The editor in chief of RVAMAG:

andrewtsks:

So here’s a Jezebel post about an awful article that ran on the website for the magazine that I work for on Friday. Let me get this out there right now, for better or for worse—I edited and posted this article. The article was turned in for publication a few days in advance, but I didn’t read it until the night before. When I did read it, I was horrified. I posted something on twitter about it, but didn’t explain the twitter post to anyone. After editing the article and preparing it for publication, I debated with myself quite a bit over whether or not I wanted to go to the rest of the magazine’s staff with my concerns about it before running it. I could have done so, and I chose not to. I wasn’t sure how my objections to the article would be received, and whether the rest of the staff would ultimately choose to run it over my objections, and quite honestly, I didn’t want to get into any confrontations at work. I decided to just go ahead and post it, and hope that it didn’t attract too much attention.

Our website usually has an indication on it as to who posts which articles, and as a sort of subtle, silent protest, I removed my name from that field on the article, so that it showed up blank. I was hoping that the disclaimer we generally run with the article would do the rest of the work. Britt’s been writing Fashion Rants for us for months, and while most of them are not specifically hateful towards an oppressed minority group, they’ve all been offensive to some particular subculture: skaters, dudes who wear Ed Hardy, etc. His humor is based around harsh takedowns of… well, basically people who aren’t just like him. It’s the kind of thing that I never find funny, because I’m not really into meanness as humor, but a lot of people like it, and his articles are often well-received. However, a few of them—especially other ones that have been based around the idea that women who make a particular bad fashion decision are all sluts/whores (as far as I can tell in retrospect, this is at least the third time he’s used this idea as the concept for an article)—have gotten enough of a negative response that, a few months ago, I started including a disclaimer whenever we posted his articles. You can see it in the Jezebel article. The “(that goes double for this article)” note was something I added specifically in this case as a subtle form of protest against what Britt had written. Because I hated it. But I still posted it.

As bad as I feared the response to this article would be, it was way, way worse. All weekend I was getting texts and emails and facebook messages from friends who were upset with me about the fact that the article had gone up. I repeatedly explained that I hadn’t approved of it, but that I hadn’t felt comfortable refusing to publish it either, and that I’d hoped people would hold it against the writer rather than everyone at the magazine as a whole. Unfortunately, part of what I’m dealing with where RVA Magazine is concerned is the fact that it’s existed for 7 years but I’ve only worked there for the last two. A lot of editorial decisions that were made before I was involved gained the magazine a reputation for sexist, objectifying laddishness, like a local version of Maxim. For a lot of people, that idea of RVA Magazine is so cemented in their minds that something like this Fashion Rant article just further solidifies an impression that they already had anyway. I’ve tried over the past couple of years to move away from that sort of thing, but it gets complicated by the fact that we still run articles at times that feature pictures of pretty girls. For example, our last issue had an interview with local photographer Anthony Hall, who uses female nudes in his work as part of a comment on the unhealthy connections between materialism and sexual objectification in our modern Western culture. In the issue before that, we ran an interview with the leader of a local burlesque troupe. These articles are not my idea of sexism (both were written by female contributors, too, though I’m not sure that’s really relevant), but when people flip through the magazine and see the images that accompanied them, I guess it’s pretty easy for them to think something like, “More sexual objectification of women! Same old shit from RVA Magazine.”

I don’t want people to see my work this way. I definitely don’t want people to think that I approve or am in any way comfortable with the article that started this whole mess. My initial reasons for going ahead and running the article in retrospect look inadequate to me. I wanted to avoid a confrontation and instead I’ve had hundreds of them. It’s easy to think that something like this, just like the print version of our magazine, will only ever be seen by a small group of people in the local area. Obviously, where the internet is concerned, that’s not true. What sucks the most about all of this is that I made the wrong decision, something I knew was the wrong decision at the time, and have had to deal with a massive amount of fallout from something that I could have avoided and wanted to avoid, but just didn’t have the guts to avoid.

I know I might lose some friends over this, and I know a lot of people will be mad at or disappointed in me. Believe me, you can’t possibly be as mad or as disappointed as I am in myself. I’ve felt way too shitty about not standing up for how I feel and what I believe in in this case to ever go that route again, so I guess I’ve learned a lesson. As far as the article that started all this, it’s been taken down, and it won’t go back up on our website (though I guess you’ll be able to read it forever on Jezebel). I wish I could go back in time and stop myself from ever posting it, but I can’t.

You guys, I blew it. I’m sorry.

—————————————————————————————————