Feminism's Toxic Twitter War By Michelle Goldberg Summary

Social Media: The Battleground for Feminism If you thought that feminism died decades ago, think again. The F-word has been coming up a lot in social media in the past few years, which has led to conflict in surprising places in the movement. Not only has the movement run into issues with the freedom of being online but also with racial tensions between different groups of women. The Internet is now the battleground for racial issues that have been brought to the forefront in Feminism and shows no intentions of slowing down or cooling off. While looking into these issues I came across an article entitled, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” by Michelle Goldberg. As a senior contributing writer for The Nation, Goldberg has accomplished much more

Many of the women that have been interviewed by Goldberg can agree that, “many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it’s become toxic” (Goldberg 13). In this article, it seems to be that most of the women interviewed were being bullied and bashed online. Of course they are going to say that it is a toxic environment. The women that were interviewed said that they are scared to write blogs or to publish articles in fear of rejection of their ideology and having the equivalent of an angry mob show up on their computer screens. Goldberg even states, “Many second-wave feminist groups tore themselves apart by denouncing and ostracizing members who demonstrated too much ambition or presumed to act as leaders” (Goldberg 14). So even though these feminists are trying to advocate for women’s rights to be equal to that of men, they are not being allowed to compete with each other to better themselves. Goldberg may be telling us that this online movement is not supposed to have a leader, or a specific feminist that outshines the others. The women just end up bashing each other and ruining each other’s reputations. Courtney Martin is quoted in this article saying that, ‘”Some of it is the product of new technologies that create more shallow relationships, and some of it feels like this age-old conundrum within feminism”’ (Goldberg 14). So the problems in feminism may be older than the actual introduction of social media to the scene. Goldberg definitely is leaning heavily to the negative side of the problems in feminism in this article; she does mention some of the good things that have happened because of social media. In one of her interviews there is a statement about how the Internet is a place where there is people uniting and doing meaningful things that affect everyone (Goldberg 14). One example that was mentioned in the article states, “When the breast