How to Tell if You’re Reading a Misogynistic Rant or Feminist Satire
By: Danika Bloom
Tags: Women, Feminism, Writing, Media, Satire

Satire is tricky. It’s hard to write and, in the wrong frame-of-mind, a reader may misinterpret the subtle humor as serious commentary, leaving him or her feeling offended rather than empowered by clever political prose.

I had this very experience yesterday. I was reading a story that had all the trappings of a misogynistic rant, with many statements that put men in one camp (serious writers who cover topics in industry and technology) and women in another (writers who share the most intimate details of their feminine issues), with no apparent ability for cross-over into each other’s worlds.

I read it as an angry diatribe, a forceful and bitter attack against female writers on Medium. I read it as a sleight against the kind of writing I sometimes do and I always enjoy reading. I read it as though it was written by a man who is frustrated with the overexposure of emotion on the platform he calls home.

But, egg on my face, since when I got to the end of the piece I saw that it had been tagged as both Satire and Feminism. How could I have interpreted this piece so wrong?

Tags used on How to Make it on the Female Dominated Medium

I assuaged my embarrassed soul by remembering that some of the greatest satitists of all-time have written pieces that nearly started riots, because they, too, had been misinterpreted by readers who weren’t up to the task of reading between the lines.

A very brief history of exceptional satire

A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick,” by Jonathan Swift in 1729 is an essay he wrote to draw attention to the way poor Irish people were being treated by the ruling party of England. In it he states,

”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled …”

While it may feel heavy-handed in today’s culture, in 1729 A Modest Proposal read like a manifesto of the rich to control the poor. It should be required reading for anyone attempting to write satire.

The War of Worlds radio play and story, written by the 23-year-old HG Wells, lands aliens on Earth as a way to discuss the divide between scientific and religious beliefs. The message, cloaked in irony — a key tool of satire — is that excessive dedication to any one belief system will blind people.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are two more wonderful examples of the specific type of satire that doesn’t intend to make the reader laugh, rather is used to expose the hypocrisy or moral transgressions of individuals, governments and organizations. This subgenre of satire is called Juvenalian and it is the kind I had misinterpreted.

Deconstruction of a contemporary satirical essay

Reminded of these exceptional examples of satire, I reread the story that on, first read, had left me wondering if the writer’s mother had been a Freudian case study in how to raise a misogynist narcissist. My apologies to the writer’s mother for casting dispersions on her parenting skills when it was my reading skills that were clearly lacking.

Let’s start with the title of the story in question.

Effective satire should give the reader a clear sense that they are about to read something requiring the lens of satire — that is, reading between the lines, understanding that when the writer says ‘black’ what they really mean is ‘white,’ and recognizing hyperbole.

So, let’s deconstruct the feminist satire-quotient of the title of this piece by starting with its title:

“How to Make it on the Female Dominated Medium”

Satire relies on using some specific literary devices such as irony or exaggerated or twisted facts. But how can we determine which of these devices a writer is using — if any at all? Sometimes it’s made clear by a subtitle, such as with A Modest Proposal.

Since the story we’re deconstructing has no subtitle, we must take the headline at face value. Well, at satirical face value, which means reading it as ironic (language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect) or with twisted facts. In either case, whether ironic or twisted, it’s clear that the writer actually means

“How to Make it on the MALE-Dominated Medium”

But, you say, “How do you know for sure the title was meant to be satire, Donna?”

Sometimes one has to invest a little more time to confirm that what one is reading is, in fact, being presented as exactly the opposite of what it claims to be. But in this case, it’s easy to determine that the writer did write a title in which ‘black’ means ‘white’ for his satirical opinion piece.

Evidence that ‘black’ means ‘white — or in this case, ‘women’ means ‘men’

In her research, Men vs Women: A Comparison of Medium’s most popular posts, Ludi Rehak, scraped 1,000 of Medium’s most popular stories and discovered how overwhelmingly male-dominated Medium is:

“Men were authors on more than 3 times as many posts as women. 73.6% of the most popular posts were written by men, 22.6% were written by women, and the rest by a group or organization, such as Medium Staff.”

And a smaller content scrape by Vanessa Torre, done just this week, Does Gender Bias in Publishing Actually Exist Here? reinforces what was Ludi found 20 months ago: two out of three of the top articles are still penned by men (49/75).

