you're wrong

On Salon.

Clark-Flory:

"typically snarky tone" "Those types of, uh, vivid arguments" "rude-girl slang" "generous heaping of the F-word"

I can't tell if you're exaggerating the way she writes to dismiss her as someone who can't argue maturely or to sell her as some kind of cool, hip, young, totally radical riot grrl or something. Either way, it's weird.

"knows how to make feminism accessible to a young, apathetic audience"

I'd say that Feministing actually selects toward readers who aren't apathetic, as do her books.

"Her first book, "Full Frontal Feminism" featured"..."a butt-naked lady on the cover."

That book's cover only shows a bare stomach, so no.

"Valenti recently sparked controversy by announcing that she's getting married in the fall: Conservative columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez called her a "feminist bridezilla," while some feminists declared she was bowing to the patriarchy and being a traitor to gay rights."

Who?


Valenti:

"In terms of male virgins, I don't think they're affected nearly as much as women. As you said, male virgins are presented in this jokey way in U.S. culture -- you see them in a doofy movie and that's pretty much it."

Perhaps not nearly as much, but I think Valenti's underestimating the degree to which boys/men can be shamed for being virgins, as girls/women are shamed for NOT being virgins. I'll never be privy to everything that goes on among male-only circles of friends, but I'd imagine that there's pressure to have sex as well as teasing the guys who are seen as still being virgins, yes? For some dude-groups, not all.

"I think the way that they're most affected is in how they're taught to interact with women and to define themselves in oppositional terms. To be a man you just have to not be feminine -- don't be a girl, don't be a pussy, and don't be a sissy."

I don't disagree about how masculinity/femininity are often defined in "oppositional terms," but I think it's unfair to say that masculinity is the absence of femininity, as it would be unfair to say that femininity is the absence of masculinity. I tend to think of those things as things and not absences of other things (is Marxism an absence of capitalism?).

"What I find really fascinating is that in Africa and places outside the U.S. we call it female genital mutilation. But, because you pay $4,000 for it here, it's a designer vagina? It's ridiculous! It's just another way of fetishizing virginity and young vaginas."

Women get cosmetic genital surgery because they want their labia to look different, or they want their vagina tightened, or they want a new hymen put in so they can "be virginal" again or some other damned creepy thing. "Female genital mutilation" is when someone else cuts off your clitoris and other parts so you can never fully sexually function, in a procedure that is often done in unhygienic conditions without anesthetic (and without consent), to small children. It's fucking gross that you would downplay how terrible that is by saying it's like a grown woman getting elective surgery from a real surgeon. And female genital mutilation happens in this country, too.