Lady I listened to #2: Lindy West

I haven't been writing about my feminist journey with the regularity that I'd hoped. Excuse me while America implodes.

What can I say about Lindy West other than that she's my hero? 

Lindy has played a big part in making me want to examine my privileges, making me want to take this journey for myself and for my daughter and for just plain waking me up. She's younger than I am, but I think of her as my teacher.

I first became a fan nearly ten years ago when she was a film critic at Seattle's weekly paper, The Stranger. I followed Dan Savage from The Onion back to his home paper and there I found Lindy. She was the funniest, the coolest, the smartest writer in a paper that was having a golden age full of such folks.

Her public feud with Dan (detailed in her book, Shrill) was one of the first times I felt myself needing to challenge my own preconceptions about feminism. 

Why did she have to fight with Dan? He was her boss, her editor and someone who was doing important work on LGBT issues. So why couldn't she just back off, sit down and let him be? She was younger than Dan. She was his employee. Couldn't she just go back to writing her movie reviews and be "nice"?

I hate that those ideas occurred to me, but they did. I have always considered myself a good guy and an ally of women. I have a wonderful mom who raised me to be full of respect, especially toward women. I don't call anyone "bitch" or expect sandwiches. I'd never hit or demean a woman, use pick up lines or shame anyone. But when Lindy called Dan out on his fat-shaming antics, I saw so many other "good" guys turn on her and, honestly, I could have gone that way.

They liked her writing and were on her side until they disagreed with her, then she was every ugly epithet you can call a woman.They attacked her and it became personal. It got ugly. Misogyny reared its head and I could tell that many of them weren't traditionally meat-headed "womanizer" types, but otherwise-liberal "nice guys" like myself that nevertheless refused to give her a fair shake.

Lindy doesn't need my help, but watching her has sure helped me. If you don't know, she's the troll-slayer supreme. She moved onwards and upwards from The Stranger, writing for Jezebel and then huge publications like Salon, The Guardian and The New York Times. Watching her get online-attacked (death threats, rape threats, trolls impersonating her dead father, a seething slime river of hatred that I can't even contemplate) by thousands of men - and trouncing them all, badly - has taught me much of what I know about feminism. And woke me to the fact that standing by made me part of the problem.

I read Lindy every day. She's hilarious. She's smarter than I'll ever be. She's just an amazing human and I'll say it again: she's my hero. I keep looking to her and she keeps helping me be a better feminist.

Read her book, Shrill, read her frequent posts on The Guardian, read her amazing piece in the New York Times following this horrendous election. Read everything you can.

Here's a juicy excerpt:

"...there’s something poetically satisfying about the first judicial and legislative blows to Trump’s regime coming from a group whose power he so plainly underestimates. The president’s disdain for women feels faintly more personal than some of his more perfunctory bigotries (though no more destructive): he has clearly spent his entire life treating us as furniture, sex holes, trophies or trash. He doesn’t just want to restrict our constitutional rights; he wants to put his hand on our genitals and squeeze. He didn’t realise we had the power to squeeze back, and that oversight will hurt him."

Next post: Lindy's amazing sister-in-law, Ijeoma Oluo.