Poles Apart by Terry Fallis Page A

movement. We’d taken over everything else in history, in society, in the world, why not feminism, too? No, I don’t think so.
    So I made the call. It would be an anonymous blog. No one would know I was the author. I wasn’t after recognition. I just wanted back that feeling I’d had years earlier. I just wanted to help move the yardsticks toward the goal of gender equality. Oops, check that. I wanted to help “make some gains” toward the goal of gender equality. I was obviously rusty after my fifteen-year hiatus from the movement. Never, ever, should one employ football metaphors in the service of women’s equality, particularly when the Lingerie Football League is still with us (I’m not kidding). Never.
    I finally fell asleep around 5:00 and didn’t open my eyes until 10:30. The name for the blog presented itself shortly thereafter. It was staring at me in Beverley’s inscription in my book. I wanted something optimistic and forward-looking. And even though it was to be an anonymous blog, I liked that my own name would be buried in the blog’s moniker. No one would ever know. I waited for an hour to see if I still liked the name I’d lifted fromBeverley. I did. And I liked that she was somehow part of it, now. So I signed in to Wordpress.com using a fake name and newly minted Gmail address and created a blog with a simple, clean look. The masthead read
Eve of Equality
. I liked it. It spoke of positive change in the past, but also clearly indicated that we hadn’t yet made it to the promised land. Yeah, I liked it. On the blog’s “About” page, I simply wrote “
Eve of Equality
is a feminist blog offering thoughts and observations on a spectrum of issues that touch women’s equality.” Broad enough. Bland enough. Anonymous.
    I decided to host the blog separately and privately from Wordpress.com. It just made me feel like I had more control over it. So I arranged for hosting services locally with a smallish firm creatively called OrlandoHosting. I did it all online and by email using the same fake name and Gmail address I’d used with WordPress to create the blog in the first place. It did require a phone number, which left me a little uneasy. But after some hemming and hawing, I provided my cell number. The hosting fees were reasonable, and the blogger reviews I read on the Internet spoke well of OrlandoHosting. Good enough for me. Twenty minutes later, the online infrastructure was ready. I had only to write a blog post, hit the big blue Publish button, and it would be live.
    I spent what was left of the morning browsing through the top-ranked feminist blogs on the Internet. I found a wide variety of bloggers representing women academics, man-hating extremefeminists, countless women’s advocacy groups, young women, older women, straight women, LGBT women, women homemakers, women entrepreneurs, women athletes, women lawyers, women politicians, women teachers, women of science, women of medicine, women chefs, women union leaders, women civil servants, women against porn, women for porn, and many, many more. (I’ve just barely scratched the surface here.) And they all, every last one of these women bloggers, considered themselves feminists. It was a very crowded space reflecting not just the urgency of the need, but also the breadth and complexity of today’s women’s movement. And I found all these in just the first few pages of a standard Google search.
    However, even after digging deeper and switching to other search engines, nowhere, and I mean nowhere, did I find an anonymous feminist blog featuring thoughtful, informed, occasionally amusing, but still serious posts, written by a youngish feminist man pining for his days in the student movement. Against all odds, there was nothing that even faintly resembled my vision for
Eve of Equality
. Great! There was obviously a gargantuan hole in the anonymous feminist blogosphere that needed filling. The particular audience seeking just such a