidence and assertiveness are the purview of dudes only. This is a layered argument, one that’s a bit complicated for me to take apart, but let me give it a whirl. First and foremost, I am an ardent, aggressive nay-sayer of anything seeming “naturally” female or male behavior– I believe all our crap is learned, almost 100% entirely. So, M, apologies if it sounds like that in my first post. What I’m doing here is running with Shirky’s version of the argument to concentrate on taking apart a cultural standard that we’re all forced to live by– not one that I believe myself. The fact that dudes hold most of the power, and dudes believe a lot of the ickier stuff in Shirky’s post themselves, etc., reinforces this cultural standard.

In the dept-of-personal-sharing that’s been happening, I’ve also always been one of those outspoken, brash ladies and it’s often served me well professionally. But personally, that’s still up in the air. There are times that I feel damaged and inauthentic when I’ve been acting like an overconfident jerk, and that’s not how I want to ultimately live my life. I wrote this post from that place, of wanting to change the culture so that different personality traits can be rewarded, so that we can have (as I said) a more holistic, welcoming set of standards.

My last point is on the note of personal sharing– just a quick observation, I have been simply bowled over by the number of women who’ve come out of the woodwork in this discussion to share their own stories of self-promo BS, things they were told to do, what not to do, etc. This kind of storytelling and sharing is what’s so powerful to me about our ability to connect, mostly through social networks, and raise each others’ consciousness around these discussion. It’s not just facts and overheard anecdotes, it’s our lives. And that, my friends, is a very very powerful thing.

A post from Internet analyst/author/smart-person Clay Shirky titled “A Rant About Women” has got quite the discussion going around the Intertubes. Read (or at least skim) it before continuing; let me also take this introductory opportunity to do the obligatory feminist thing and thank the dude for taking time out of his busy schedule to wrestle with the giant questions of why don’t women do as well as men at X. Here it comes… thank you. OK, so I’m being a wee bit sarcastic, but seriously: it really is nice to see these conversations happen outside of the usual suspected fora of listservs, blogs, etc, all for and by the ladies.

Much of the resulting discussion has been a bit heavy-handed on both sides– “OMG, he’s totally right!” “OMG, he’s totally wrong!” Some great points have already been well covered by others, especially Jezebel blogger Anna’s point that women aren’t allowed culturally to be the aggressive jerks that successful men are. This was also the place where I had the most visceral reaction — the conclusion that we need to teach women to be more like men: more assertive and aggressive, demanding of what they want and need. This approach to solving the “where are teh womenz” problem misses the mark in a way that 70s & 80s power feminism also missed the mark for me. The “we’re just as good as men” statements and subsequent actions set the wrong frame. It assumes:

• Men’s success and ways of achieving it are the gold standard.
• Women’s lack of success and lack of use of men’s ways is the deviant behavior. (as in, “deviant from the norm,” not deviant as in “naughty”)
• Therefore, women should act more like men to be successful.

Personally, I’m just not that interested in acting more like a dude for the chance that my work gets more widely recognized or that I get paid more to do it, and I suspect many other women aren’t, either. It’s sort of, just maybe, one of the myriad of reasons we haven’t been acting like dudes since women’s lib, y’know?

What’s far more interesting to me is shifting the cultural consciousness around what being successful means, and what it then takes to achieve it. Creating a more holistic standard to which men and women both can hold themselves, and then compete/collaborate, etc., offers us an opportunity to break down terribly unhealthy versions of masculinity and femininity that oppress us all.

Asking women to be more like men (which is different than what Shirky claims we’re doing when we ask men to be “sensitive” and “listen” — that’s just asking for a little humanity, there) falls on a spectrum of prescribing feminine behavior that is dangerous and unhealthy. We’re putting the onus on women to fit themselves into a culture that doesn’t value them enough to begin with. It sounds a lot like misguided sexual assault prevention tactics (“how not to get yourself raped!”), and Shirky goes there himself when he points out the time colleges spend teaching women self-defense. Me? I cringed right there.� Where are the colleges teaching men not to rape women?*

I’ve been looking for an excuse to post about this great piece from Jill at I Blame the Patriarchy, wherein she rewrites one of those email chain letters telling women what to do in order not to get themselves attacked, into a guide for men on how to prevent sexual assault. Now seems as good a time as any:

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work

1. Don't put drugs in women's drinks.

2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to assault her.

4. If you are in a lift and a woman gets in, don't assault her. You know what? Don't even ogle her.

5. When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not assault her.

6. Never creep into a woman's home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or assault her.

7. When you lurk in bushes and doorways with criminal intentions, always wear bright clothing, wave a flashlight, or play "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)" by the Raveonettes on a boombox really loud, so women in the vicinity will know where to aim their flamethrowers.

8. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from assaulting women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when in public.

9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to assault a woman, you can hand the whistle to your buddy, so s/he can blow it to call for help.

10. Give your buddy a revolver, so that when indifferent passers-by either ignore the rape whistle, or gather round to enjoy the spectacle, s/he can pistol-whip you.

Don't forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don't pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be assaulting her later. If you don't communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.

