Young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, influence and connect.
- Editor, Jessica Valenti
- Editor,Vanessa Valenti
- Editor, Samhita Mukhopadhyay
- Editor, Ann Friedman
- Editor, Courtney Martin
- Editor, Miriam Perez
- Contributor, Shark-Fu
- Contributor, Professor Foxy
For more detailed information on who we are and what we do, download our media kit (PDF).
Feministing is an online community for feminists and their allies. The community aspect of Feministing - our community blog, rating system, and related social networking sites (our Facebook group, YouTube page, and Meetup Alliance) - exist to better connect feminists online and off, and to encourage activism. We hope that the Feministing community will provide a forum for a variety of feminist voices and organizations.
In order to maintain a progressive and safe discourse on the site, anti-feminist comments, blogs, and profiles are not permitted; the Feministing editors believe that racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and hate speech constitute anti-feminism and have no place on the site. If you have a concern about a commenter or blogger, please send a detailed email to contact@feministing.com.
We view Feministing as a platform for not only discussion among feminists and allies, but for reaching (open, not hateful) people who may not agree with every word we write. Comment threads are a big part of what facilitates this dialogue.
Comment moderation has been one of the most difficult parts of running this site. We moderate comments because we want to leave space for dialogue and questions, but also want to prevent the comment threads from getting derailed or offending anyone is a difficult line to walk. We're not sure there can be such a thing as a safe space on a blog with thousands of readers, but we do want our common conversations to be as productive and useful as possible.
We appreciate all the feedback we've gotten from our community about how we can better moderate comments. To that end, here are some strategies/guidelines we've developed:
Comments that contain personal attacks, hate speech or offensive language will be deleted. Victim blaming is never allowed. Commenters who derail threads (i.e. choose not to discuss the subject of the original post) will be warned and possibly deleted if the derailing continues. As editors, we use our discretion in determining which comments meet the criteria for deletion.
You all can help us to moderate comments and keep threads in check. You can "like" comments that you support, and you can also flag comments you think violate our policy. Just click the report abuse button on the bottom right hand side of the comment and we'll take a look at it. You can also help us to de-escalate a tense situation in comments by choosing not to respond to a commenter who is derailing a thread or trolling.
Because some topics we write about are more contentious than others, and because we are not always able to moderate as attentively as we would like, we realized we needed different tech solutions for different threads. We've come up with three ways a post author can set comments on their post, and it's up to the author's discretion which method works for them and that conversation.
- Open comments: Just like now, the comments go up as written and are moderated in the thread. We expect the majority of our posts will continue to be moderated this way.
- Moderated comments: On these posts, the comments will only go up as they are approved by the author. This slows down conversation and allows us to make sure all comments are within our policy.
- Closed comments: These are posts with no comments allowed. This option will be used in rare circumstances.
Threads will be heavily moderated the first day they are posted. After 24 hours, they will still be watched, but not as closely and community members should keep that in mind when participating. (This is where that report abuse button comes in really handy!) Comments on every post will be closed after seven days. We have thousands of posts on Feministing and the Community blog, and we simply don't have the capacity to moderate threads forever.
The editors don't have the capacity to moderate community blog comments as heavily as comments on the front page. We will do our best to keep an eye on them, but please use the report abuse button when possible to alert us to comment policy violations. We also recommend that community bloggers actively monitor and participate in comments on the posts they write.
You may be getting server errors when you try to post comments. This is an ongoing problem we're trying to stay on top of, but the best advice is to just sit tight (don't click "publish" again), and your comment will show up in a few minutes. Clicking "publish" multiple times is what leads to double and triple posts in comments.
If you get a message that your comment is being held in moderation, usually that's because you've included three or more links in it (which means our system "holds it" because it's suspicious you've posted spam). If you get the "comment held" message, email contact@feministing.com, and we'll liberate your comment from the junk folder. Alternatively, you can repost your comment with fewer links included.
- Create a profile to participate in the Feministing Community blog. (More info here.)
- Read and rate posts from other Feministing Community members
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- Get involved with feminist groups all over the country. Or start your own.
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