It’s the End of Feminist Media. Again.
Jezebel’s closing isn’t the end of an era — it’s a reminder that the era has been over for a long time.
When I was a teenager, the universally acknowledged center of culture in Columbus, Ohio was an all-night coffee shop named Insomnia. It was filthy, and the bathrooms never worked, and the coffee was barely serviceable. Nonetheless, anyone who was vaguely “alternative” wound up at Insomnia, the same way every terrible entry-level punk band played the basement of Bernie’s, a few doors down. (I was offered a slot in a band playing at Bernie’s because I wore an interesting outfit and claimed — incorrectly, as it happens — that I could play keyboard. This happened, not once, but several times.) Every date I had before age 20, every non-school-based relationship, resulted from running into someone at either Bernie’s or Insomnia. It was where my young life happened.
Anyway: Because of establishments like Insomnia, and Bernie’s, and because of the crowd they attracted, that particular strip on High Street was bought up by some developers, rumored to be fundamentalist Christians, who wanted to get rid of the drugs and binge-drinking of the rebel youth, and bring in the drugs and binge-drinking of the OSU fraternities and sororities. I believe it was those same developers who kept trying to…