Men-folk: see how terrible and condescending and infuriating it is to be on the receiving end of this kind of thing? Jill’s list o’ tips makes me laugh and cry a little.

Tactics to solve gender inequality that don’t address the wider cultural discrimination and structural oppression, that only put the problem in women’s own hands, do nothing but perpetuate a system that keep women “in their place.” This is shockingly unappealing to us at the receiving end of said place assignment.

UPDATE, 1/19: Follow-up post is here.

–

* When I was at SUNY-Albany, there was a program for men only called “A Few Good Men,” though I don’t know what the content was. If anyone has references to good programs (though I’m skeptical they’re offered at the same frequency and with the same enthusiastic energy as self-defense for women courses), please post them in the comments.

What do I want to do, I hear you asking yourself? In short — I do want you to buy the book, after all — I’m going to be describing the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action. If you’ve read some of what I’ve written about Twitter and other services, and my ideas about the giant gene pool and the desperate need for diversity, you have an idea of where the book will go. Plus, it’ll be stunningly entertaining to boot!

It was interesting to go from “I don’t think I ever want to write a book” at the end of February to looking at what I’ve got to sign for the deal in the middle of May. I wanted to share this part of the story as both a testament to Johanna’s powerful skillz of persuasion, as well as a revelatory moment about how these things can work– especially for women who think they have to know every detail of everything before they set off on sharing their expertise. Not that I know anything about that.

In the beginning, I couldn’t identify what topic (of the myriad of things I’m interested in) I’d have enough passion, expertise and attention span to write an entire book about. Johanna asked me to complete an exercise as homework after our first official call, where I was to answer three questions:

• What community do I identify with, am affiliated with or otherwise care about?
• What is that community’s point of pain? What’s preventing them from getting to the next level?
• What book could I write to address that point of pain?

Well, jeez, that was easy. My community, through my work in feminism over the years, is women; their point of pain is an intimidation and/or distrust of new technologies, and yeah, I’m pretty sure I could write a book helping them get over that hump. As Johanna and I fleshed out my ideas, we both realized that what I’m talking about is larger than just women needing to take advantage of this moment. I’m going to be talking about and bringing in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare… yeah. It’s going to be one big party in my book.

So, there you have it. We’re attempting to do this on a strikingly fast timetable, and I’m going to be looking to my community for help in a few areas. One of them is fundraising, but that’s a separate story that I’ll blog later this week. For now, I’ll be over here just bouncin’ off the walls.

PS– A big, big, big shoutout to Christine Cupaiuolo, the most fabulous editor ever, without whose help I seriously would not have been able to put together a proposal that knocked it out of the park as hard as it did. Can’t wait to move on to the book work with you, CMC!

I wanted to share with you an amazing worldwide conference that I’m participating in next week. It’s called “Women Who Tech,” and it brings together hundreds of women who leverage their technology savvy to inspire change and transform the world. And it takes place all online and on the phone!

Women Who Tech
When: May 12, 2009. Panels are 50 min long and run from 11AM EDT to 6PM EDT.
Where: Everywhere via phone and web
http://womenwhotech.com/
A mere $10 for a whole day of goodness

I participated last year, and at first I thought the distance thing was going to be strange– but it’s absolutely incredible, and I highly recommend joining in the fun. What’s great is that this is really not just for women who currently tech– if you’re interested social media, launching a startup, learning about new tools… this is *the* place to be.

I’ll be moderating this panel:

What Shirky Didn’t Tell Us – 4PM EDT
This panel will look at problems that are arising along gender, class and race lines within the new paradigms of Web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. When we remove explicit structure from the organizing and tech equation, inherent structure arises– illustrating through technology just how far we have to go for social equality. But we don’t want to just kvetch about the problems: this panel will present and brainstorm solutions together. Panelists: Allison Fine, techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum, Tanya Tarr, AFSCME.

Thennnnn, there are parties that evening in major cities for participants to get together and socialize. Shockingly, I’m throwing the NYC party. Details:

NYC Women Who Tech After-Party
6:30pm – 9:00pm
Donnybrook
35 Clinton St (corner of Stanton)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=73623154033
Drink specials and noshy things galore!

Feel free to come by and say “hi” even if you’re not attending the conference. Other parties are scheduled for DC, San Francisco, London and Atlanta, too.

I can’t express enough how excited I am to be part of this gang. Please feel free to forward on, and if you’re one of those journalist types and you want to write about the events or women in technology in general, drop me a line!

As the day has worn on, more parts of the story are unfolding, and all these little tidbits at the intersection of tech, culture, media and commerce are more than fascinating. This is the kind of story that sends me down the rabbit hole of musing for days.

Let’s start with the tech side of things

According to Jessica Valenti (and her publisher, Seal Press), Amazon reps are claiming that this is a purely internal issue caused by the mysterious “glitch” spoken of last night. I don’t think the reps know what they’re talking about, frankly. What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it’s been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon’s mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:

• Refusing to acknowledge a vulnerability. People are reaching the point not just that they like transparency in dealing with people who hold lots of important info on their behalf, but they are coming to demand it. Amazon’s “nothing more to see here” approach is damaging to the relationship they have with those outraged by the exploit.
• Refusing to acknowledge the pain of affected people. If you have an entire relationship built on trust (with personal info, with commitments to move products, with referrals and wishlists, etc), you have the obligation to have that uncomfortable sit-down when a betrayal is introduced to the relationship. Amazon hasn’t done that yet. Yikes.