Off to a good start! Well done, Satirist! You had me there for a minute!

“Medium’s pivot to a feminist slant is also a pivot to subjective essays.”

In this line, the writer makes clever use of the satirical tool of twisting facts. In this case, the twist is like the tornado that dropped Dorothy into the Land of Oz, where nothing is as it appears to be.

The writer makes two assertions (which may or may not be based in fact, actually, but let’s assume for sake of satirical argument that they are) that Medium has pivoted to giving a higher profile to stories with a feminist slant and has pivoted toward subjective essays.

By placing these two mutually exclusive themes or tropes into one sentence, it suggests a correlation between the two: feminist slant = subjective essays. And the fact that the writer’s piece is both feminist (per his tag) and subjective (there is no doubt it is his opinion), as readers we subconsciously tighten the twist of the link between these two phrases since what we are reading is exactly this: a subjective, feminist-slanted essay.

But the statement is obviously ironic, therefore satirical. It is clearly challenging the status quo of mainstream media’s biases against feminist slants in subjective essays. How do we know?

Well, because some of the most respected subjective essays published in media are found in the New York Times op-ed columns. A quick scan of the subjective essays published in the first 8 days of July 2019 shows that 7 op-eds were written by women, while 22 were written by men, and not one single story of the 29 appear to have a feminist slant.

Way to poke it to the man, Satirist! You had me going there.

“If you feel powerful emotions, vulnerability and authenticity (manufactured or otherwise) make great reading, you are probably falling in love with Medium. Medium isn’t diversifying its product, it’s re-focusing its product on the subjective female journey.”

So much in this statement brought our satirical sensibilities joy. The clever way the writer has us “falling in love” if we enjoy reading about powerful emotions. Sure, it’s not high art, but it’s a sweet break from the tone of anger that has permeated the Juvenalian satire until this point. Readers need this relief, to take a breather from the rage.

The satirical one-two punch comes in the next statement which ends by suggesting — declaring? — that “powerful emotions, vulnerability and authenticity” are limited or confined to women readers and writers.

It might be overlooked by a tired reader, but by using the term “subjective female” journey instead of “human” journey, the writer is clearly using the satirical tool of exaggeration to make his point that men would like to see more of themselves represented in the stories that make us all human, the stories that bring us together and help us find common ground, since stories about industry and tech are leaving them feeling cold and alone.

What a lovely metaphorical hug from our Satirist for all the men, like him, who are feeling that powerful emotion of vulnerability.

“Women make up around 65–70% of writers on the Facebook Groups associated with Medium. This means if you are a young man or an older business writer like I am, sorry, your time on Medium may be up.”

Ouch! If read at face-value this assertion suggests that female writers and their emotional sensibilities are in the process of kicking men out of the Medium community. But that’s not at all what was intended by this statement when read as satire, as the writer clearly stated it is.

Connecting the higher percentage of women who engage in Medium-support Facebook groups to the downfall of men’s place in Medium itself is a gentle call-to-action to men to become more engaged in the communities that support and uplift writers, to help them learn to write with passion, vulnerability and authenticity.

What he’s really saying here becomes crystal clear if one replaces “writer on Medium” with “driver of a car.” It’s simple, really.

We all know that a much higher percentage of women will stop and ask for directions when they are lost; that men’s egos get in the way of asking for help even when they know they need it.

So, by the subtle suggestion that women are gathering and plotting to overthrow the men, kick them out of their rightful domain, the writer has helped remove the ego from the equation and placed “engaging in helpful communities” as an act of maintaining control and power.

The satirist has put the map to success right into the lost writers’ hands!

Writing effective satire is hard

The truth is that communicating our ideas and feelings in writing is rarely easy, even without the added complexity of satire which lends itself to be easily misinterpreted.

The writer of the piece I’ve quoted certainly understood this as evidenced by the last line of his piece:

“This article is in part satirical and will disappear due to being in violation of Medium’s rule of law.”

Dear readers, before you get your knickers in a twist (as I admittedly sometimes do) when reading stories on Medium that upset you, be sure to read to the end and look at the tags: it’s possible that you just got it all wrong and that the story that reads like a misogynist rant is actually feminist satire.

Or not.

Because although sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes it’s actually a penis, pretending to be a cigar, shoving itself down a woman’s throat.