Haters

Last week Feministe linked to a post Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle wrote about Katy Perry -- specially how Katy Perry is bad for feminism. I'm not here to argue that. I'm so far from Katy Perry's target audience, I should be worrying about her influence on my daughter (if I had one) than her influence on me. I do want to talk about the discussion that followed, particularly the idea of "hating" a celebrity.

You can't really "hate" a celebrity. In essence, what you're really hating is that celebrity's brand. And you know, that's okay. And it doesn't hurt the sisterhood or anything if you hate an artist whose brand promotes tired old tropes about women's bodies or psyches. Hate on.

I think this is one of those areas where I really feel some sort of generational disconnect: the idea that women can't, or shouldn't, hate one another. Or (lately) that criticizing another women automatically brands you a "hater." I see this a lot in the feminist blogosphere and I always want to scream "You can hate! It's really okay!"



I kind of think of "haters" as the continuation of the old stereotype "she doesn't like me; therefore, she must be jealous." Though I absolutely do not believe that "hating on" someone is motivated by jealousy, jealous itself is another thing I wish were okay to own up to. I'm jealous. I'm jealous of others' success. I'm jealous of bloggers who can write 5000+ word posts in less than a hour and have them be free of typos and grammar gaffes. (Even if I hire a secretary, I'll never be that person.) It's not jealousy that's wrong, it's what you do with it.