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street roots
July 18, 2014
Redefining Bitch
Bitch M edia’s A ndi Zeisler on the new media literacy and the challenges o f modem fem inism
BY SUE ZALOKAR
—. STA FF W R IT E R
A ndi Zeisler is a co-founder and the
creative/editorial director of the Bitch
JL JLMedia group and the magazine Bitch:
Feminist Response to Pop Culture. She is
the quintessential “bitch” of pop culture. I
mean that as a compliment, which can be
confusing in today’s convoluted climate of
misogynistic social and cultural messages
about women, men and the roles we are
socialized to play out in our daily lives. Of
those who understand this phenomenon,
Zeisler is at top of the list
In 2006, Zeisler and the Bitch staff moved
their home base of operation from the San
Francisco Bay area to their current home
base in Portland’s Alberta Street art district
in Northeast Portland.
In that time, a zine that was bom from
the philosophical, political and social
critique of pop culture from a feminist
perspective has evolved to include a media
group whose presence in the social media
and online world has offered a refreshing,
feminist critique of all things cultural.
The magazine was conceived by Zeisler
and friend Lisa Jervis in 1996 as an all- ,
volunteer publication with a circulation of
300. It is now internationally distributed
with a circulation of more than 50,000 - no
small feat in a climate where print \
publications have folded up and retreated
from newsstands. I asked her how Bitch
Media functions as a response to media and
pop culture.
Andi Zeisler: We respond to all aspects
of the media and popular culture whether
it’s news media or movies and TV,
advertising, video games, websites and
blogs, art, comics - all of those things are
really ripe for analysis from a feminist
perspective, some more than others.
Sue Zalokar.: Never ending fodder ...
A.Z.: Yes. Culture in many ways, as
progressive as it is, is still very backwards in
many places when it comes to gender and
when it comes to representing difference or
any sort of deviation from this traditional,
white, male status quo.
We see that in politics, we see that in who
creates advertisements, who creates movies,
who creates culture.
The mission of Bitch is to give a voice to
how those representations impact real life
and to highlight places that are getting it
right and are really doing innovative things.
Our mission is two-fold: it’s not to complain
about what’s going wrong, it is also to hold
up what’s going right and celebrate ft.
S.Z.: What about Hobby Lobby?
A.Z.: People are calling the decision a
slippery slope that will lead to other
religious exemptions, but I think there’s
another slippery slope: Misinformation has
been allowed to stand in for fact in a
Supreme Court decision. What other
misinformation will be treated as fact in
future decisions? There are some scary
possibilities.
When I tweeted about the decision last
week, I got a lot of responses — from men,
primarily - that were like, “(Hobby Lobby) B
still cover 16 other forms of birth control,”
as though that should somehow appease^
people who were protesting the decision, as
though it’s somehow not a problem that
corporations are involved in women’s
reproductive choices as long as they’re not
involved in all of them.
One man responded to me saying, “Even
as a man, I think this is a bad decision on
the part of the Supreme Court.” And to me,
that very mindset; that “even as a man”
modifier, that’s part of the problem.
The challenges to women’s reproductive
justice and bodily autonomy is a global issue.
It affects education, it affects economies, it
affects a million little things that people
don’t recognize when they see ft as simply
“her problem” or “a women’s issue.” It is
crucial to have everybody, not just women,
in the fight for women’s reproductive justice,
on all levels. That’s definitely something
that this ease has underscored.
S.Z.: Print vs. digital media?
A.Z.: We (at Bitch) don’t really think of it
as an either/or situation. For us, it is very
much a both/and (situation).
It’s figuring out a way to balance what we
do. We have the print magazine, but it is not
a medium that makes a lot of sehse from a
practical point of view. It’s really expensive
and it’s really wasteful. We also do digital
editions of the print magazine for people
who want to read it but don’t want the paper
waste or don’t have a permanent residence.
There is just something ahput print
media: it’s tangible, it’s archivable. There is
something that has a kind of permanence,
even psychological that you don’t get from
digital media. At the same time, digital
media is incredibly important and really
useful.
We find that it’s not necessarily all the
same readership. People who read the
magazine, aren’t necessarily the same people
who read the website every day. The people
who comment on Facebook aren’t the
people who engage on Twitter.
S,Z.: As a woman who identifies as a
feminist, but has always been on the fringe of
the real movement, I wonder, how best for
people to respond, as feminists, to sexism in
media and pop culture and in our everyday
lives?
A.Z.: A lot of it is raising awareness. As a
culture, that gets really easy to just brush
things off.
S.Z. Nobody wants to be that person...
A.Z.: Right! Nobody wants to rock the
boat too much and it’s really easy to say, “If
you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch i t ” •
Or, You don’t have to buy that magazine.
No one is making you do this.” That’s true
on an individual basis; no one is holding a
gun to your head telling you what to watch.
At the same time, we are affected by
messages that half the time we aren’t even
aware we re absorbing. This is especially
cruciatfor young people. They are
surrounded by media. They are learning
their ideas about thè world, how they should
act, who they want to be, who they want to
hang out with, what it means to be a man,
what it means to be a woman. They H
learning all of that from media and popular
culture. Often the messages being sent are
See BITCH, page 5