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!

More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now, I’ve used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.

I’ve come to terms now, or at least I’m trying to come to terms with (did I mention the therapy?) the fact that I am tired of building bridges. I’m over it, I’m sore, my resources are expended, my back is broken, and I am, quite simply, spent. I want to spend a little time with like-minded folk who will let me explore my beliefs; I want to find my safe spaces. But where on Earth do I begin? Who are my people?

Immediately it became clear to me that feminism was going to play a large role in process. I’ve been a feminist since I can remember, though I don’t know where I got the idea that this was thing Thing To Do. All I know is that I chose Amelia Earheart for my living biography project in 4th grade, and the rest is pretty much history. So, I’ve known that The Feminists were the kids in the political schoolyard for me to pal around with.

I am lucky to have found a community of women with whom I can toss things about with, who fascinate me with their listserv banter and arguments, who dazzle me with their annual killer conference: Women Action & The Media. Or, more simply and more fun: WAM!. Full disclosure, I am a volunteer WAM!bassador of technology. It’s fun to say, and it’s even more fun to be a part of. I’ve attended the conference for three or four years now, brought into the fold by Tracy van Slyke and Jessica Clark. I don’t always agree with everything that happens on- and offline within the WAM! community, but it has become a rewarding home for me, the beginning of a safe space for my explorations.

In the last year or so, my frustrations with external liberal forces have become louder and stronger, at least in my head, though not so very publicly. I’ve found myself commiserating with people of color and folks working on poverty issues at various conferences. To wit, I remember sitting with Christopher Rabb, Roberto Lovato and a few others, talking about the Take Back America conference and just how bizarre the “take back” frame is. “Ummmm, ummmm,” Chris would start ribbing, gently raising his hand. “Um, who exactly are we taking it back for? ‘Cause some of us never had it.” We’d giggle our rage away. Like ya do.

So, more than ever, I was looking forward to this year’s WAM! Conference, to regroup, to kick back, kick back many cocktails, kick back my brain, and for the love of God, just relax and have fun with peeps that I only get to see in this setting but once a year. I was excited to see all of the crazy panels and workshops that been stacked up, excited to meet Helen Thomas (I’m a celebrity hag, yes I am), excited to not worry about a damn thing. Because, what do I have to worry about?

The conference was all that (and slightly more, since it’s more than doubled in size compared to when I first started going), and I left completely exhausted from lack of sleep and yet feeling connected to my little spot of the universe again. When I got home, I finished putting up my presentation materials online, and started trolling around for other people’s post-mortems.

That’s when I started reading about a whole group of people who didn’t have so good a time at the conference, and who don’t feel the unending waterfalls of warm fuzzies that I feel for this community. I was, perhaps naively, surprised. The more critiques I read from the queer and women of color communities, the more confused and frustrated I started to feel. How could they say that my community, my beloved WAM!, was not welcoming, inclusive, transformational, radical enough?

I went through several days of this, and by Wednesday night, I was seething and stewing in my defensive thoughts. The moment that I realized I was talking to myself while stirring pasta on the stove, a la “Well let me just tell you something…”, I knew something profound was happening in my psyche. Said pasta nearly hit the floor when I realized that much of the defensive words I was spouting were the same words that mainstream non-feminists (often men) had thrown at me when I called into question their recruitment and organizing tactics. (“But we just don’t know that many women who do [insert job here]!”)

I felt like crap.

Ah, I retorted to myself, but my good liberal white guilt will get me nowhere in this life!

So, I sat on it uncomfortably for a night, still occasionally chatting with myself, and the next morning, I read Jessica Hoffman’s critique of the conference over at The Bilerico Project. This is probably the post that got my brain churning the most (though I am questioning why that is now, since, as will soon be revealed to you, I am now questioning everything– it’s like being 17 and discovering communism all over again). What I realized I had to do was to take all of these experiences into my own experience. I was, and am, guilty of treating communities to which I do not belong as Other, as not me or mine.

Conservatives are very good at the game of Other. My friend Sasha once said to me, “Conservatives have the mistaken notion that there is a difference between you and me. Part of the liberal or progressive ideology, why we care what happens, is that we know there’s no difference spiritually, really, between us. We really are in it together, for better or worse.” This was my first exercise in breaking down not someone else’s Other issues– but my very own. I’m not done yet.

Watching the ensuing conversations over email and blog comments enabled me to wait a long time to write this essay. I watched as women that I consider friends react to individual words and ignored overall concepts, while others reached out and went a little further than they had in the past. I watched as some tried the bridges, and in some cases, from one side or another (there are many islands needing connection here) were ignored or flamed. Women who had been through these discussions in other iterations offered thoughtful advice or jaded dismissals. The conference organizers answered all of the open questions in a variety of forums, and folks seem to come out of the woodwork to defend the conference itself. Which was, in the end, a Good Thing. We couldn’t have the whole damn thing falling apart, now could we?

Throughout this intake process, I’ve become more uncomfortable, instead of less so, and this makes me think I’m probably on the right path.

