>> Hi, everyone.
I am Sarah.
>> And I am Beth.
>> And we are the founders and editors of Reductress.
Today we are going to talk a little bit about what we have done for the past five years
and how we tell women's stories through satire.
>> The mission of Reductress from very early on was to take on these outdated perspectives
of women's media and put them up against women's actual thoughts and needs and feelings.
[Laughter] We felt very early on that women's media wasn't speaking to us as women.
It was speaking down to us.
It was talking to us in the way that women's magazines have spoken to women since the 1950s
and it really didn't represent our interests.
>> And while we've definitely seen a lot of one-off magazine parodies, I think we've all
kind of seen them, we saw something missing and wanted to address it.
Both Beth and I came from a sketch comedy improv background so this was one way we felt
empowered to do it.
We gave ourselves, and a lot of our friends a space to make satire and comedy that didn't
exist before and talk about things that maybe weren't talked about a lot.
[Laughter] >> More than just parodying women's media
we wanted to give women a place to speak to these experiences that we've all had and were
not necessarily being covered in other comedy spaces and theaters.
>> Now, I am wondering if this required a content warning as well.
I will let you be the judge.
[Laughter] >> As we were building Reductress, and this,
like, applied to many years before that but there was a lack of women-focus content, and
we're going to use women-focused very broadly here.
We weren't seeing content that reflected our lives and experiences.
There definitely wasn't enough of it being expressed through humor or satire.
We have The Onion or Colbert Report or The Daily Show and all those things are definitely
reaching us five or ten years ago, but it wasn't our specific experience.
>> As we launched Reductress and grew and learned about what we were actually doing,
the more we realized what wasn't being talked about because our contributors were pitching
things even we didn't realize were issues.
[Laughter] So, you know... >> I think it was just really refreshing early
on to get groups of women together and share these jokes with each other and see the type
of response they were getting which is, you know, very well appreciated across the board
in ways we didn't expect because we hadn't seen it being done in a lot of comedy spaces.
>> As you can imagine, we had some amazing conversations, but more than anything we really
realized we had an opportunity to identify social issues through satire and things that
were not being named in the world.
This was one way to do it that wasn't just straight like, this is a problem and we need
to fix it.
We were doing it by making people laugh about it.
Our writers spoke to a lot of the nuances of dating — can't relate.
No idea what this is about.
[Laughter] >> We were able to speak to a lot of realities
of being millennial women in the dating space on the apps, all of those things.
>> And women's health.
[Laughter] >> And also just daily life.
[Laughter] >> Yeah, there's a
lot of parts of our life that maybe we take for granted that are sometimes worth pointing
out.
They may not be the most serious political issue but they are definitely there.
[Laughter] >> In the sketch comedy world that we had
been working in, we would often be one or two women in the room and if you shout out
ideas like this they don't necessarily get the type of response we're having in the room.
It was really refreshing to see the response the site got.
The more people responded, the more we realized how many of these things were actually very
broad shared experiences and we had just hadn't had a platform to do that.
>> Yeah, so that was pretty exciting.
We also realized the bigger our contributor base grew that there was so much that wasn't,
that we weren't going to talk about, but a lot of people were bringing in stuff that
was very real to them.
[Laughter] >> I should say with that last one, we definitely
had an interesting exchange with Wild Fang back and forth on Twitter.
[Laughter] >> It was another short sleeve, button-up
company.
>> Oh, right.
But Wild Fang was the coolest about it.
Whatever.
[Laughter] >> Yeah, we definitely had the opportunity
with this platform to share experiences that weren't necessarily ours specifically but
part of this larger experience that we are trying to address.
We also had the opportunity to shed light on these finer things, whether it was paint
and sip night, or issues of race, class and gender, but this platform allowed us to speak
to all of those issues.
[Laughter] >> Part of the beauty of the internet and
why we brought it to the Internet as opposed to the sketch comedy we had been doing in
theaters...
[Laughter] [Applause] You know, on the internet you can find a larger community for something
that feels like a very potentially niche experience in your own community.
We have seen a lot of response to articles like this that obviously speak to very broad
groups, but that don't necessarily get a lot of play in other media spaces.
>> Who here has worked in a startup that looked like that?
>> I think that was all of you.
>> That was everyone?
>> Cool.
Cool.
Obviously, Twitter and the internet can be weird.
Reductress gets treated like a woman, in a weird way.
This is, like, an example of our stock photo getting hit on.
[Laughter] Yeah, obviously being a woman on the internet is a really weird, hard experience
sometimes and the beauty of satire is that the trolls get very confused and then their
reaction is a lot funnier than it might be in other contexts.
