We’re bringing intersectional, independent feminist blogging back to the internet. And we’re gonna have fun doing it, dammit.

I love heist movies. My favorite part is when the gang gets together — when they roll the montage so you know exactly who’s who: the brains, the brawn, the acrobat, the money expert, the tech wiz, the fabricator, the con artist, the math genius, the local, the weirdly capable drunk, the inside operator, the wild card.

Nearly a year ago, I started building my own heist squad. Our target: not a bank or casino, but the media industry. Our goal: not to steal, but to steal back what has been taken from us by the tech bros and venture capitalists who’ve decimated the field of journalism. And specifically to reclaim the joy of publishing smart, provocative and boundary-pushing work through an explicitly intersectional, feminist lens.

Because the feminist internet used to be a thing, right? It used to be fun! I came up as a young journalist in the golden age of 2000s and 2010s feminist media — for a couple of years, I even got to run one of those outfits (RIP Heartless Doll, and fuck you Village Voice Media). I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without outlets like Bitch, Bust, Nylon, Sassy, Tiger Beatdown, Broadsheet, xoJane, Jezebel, Feministing, Feministe, Racialicious, Pandagon, Shakesville, The Establishment, The Hairpin, Racked, Refinery29, Bustle, The Toast … they’re not all dead today, but those that’ve survived have done so against the odds. Now, there are fewer destinations than ever for great, explicitly feminist cultural criticism, political coverage, and reporting.

Why wait, I thought, for somebody else to fix the problem?

Why not just … fix the problem?

Well, there were a lot of “why nots.” Funding, for one. Did I want to hustle for what would ultimately be tenuous venture capital money, or rely on ~ angel investors ~ to get a provably great idea off the ground? And then have to answer to some board or bunch of wanky dudes? And then there was the talent problem — it’s incredibly hard to recruit people to work on a promise. And I couldn’t even make a promise: all I could say, when I reached out to a whole bunch of writers and artists who I thought might come on board, was: maybe we can make something really neat happen. I didn’t know how, exactly, but I was pretty sure we could do a thing.

Well, we are doing a thing. We’re making something really neat happen.

A few days ago, we launched a Kickstarter for The Flytrap, a smart, seasoned collective of writers, editors, and creatives producing an independent, collectively owned publication that’s bringing feminist thought and cultural criticism against the algorithm back to the internet and into the inboxes of our readers starting November 5, 2024. (Yes, Election Day! We’re bonkers!)

Within ~10 hours of our public launch on Kickstarter, we raised over $20,000 of our $45,000 pledge goal. We’ve already been covered in The Objective and Poynter. People are picking up what this bunch of salty feminist creatives are putting down!

We’ve got until Halloween to make our original goal; I think we’ll get there. (And we won’t get there without y’alls pledges!) But I really, really hope we’ll make our original goal early so we get to set stretch goals that will allow us to produce even more great feminist journalism and art for the burgeoning Flytrap community.

If y’all wanna hear about our general jam, it’s easy enough to check out the Kickstarter and follow us on socials — we’re on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and TikTok.

But I wanna talk about the team. The heist squad. The folks who are orchestrating an elaborate scheme to fuck up the system. The Flytrap Founders are a veritable Ocean’s-something-or-other of badass feminist creatives. So let me run my montage:

Aria Velasquez: The smart-ass. I hate the description “whip-smart” because it’s too often and too casually applied to people who are not. But Aria is, and she has the fucking lines. She’s been The Flytrap’s voice in interviews with The Objective and Poynter, and she also came up with our name — because we’re seeding ourselves in hostile soil, just like venus flytraps do, and we give none fucks about it.

Chrissy Stroop: The intellectual. I got to know Chrissy when I interviewed her for a DAME mag piece about the Twitter implosion and its effect on independent journalists. She’s an academic-turned-journalist who comes from an ex-vangelical background, and uses that experience to produce eminently thoughtful political and cultural analyses on a wide swath of subjects.

Christine Grimaldi: The “ombudsmom.” This is a term she came up with for herself, and it so delightfully encompasses her approach to journalism: thoughtful, rigorous, fact-checked, unapologetic. She’s as good in long-form personal essays as she is covering Capitol Hill and serving readers the straight dope on abortion politics. She gives a really, really big fuck about not fucking up.

Evette Dionne: The expert. As the former EIC at Bitch Media and author of Lifting As We Climb and Weightless, she’s the consummate feminist media professional and who is, amazingly, up for whatever. When she said “yes” to being involved in the Flytrap, I just about lost my whole-ass mind.

Katelyn Burns: The ass-kicker. Katelyn was the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history, and her hilariously irreverent podcast, “Cancel Me, Daddy” brings much-needed humor and real-talk to our extremely online times. As the only Flytrap Founder with a business degree, she boldly took on the operational tasks what the rest of us nerds were too terrified to tackle.

Nicole Froio: The culture queen. Whomst among us has a doctorate degree in philosophy, media studies, and women’s studies? It’s Nicole! She’s the one! I didn’t even know about her academic excellence when I reached out to pitch The Flytrap to her — I just knew that I loved her smart, international perspectives on pop culture and that she was the right person to bring anti-capitalist badassery to the project.

Rommy Torrico: The artist. The Flytrap’s gorgeous, silly, eye-catching counter-cultural branding looks the way it does because Rommy has translated the Flytrap Founders’ collective ethos into a visually cohesive smorgasbord of unhinged delights. Actually, “artist” seems too quiet a descriptor for Rommy’s righteous, vibrant work. (And don’t get me started on their voice — Rommy’s ASMR empire awaits.)

s.e. smith: The manager. Sure, s.e. is a National Magazine Award-winning writer, but I’ve just ding-dang liked s.e.’s ~ whole jam ~ for a decade or more. Come to find out: s.e. can wrangle the absolute shit out of a cat-herd of feminist creatives.

Tina Vásquez: The insight. Tina’s the person who comes in with the extremely salient question in the middle of an otherwise messy meeting. Her ability to see the forest through the trees, and the important trees in the forest, absolutely stuns me. Her deep connection to movement work and investment in radical organizing is unparalleled. And? She is so, so fucking funny. (See: skeleton.)

The Flytrap is especially important to me because I’ve cultivated a reputation as a media naysayer who has a lot of negative shit to say and not a lot of anything else to show for it. I’ve been a mouthy media critic for over a decade, and I’ve been producing the Texas Writers Byline Scan for three years, analyzing diversity in bylines in Texas print magazines. I don’t have much money, but with The Flytrap, I’ve put what money I have where my mouth is: I don’t want to be the kind of person who only rags on other people without putting their own shit on the line.

I know that running media is hard; I’ve worked as an editor and writer in progressive and nonprofit media since before I graduated college. I know that there are ~ reasons ~ why everything isn’t perfect, always and forever. I know it’s easy to talk about what’s wrong if you never really intend to do anything to make it right. I don’t want to be that kind of critic.

So I’m trying to do media the right way, and I have every confidence that The Flytrap’s exemplary team of stone-cold weirdos can do something better and different, for audiences who crave just that.

If that sounds pretty ding-dang reasonable to you, pledge up!

Oh, and: We’ve got a few spots left in my BLOODIES IN THE BOG tier for folks who want to kick in $420 to be part of indie feminist media history by getting a personal Bloody Mary mixology + cocktail history class with yours truly.

See y’all in the bog! ❤

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