Babe.net: The Liberal Bogeywoman Republicans Have Been Waiting For
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’re probably familiar with the #MeToo movement. It is a long overdue rectification of years of unpunished sexual assault and harassment. It has brought many sexually abusive men to justice, keeping them off the air, off the screen, and out of our national politics. So far, it has been incredible. It has yielded countless confessions, and seems to be seriously changing a long entrenched pattern of unacceptable behavior. So far, resistance to the movement has been futile, but as with all things, there is a snake in this Garden of Eden.
Enter babe.net. Until a week ago, hardly anyone knew what babe.net was. This news site is theoretically awesome. Its description reads: “babe is for girls who don’t give a fuck.” Unfortunately, two of the things they “don’t give a fuck” about are actual feminism and actual journalism. Aziz Ansari’s name has entered the #MeToo debate, and babe.net is the reason for that. Babe published a bombshell piece a couple of weeks ago detailing a woman’s awful date with Aziz Ansari. During this date, Aziz Ansari acted aggressively and inconsiderately, and that is not okay. But it also isn’t sexual assault, and nobody should be under the impression that it is. Moreover, no allegedly feminist, pro-woman news source should be further blurring the already fuzzy boundaries of what constitutes sexual assault by saying that it is.
Before I go on, I want to make it clear that, as a writer for a small, independent publication, I completely support up and coming news sites. That said, irresponsible journalism is irresponsible journalism. And in babe’s case, sloppy journalism is setting back one of the most important movements ever. Babe is trying to give Aziz Ansari and his poor first date etiquette the same treatment that Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, and the like have all received. This isn’t just a suspicion of mine. They stated in a follow up article that they “expected ex fans to denounce him publicly.”
In the context of the current Left-Right political rhetoric, babe is playing directly into the hands of the Right. One of the Right’s primary condemnations is that the Left is not genuine, that they are “fake news.” Babe is the bogey(wo)man they’ve been waiting for. They’re young, they’re female, they’re unabashedly feminist, and they follow a completely ridiculous standard of sexual assault. Moreover, the article’s author, Katie Way, ruined any feminist credentials she might have had when she launched an ad hominem attack on reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who sharply criticized the article on her tv show. The email Way sent to Banfield read, “Ashleigh, someone who I am certain nobody under the age of 45 has ever heard of, I hope the 500 retweets on the single news write-up made that burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been really relevant for a little while.” Over the course of a single news cycle, she has managed to become the incarnation of both fake news and faux feminism. The angry, greying masses could scarcely dream up someone better to crucify as everything wrong with liberals, feminists, and millennials.
The Left has largely renounced babe. The New York Times and The Atlantic, frequently touted as “fake news,” have both decried babe’s article. The chain of celebrity denouncements that has followed exposés on actual predators like Harvey Weinstein has been largely absent. Even so, the damage is done. Anyone monitoring the news cycle can tell you that this movement has lost steam. I fear that we are now in what will in future days be called the “Post-babe.net Era” of the #MeToo movement. Allegations since this article have received markedly less press as the movement wrangles with the internal divisions this article has ignited, and detractors find a sticking place for the label witch hunt. Babe has hamstrung one of the most important movements in American history, and that is a whole lot worse than Ansari’s failure to pick up on “non-verbal cues.”
