In 1998, my mother forbade me from reading magazines while walking around stores. I had my nose in an issue of Seventeen or some other such mag all the time, dreaming of life beyond my Texas bubble of Army brats and Christian fundamentalists, and beyond running errands for my mother. Thank God for magazines, I thought often, because this place sure is boring.
In 2000, I got on the internet and written media became a group activity. On our family desktop, I bogarted the dial-up connection to read blogs. They weren’t news but they were a portal to a bigger world than my own, written by teens with opinions on the election (which Bush stole!) and pre-marital sex (totally fine despite what my Southern abstinence-only education said!). I could read the blogs, and critically, I could comment. What a revelation! Two-way communication.
I’ve spent the last 25 years being Extremely Online and loving it. I’m the type of sicko who had a GeoCities site, a Xanga, a LiveJournal, a Tumblr, and a Myspace. I liked that everything was in conversation with everything else. It was on this internet that I became politically radicalized. I wouldn’t be a feminist without Tumblr, where critical analysis of Harry Potter movies existed alongside lesbian smut of Hermoine and McGonagall. I wouldn’t be an abolitionist without Twitter, a site I graduated to after earning my Social Justice Warrior degree at Tumblr.
The internet created a generation of woke millennials who turned our internet conversations into real-life action. It was us early internet natives who formed the base of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and used our smartphones to document everything to a global audience. In the period between OWS and the George Floyd rebellions, the internet was a partner in promoting left political action. In 2020 I used Twitter to find marches and protests in real time as they moved through the city.
Lately, though, I’ve been feeling the internet is closing in on itself. For the last 25 years, I’ve relied on the World Wide Web to be my access point to truth beyond what “they” — conservative teachers, big corporations, the government — wanted me to know; now “they” are in control of every goddamn platform. Under Elon Musk, Twitter has become a Nazi haven. Tumblr, a place where I learned from sex workers, doesn’t allow “porn” anymore. AI is everywhere (don’t get me started).
I’ve come full circle back to where I was in 1998: Thank God for magazines! Perhaps the era of digital dialogue is over, but they can’t stop us from yapping elsewhere. Lux is one place where the politicizing conversations I had on the internet are happening in depth and at length — and we’re making them happen in real life too, with recent events in NYC, Asheville, Philly, and L.A. In the fall, we’re going on tour across the country (stay tuned). In the meantime, consider this our summer books issue: We’ve got reviews, reads, and ruminations on abortion literature, queer Lolita novels, dyke and trans graphic memoirs, and more. We hope to bump into you soon, noses in mags.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
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