I question my own role in the manifestation of WAM! and other feminist communities as interpreted by some as mainstream, white, straight, privileged, what-have-you. Many of the women I’m friends with in the community are women that I work with, either through my own tech work or through sites like AlterNet.org, and most of them are white and not super radical in any one way. In this process, I wonder if there is something about my place in the world and how I’ve presented it that has not attracted radical, queer and women of color to my secret plan for world domination through technology. I talk a good game. Am I walking it? Perhaps… not. I don’t know.

It’s hard to write “I don’t know.” I just read an interview with Spike Lee in this week’s New York Magazine that was sort of a retrospective of “Do The Right Thing.” His comment about critics who ripped the movie apart was telling: he was criticized because he didn’t have an “answer to racism” at the end of the film. Because, you know, a movie could do that. And if you’re so smart, Mr. Smarty Pants, smart enough to make this whole movie with all these complex characters, then how come you’re not smart enough to have an answer at the end?

I’ve found that most of the people participating in various parts of this discussion at the intersection of race, gender, queer, identity and radical politics just don’t have The Answers, and each of the camps are frustrated with others for was feels like an unwillingness to explore answers, to stumble and make mistakes (and have other camps accept them) along the way. Some folks are broken, tired, sick of building bridges out to people like me and beyond– and with this, I can sympathize, and I cannot fault them.

One minor conclusion that I have come to out of this is that people who are desperate for change — the real kind, the kind you can taste in your WAM!tini and feel in your bones and live in your sustainable life — will put a good chunk, if not all, of their hopes and dreams into a gathering like WAM!. I know that I do, every single year. Along with your basket of hopes-’n'-dreams also comes a helping of fears and disappointments, and those are forces to be reckoned with. Heartily, madly reckoned with. If we won’t do it, how will we expect others to?

There are now more conversations happening about race and feminism around the ‘hood, and I’m not qualified to comment on them yet (note that it took me nearly two weeks to write this one piece), but I think so far that Ampersand had what seem like the clearest words on one set of arguments (especially sprinkled throughout the comments), and Jessica Hoffman’s Open Letter To White Feminists has the best line I’ve seen in recent years about what’s wrong with privileged people of all sorts: “We’d been pissed and well meaning, but not useful.” (Especially you upper-class white men! Yes, you! Just kidding. But not really.)

Now is the part where I write a neat, clever conclusion for my “What I Did At Camp” essay, wherein I solve the problems of my community with a quick flurry of keystrokes. At least, that’s what I thought I’d have to do in the past when I tried to write these essays. The new, improved, desiring-to-break-free-and-be-a-good-deal-more-radical DZ is instead going to be over there in the corner, thinking and writing, emailing with folks and taking it all in… and figuring out what being “useful” is going to mean for me.

no no, thank YOU, Adele!

WAM!‘s gotten to be huge, and it’s hard to say how I feel about that. It’s like when your favorite restaurant gets discovered, and the atmosphere changes because the throngs are rushing in to discover the yummy treats. Yep, I’m thrilled for my favorite conference, and it was still like camp-for-grownups, but I did lose some intimacy with my fellow attendees. There’s a group of “old-timers” who are already saying things like, “Wow, remember when it was 10 of us hanging out afterwards?” during the afterparty, in which around 50 women crammed into the very generous Amanda Marcotte’s room. (Who is the quintessential afterparty-hotel-room-hostess with the mostest, by the way. I was amazed at her mad skillz, and learned much from her party kungfu.)

Pictures galore from the conference are on Flickr.

Continuing the theme of “women who work together, rock together” when I got home, I attended the first-ever Women Who Tech Telesummit on Monday. That’s right, it was the first conference I was ever able to attend in my yoga pants and t-shirt. We dialed in to listen to the panelists and watched the presentations via ReadyTalk. (Hint for future participants: use a separate computer to log in to both via Skype and ReadyTalk. It was like having a TV with really good shows on all day.)

The two panels that blew me away were Tara Hunt’s “Women And Social Capital,” with panelists Arianna Huffington and Joan Blades. While Arianna and Joan are always inspiring and fun to listen to, I have to say, it was Tara’s opening remarks that really got me thinking. I’m going to write more extensively about this, but she pointed out that women tend to hide themselves online, using pseudonyms and private profiles on services, which often can mean we are not shaping the discourse. I’d never thought of it that way, and it was inspiration for me to set my profiles free. Go free, little ones! I’ll be implementing a redesign of dz.com to reflect my newfound carefree abandon. Wish me luck.

Equally compelling was the panel “Web 2.0: Hot Or Not?” I can’t wait for the podcast of this session to come out, there were so many interesting tools and concepts for measuring the success of social energy. I’ll post links when I get them, but all the panelists here were just completely dynamic and amazing.

What else can I tell you? On a personal note, I’m heading off this weekend to Cheryl and Mike’s wedding, and then commencing on the mad prep for my month-long trip to Berlin. Oh, let me leave off with a cute postcard from Jim Hightower: he married John Weiss of the Colorado Independent this week. Tee hee.