There’s a livejournal blogger out there now claiming responsibility for the exploit. I won’t link over, because I actually think he’s full of crap, as do those who’ve attempted to reproduce his exploitative code. It’s a well known practice for those with no skillz to take responsibility for things they have no part of to build up their hacker cred. Please. You know what tipped me off, for the record? The references to wanting to have anonymous sex with women and heroin from Craigslist. Fetishy-objectifying of women is common in the hacker community, for sure, but this guy is just… silly.

This doesn’t mean that someone didn’t come up with something similar– I’m almost positive they did. Which means that Amazon has a serious problem, and they better have a better explanation than the “glitch.”

There’s a bigger picture here: cultural implications

From a tech point of view, recommendation systems and flag-as-inappropriate tools that aren’t built to handle gaming the system are just no good. It’s unacceptable that a masterminding giant such as Amazon wasn’t prepared for this kind of attack. Especially considering how much it affects Amazon’s contract and relationship with the people that provide them with the goods its users demand, and how much users trust Amazon to do the Right Thing.

On a wider cultural scale, as I’d mentioned in the article in the WMC, the cultural implications of these attacks — especially when it’s big enough to get this kind of attention — are huge. Geek culture is one of the last vestiges of an overtly sexist and toxic environment for anyone who’s not a straight guy, most likely white and middle-class. (Not limited to the nerds of computer love, either– check out this post on misogyny and comic books from Amptoons.) When these attacks occur, it reveals not just the hatred that the hackers themselves have for women and LGBT folk, but the wider cultural intolerance we still have running rampant.

Decades of victories in civil rights for women and people of color, and more recently, LGBT folk seeking rights to get married, cannot correct the thousands of years of damage on which our culture is built. When a system of rapid information distribution (oh, like say, The Internet!) provides anonymity, free(-ish) speech and very little accountability, it makes it easy for people’s True Feelings to come out. It’s my feeling that what we see online is a mirror showing us the dark underbelly of what exists.

Some would react by clamping on the anonymity, the level of free speech and the accountability, often all at once. Sure, keeping trolls off your comments section is probably a good idea. Enacting laws making it impossible to operate independently and anonymously online? Bad idea. Very bad. We need to be addressing the root causes of our misogyny, our racism, our homophobia — not piling on bandaids, duct tape and bailing twine to keep people’s mouths shut. Only when it came to the threat of physical danger would I advocate for restriction. I have witnessed friends and colleagues being attacked viciously, and there is no one on this planet that deserves that level of fear stuffed down their throats.

It’s time to get real, folks. These attacks are proof that feminism and its partners in other social justice work still have a long, long way to go. Long way. I’m on board… are you?

Updates on theories, conspiracy and otherwise, are welcome in the comments.

Bonus: I also played superfangrrl and got my picture taken with Jane Fonda.

In short, every woman I know should apply for this program. The deadline for applications to get into the next round of classes is coming soon: March 10. Women from all disciplines, backgrounds and identities are strongly encouraged to apply! Don’t let geography or other constraints prevent you from applying — the staff is more than willing to work with candidates that get accepted. This is one of the most brilliant programs for empowering women with real skills that I’ve ever seen– get your application in today.

Whenever you do that, you are stating that the default gender for that job is male, and you need to add a qualifier before it to make it female. Can we all now, together, say that “women” should only be a noun? I know the dictionary has an adjective entry for it, but sometimes dictionaries are stupid.

Do you want your daughter to be an adjective or a non when she grows up?

If you want to refer to women who are doing a particular job, say, “women who are bloggers,” or “women who are journalists.” I know it’s longer and a little more cumbersome, but it makes women the actors and agents of the situation.

This has been a public service announcement from the nerdy linguistic department of Deanna’s brain. Please commence enjoying your weekend now.

We are "changing the conversation" by making sure that there are plenty of qualified, authoritative, progressive women experts available to editors, reporters, producers, and bookers. For the women chosen to participate in our 2009 Progressive Women's Voices program, we provide intense media training sessions in New York, with weekly follow-up briefings and continued training, as well as support and resources for media bookings.

Not only am I thrilled to be participating myself, but I’m especially excited to work with amazing classmates — Rinku Sen, Jehmu Greene, hello! — and almuni of the program (Carmen, Courtney, I’m lookin’ at you…). Thanks to the Women’s Media Center for giving us all this fabulous program.

Tired of being talked about this election season? Done with being represented by skewed polls and stereotypes?

This is your chance to cut through the spin and tell the media, the candidates and the world exactly what you want this election season, both right here online and live in cities across the country this Fall.

Oh. Freakin’. Yeah. There were a lot of interesting technical challenges for the project: how to get WordPress to take anonymous submissions, how to make the site as managable and geek-free by the end users as possible, and so much more. Can’t wait to rip this election season up!