Here’s a copy of an email I’ve just sent to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood:
“Melissa — As you may recall, on 7.17 Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a passionate, thoughtful, first-rate piece about the hurdles that women directors face and go through in getting due or fair recognition for their work. It’s my understanding that despite the quality of the piece and the obvious synchronicity between and it and Women and Hollywood, you declined to link to it because she mentioned me in a somewhat (mostly?) favorable way. You ‘took exception’ to my being mentioned as a friend to women directors, I’m told, and so you did what you could in your own little way to limit the exposure and readership that Sasha’s piece deserves.
“Here’s the paragraph (or rather the portion of the paragraph, split into two graphs) that led to your decision not to link to Sasha’s article: ‘The world of film criticism is changing by the second. While I constantly bemoan the old guard of film critics being ousted — a lot of the new guard are aware of the state of things for women. What women haven’t had all of these years is advocacy. Since I’ve been online and aimed my own coverage more at advocacy, I’ve noticed subtle changes here and there. Many of the very loud voices out there keep the subject on women filmmakers — Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci, for instance, or Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells.
“‘Wells specifically champions the work of female filmmakers on his site. Wells is a controversial person to name here [as] he is so often labelled a sexist by the often hateful posts about women on his site — worse is the den of misogyny in his comments section) but I also must acknowledge that he is one of the few who goes out of his way to support women filmmakers. He has also been generous to me for years, which is more than I can say for others in our industry. Mark Harris has been a champion for women and so has Anthony Breznican at EW. David Poland at Movie City News does this as well. And many female movie writers have their eye on this topic as well, like Thelma Adams, Carrie Rickey, Anne Thompson, Susan Wloszczyna, Katey Rich and most especially Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, who is tirelessly waging a war against the clear oppression we see around us every day.’