Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Just walk away, if I ever take all of this so seriously that I lose perspective.
Just walk away, if I become one of those unthinking webloggers who pile on at a moment’s notice, pontificating from such a privileged position of smug superiority. I’d rather burn this site and plow salt into the ashes.
Barry at Alas, a Blog has probably done more for women in weblogging than any other man I know. Recently, he got into some financial difficulty and had to sell his domain, keeping his weblog and asking that the new owner not host porn. The new owner hasn’t, but he has posted a page that links to several hardcore porn sites–using Barry’s accrued Google ranking to drive up the rank of these sites.
I can understand Barry’s dilemma on selling the domain or not, because I had a similar offer for burningbird.net a few months back. If the offer had come during a downtime for me, I would have taken it. As it is, with my redirects, I’ve basically killed all page rank for all my domains–a state that leaves me happy, because I don’t want these domains to have value other than what I provide, not Google.
To return to Barry, according to Sour Duck some of the more righteous ‘discovered’ that this happened (do you think it’s because Barry wrote about it?) and are now disdainful of Barry, what he has done, and have vowed never to link to him again, for him being the traitor to the ’cause’.
Give me a break. These women will slam one of the few men who consistently bring up more issues of impact to women than the women at Blogher or most other female-oriented site. Why so condeming? After all, it’s not as if he’s linking to porn, or the fact that people searching for information on feminist issues will now be shown page after page of porn sites. What happens in the end is one porn site ends up ahead of other porn sites. Frankly, can any of us tell any of them apart anyway?
Here’s what one purist has to say:
You asked for no input, no feedback, no suggestions. As though your blog is what it is because of you and you alone, or because you paid for server space. Your blog was what it was because of all the people who commented to it, read it, guest blogged there. They made it what it was, too. Their words, on your site, are what caused it to be widely read– not just your words. And their words are their words– not yours. Their reputations are their reputations, too. That being so, I believe you owed it to all of the people who supported your site by commenting to it and guest blogging to ask for their thoughts and views before you irreversibly tied their words, comments, guest blog posts to a page which links to misogynist, racist internet pornography. You could have gone ahead and done what you were going to do anyway, nobody could have stopped you, but at the very least, we’d have had a heads up, and we could have stopped posting before the porn links page was created, and hence we would not have unwittingly helped to boost the search engine ratings for porn sites with our feminist, woman-centered postings! This is especially true for those of us who oppose pornography, for whom this is central to our feminist politics. You know who we are. You owed us *at least this*. But you allowed us to keep posting, and boosting the internet ratings of racist, misogynist pornography websites, for months. You didn’t let us know until people had discovered for themselves that these porn reviews were part of Amptoons. And even when you finally let us know, because the porn links were found on your site, you didn’t allow for commentary or feedback or even trackbacks. Why? Because you’d cut a deal at our expense, and you didn’t want to hear about it? Because you didn’t want search engine ratings to go down, possibly compromising the deal you cut behind our backs?
Hello? What part of ‘domain already sold’ didn’t you understand? No, skip that: what part of personal space don’t you understand?
Where does this person get off putting such demands on any weblogger, much less one who I know for a fact, has been fighting the battle for women online one hell of a lot longer than most of the outraged people?
I can be persistent and I can be assertive and I can even be pedantic at times when I’m fighting for the cause of women, but I’ll walk away from this space, without a look back, if I ever get to the point of telling another weblogger what to do, as well as kicking dirt in the face of one of the few men I know who has consistently fought our fight.
I never want to be that good or that pure.