>> The fact we can use satire to speak about these issues gives us a little bit of distance
from what we are talking about and allows us to have a little fun and we get responses
like this which is like a neg and a compliment.
[Laughter] >> Just a pretty typical reaction.
>> You know, it's not always fun and games.
We have also dealt with some pretty serious issues on the site too.
Back in 2016, we in the office were all very personally frustrated by some rape allegations
that had come out within the comedy community specifically.
People that we knew were specifically affected.
We were all very frustrated with the discourse around it online.
>> Yeah, we were seeing a lot of really frustrating responses on Facebook and Twitter, which as
you can imagine was the usual, why didn't they go to the police, I am speculating based
off of having no knowledge of this situation and I will just question the women for not
handling this perfectly.
We were feeling angry about the response, mainly from men who hadn't really thought
through the reality of sexual assault, and how you go about reporting something like
that, and all the legal intricacies of that.
We were venting to each other in our office trying to figure out how to response and we
decided to do a homepage takeover about rape culture.
So we got our writers together, brainstormed several headlines, and just tried to tackle
different angles surrounding the ignorance around rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment,
and we ended up getting a way bigger response than we expected because we were just doing
it to vent our own frustrations and it was sort of cathartic for us.
>> We were caught off-guard by the response we got, just personal emails and tweets, and
people saying oh my god, I related to that thing so specifically.
That was impactful for us because I think the whole reason we did it was because there
was so much more to say about rape culture than could ever fit in one article, and there
was so much about the discourse around it that's so busted.
We just really wanted to talk about every aspect that felt really real and true to us.
Each article impacted different people in different ways based on their experiences,
but most people were grateful someone was saying anything at all.
>> So many of these headlines were sort of amazed, again, just speaking from our experience
with how widely they would resonate with people who had almost the exact same experience.
>> Also, in the middle of all of this, one of our staff, Jasmine, got sued by someone
who was accused of raping multiple women, for calling him a rapist on Facebook.
So, while all this was happening, there was a very stressful staff member who was undergoing
a frivolous lawsuit which just goes to show you how much this stuff can hit home personally.
>> Yeah, I mean, so many of these issues and these sort of predator abusers in the community
have taken such a toll on the women in our community, and not just the comedy community,
but every industry, I think.
By virtue of working predominantly with women, we have just experienced that inside and outside
the office of just women being affected directly and indirectly in so many ways at the same
time.
This was in advance of the presidential election, which as you can imagine stirred up a lot
more of this stuff.
So, yeah, it's taken a large toll on us but I think it's been really great to have this
outlet to speak to it.
>> I think getting to do it together was really an empowering act for everyone and gave us
an opportunity to do it.
Now today in 2018, five years later, we are still speaking to the issues on women's minds
from the personal to the political.
[Laughter] You know, and everything else that happens on the internet and in real life.
What we're still trying to do every day, whether it's in the news or something that's happening
to us, we're looking for those issues or little moments that we take for granted in our own
life.
That applies to all comedy, not just what we do but, you know, we're constantly asking
ourselves what isn't being said that can be said by way of Reductress.
And here's a few examples.
[Laughter] A lot of what we do is talking about the way the media talks about women.
Sometimes when we can't even, you know, find a take we all agree on in a news story, looking
at how the media covers the news story is more interesting and ripe for satire.
But also, of course, now that we live in a world where feminism has been commercialized
in so many ways, we've had a bit of fun with highlighting how consumerist feminism can
sometimes miss the point.
[Laughter] >> Yeah, a lot of what we're trying to do
in our goal to be intersectional feminists is to sort of poke at the well-intentioned
ignorance of liberal white people, which I think we're all pretty familiar with.
It's very easy to make fun of Trump and I think a lot of other comedy outlets are doing
that.
I think it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
But we're really trying to point fingers at ourselves, and cause our readers to question
their day to day thoughts and behaviors.
>> And also laugh, because you can laugh and hold yourself accountable at the same time.
>> There's still a lot to be uncovered and fortunately we have an amazing contributor
base that is of different ages, races, genders, identities, and are constantly revealing new
things to us that maybe we don't even know yet.
You know, I would ask you guys today to see where you can find the things that aren't
being said and seeing if you can put words to them in whatever medium or profession you
do.
Where can you find the thing that's not being said and how can you articulate it to build
awareness in your own communities, or on the internet or elsewhere?
So, we'll leave you with that and you can find us at Reductress.
Thanks, guys.
>> Thank you.
[Applause]