Jose Luis Magana / AP Photo, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Jacob Silverman | Longreads | May 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)
For the better part of two decades, an important set of assumptions has underwritten our use of the internet. In exchange for being monitored — to what degree, many people still have no idea — we would receive free digital services. We would give up our privacy, but our data and our rights, unarticulated though they might be, would be respected. This is the simple bargain that drove the development of the social web and rewarded its pioneers — Facebook, Google, and the many apps and services they’ve swallowed up — with global user bases and multi-billion-dollar fortunes. Read more…
Then they quadrupled. Then they began to increase exponentially.
I leaned in some more. I ate protein bars and made important telephone calls during my morning commute. I stopped reading novels so I could write more articles and memos and make more handicrafts to contribute to the school auction. I put in extra hours at work. When I came home, I did radio interviews over Skype from my living room while supervising the children’s math homework.
And I realized that I hated Sheryl Sandberg.
Because, of course, I was miserable. I never saw my friends, because I was too busy building my network. I was too tired to do any creative, outside-the-box thinking. I was boxed in. I wondered if foreign-policy punditry was just too much for me. I wondered if I should move to Santa Fe and open a small gallery specializing in handicrafts made from recycled tires. I wondered if my husband and kids would want to go with me.
—Rosa Brooks, The Washington Post. Brooks’ piece looks at what happens when a woman takes Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and leans in (spoiler: good things at work and exhaustion at home). She posits that maybe the answer lies in a different kind of feminism manifesto, a “Manifestus for the Rest of Us,” wherein women fight for the right to “lean out,” relax a little, and maybe even find time “for the kind of unstructured, creative thinking so critical to any kind of success.”
“In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object, valued by how many times it’s been bought—or, in our electronic age, how many times it’s been clicked on. ‘Images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate,’ British philosopher Nina Power observed of contemporary faux-feminism in her 2009 book, One-Dimensional Woman. ‘The city worker in heels, the flexible agency employee, the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine—and would have us believe that—yes—capitalism is a girl’s best friend.’”
Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.
The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.
The other problem is that we’re still relying on National Magazine Awards and print-only publishers to reflect the zeitgeist. I’ve mentioned that 65% of all #longreads started out in print, but we also should spotlight the work of online publishers who are pursuing in-depth storytelling.
So, here’s a start: 21 stories from women’s magazines and sites that we’ve featured on Longreads. On Twitter, Rebecca Traister is curating some of her favorite serious work. And we’d love for you to add your favorite women’s magazine stories in the comments.
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