Blaglash.com

Jezebel is a feminist slanting blog about media, pop culture and celebrity.  They foray into politics, the economy and literature as well.  Their bias, voice and overall tone is aimed at shaming people into agreeing with their ideas and opinions; at least that’s my conclusion based on my year and a half close reading of their site.  Depsite the fact that I respect their mission, I do not respect the end result- the creation of a community of narrow-minded, insufferable know it alls who feel privileged and entitled enough to insult a dissenting opinion. 

If I could stand it, I would research all the examples I’ve witnessed of this attitude.  The way commenters on that site single out other commenters to vindictively insult is based on one thing- what they’ve also commented.  I’ve seen users abused for supporting Clinton or Obama, claims about rape and economic opinions.  These commenters rarely defend themselves, they simply dissapear from the threads.  This has happened to me on a number of occasions and I’ve never taken true offense to it until now.

As most people know, David Foster Wallace killed himself last weekend.  The people that care about Wallace care a lot.  So whenever I find someone eulogizing or remarking upon him, I read it.  Jezebel, despite the lack of “feminist” slant in a writer’s suicide, decided to cover and post about Wallace’s death.  In this post, almost without warning (a short disclaimer positioned before the offending sentance is not enough) the last line of Infinite Jest was quoted.

This in and of itself is offensive.  To give away the last line of any book is simply rude.  To do so for a long, difficult and rewarding masterpiece such as Infinite Jest, whose author has killed himself, is unspeakably wrong.  And I commented thus, only to be barraged by commenters whose righteosness could only be shadowed by their narrow-mindedness.  I was called a “bitch”, “nitpicky”, told to stop complaining, that I should have already finished the book by now and asked how I could dare critisize the author who wrote the post.

The fact that there were no adjustments to the post shows that Jezebel is unprofessional.  That no one was told to lay off me was rude.  There was no apology made.  I’ve seen “spoiler alerts” prefacing many posts, including ones about America’s Next Top Model, for goodness sake.  In fact, if the ending of things like ANTM are given away, commenters BITCH AND MOAN in the comment section, and a ***spoiler alert*** is added to the post. 

Apparently Jezebel thinks reality television is more important to their readers than one of my favorite authors was to me.