As a certain demographic will know, calls for Ferro's head were instantaneous. Save for a few websites–ones frequented mostly by jock party animals–which had some mean-spirited, misogynistic laughs at Snooki's plight, by and large the public opinion was one of outrage. "How could someone do such a thing?" I remember my co-worker asking, his eyes narrowing as if in deep thought. On one of the countless blogs that weighed in on the Snooki Punch, someone posting as "Brad's Nightmare" wrote, "Brad Ferro is a fuckin bitch. Any guy that punches a girl has got a small dick and cant fuckin fight in the first place."

Eventually things got macro. The accusations grew to include both Ferro and MTV, which had profited off the subjugation of women for years, but never so openly. "[S]hould MTV have used the footage?" asked Jezebel's Irin Carmon. It turned out that the answer was no.

After initially airing Snooki's attack in a sneak preview of the season, MTV, amid fiery charges of sponsored misogyny, decided to stop showing that bit of violence entirely. It even went so far as to fade to black when the punch finally happened in episode four (not edit it out, mind you, but fade to black). Later, that episode was appended by a public service announcement. It read, "Violence against women in any form is a crime. If you or someone you know is being abused by a boyfriend, family member or total stranger, please call 911."

At first, this all made sense. But then came episode six.

Titled "Boardwalk Blowups," the centerpiece of episode six was Ronnie–the Magilla Gorilla to The Situation's Yogi Bear–beating the blood out of a guy in the middle of the Seaside Heights esplanade. MTV did not fade to black on this altercation; it instead zoomed in, the better to see Ronny knee his enemy in the face and, while straddling his chest, drop heavy blows into the man's jaw. (Editors did make sure to cut the parts where Ronny called his victim a "faggot" and a "queer," epithets later uncovered by TMZ.)

At the end of the episode, where a PSA warning against violence had been just two weeks prior, there was a beer commercial.

From there, the fists flew. In episode seven, J-Woww, in a drunken rage, gives a roundhouse hammer punch to The Situation's face. Episode eight found Ronny back at it, knocking a man unconscious as he and the castmates stumbled home from the clubs. "That's one shot!" Ronnie screamed victoriously as he literally skipped away from the body he'd just rendered lifeless and prone in the gutter.

MTV thought that was so cute that they ended up calling the entire episode "One Shot."

We're now just a few episodes into the Jersey Shore's second season, and already we're reminded of that old chestnut: You can take the Jersey Shore cast to Miami, but you can't stop them from assaulting each other and strangers nearly every day. Thus far, Angelina has smacked Pauly D in the face for not returning her affections and J-Woww has threatened to attack Angelina in her sleep. Previews of upcoming shows reveal that J-Woww and Sammi will tear one another's hair out in the kitchen. Also, J-Woww–she's really getting after it this time around!–and Snooki are currently the defendants in a lawsuit brought by a woman claiming they beat her in a Miami club in May. Throughout it all, since the Snooki punch, MTV has either done nothing or intentionally highlighted the brutality.

Based on MTV's censoring decisions in relation to the show, viewers can infer the following: a man hitting a woman is never OK; a woman hitting a man is fine, especially if she's drunk or emotionally vulnerable; a man hitting a man isn't just fine, it's exciting, and practically a matter of course when "queers" are talkin' shit; also–and this is the most important point–despite what was said earlier about calling the police if ever you see a woman being attacked, a woman hitting another woman is totally alright. They'll probably hug when they're sober!

Triaging and then tolerating certain random, relatively minor acts of violence in this manner isn't just problematic for the Jersey Shore cast and everyone in its immediate vicinity; it's also a profound reflection on what American society tolerates when speaking of much grander, much more despicable crimes. It's resulted in the degradation of the male body as an inherently brutal entity, something that, if not deserving of violence, should at least be prepared for combat at a moment's notice. The female body, on the other hand, remains sanctified, so much so that, at least on "Jersey Shore" (and "Teen Mom"), women hit, kick and choke men with impunity.

If you look closely, there's a sturdy bridge between J-Woww casually smashing The Situation in the jaw and the nonchalance with which people in polite society make rape jokes every time a male celebrity goes to prison. Try and imagine sketch comedy shows making light of a husband slicing off his wife's vagina the way they did when John Wayne Bobbitt was butchered.

Writing at Jezebel, I once asked, "Why is random violence-not premeditated, protracted violence, like war rapes and domestic abuse-something MTV should consider not showing when against women, but air at will when it's against men?" I was told a lot of things, but mostly that my thoughts were "patronizing" and "reeked of male privilege." I was told that I didn't understand the "structures of power" that apparently dictate why men hitting women is markedly worse than men hitting men. I was told, in bold letters, "The widespread socialization of men as violent and women as receptacles for that violence is why this violence is different." (I was also told to never come back.)

About a year before I asked that question, a man in Australia was killed when his wife set his genitals on fire while he was asleep, burning him alive in perhaps the most awful way possible. A writer at Jezebel briefly covered the murder, illustrating the post with the picture of a hot dog engulfed in flames. Beneath it, one commenter wrote, "That puts a new spin on 'fire crotch.'" Another wrote, "I am honestly kind of horrified at the levity with which this is being treated." And yet another opined, "Obviously this is NOT an amusing tale; however, here I am laughing at my work computer, trying to be quiet, with tears running down my face."

Cord Jefferson also writes at The Root.

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But then last week, in the middle of a long list of the travails of running a world-famous, critically-adored, massively-profitable talk show, Jon said, "Jezebel thinks I'm a sexist pig!" And I thought: they've got something planned. Sure enough, they did. Yesterday, an open letter from various women staffers at the Daily Show hit the Internet, in which they say, among other things, that their boss is great guy! (He pays their salaries!) They are "integral" to the development of the show!

Then Emily Gould came in at Slate with that classic ladyfight ender: "Y'all Are Just Jealous." Her thesis is that blogs like Jezebel and Broadsheet and XX Factor drum up pageviews by exploiting women's envy of other women's positions: "Instead of mimicking the old directly anxiety-making model-for example, by posting weight-loss tips and photos of impossibly thin models like a traditional women's magazine-Jezebel and the Slate and Salon 'lady-blogs' post a critique of a rail-thin model's physique, explaining how her attractiveness hurts women. The end result is the same as the old formula-women's insecurities sell ads."

Gould's giving a pretty vague gloss on what it is that those blogs do, in my experience-Jezebel's anti-"bodysnarking" rule is Internet-famous, and just yesterday they had a post explaining why Crystal Renn oughtn't to be criticized for losing weight. Also, in general I think it's important to be skeptical of grand theses based on sampling of Internet comments. Internet commenters (and I've been one! Still am!) are assholes; on this I think we can all agree.

But that doesn't mean that the only thing that can be going on behind these arguments is a feeding of the id. I don't know that I can get on board with saying that the dominant dynamic among women on the Internet (or anywhere else!) is purely jealousy. In any event, I don't really think jealousy or envy is at the root of what's going on in the critique of sexism at the Daily Show particularly.

As a ladyparts-haver and even, gasp, a self-identified feminist of some years now, when I initially read Carmon's article, I also wasn't shocked or appalled by the allegations. This was hardlythe first time the issue of a Daily Show sausage-fest has been raised. In fact, and maybe your friends are different than mine, but every year, when they win an Emmy, everyone I know makes the standard joke about all those suits up on stage. (In fact, Jon made a version of it himself once! Though he was remarking on the prevalence of Ivy-educated Jews.) And while no one, not even Carmon, denied that Samantha Bee, Kirsten Schaal and now Munn, work there, the latter two are trotted out only occasionally-Schaal last appeared on the show, per IMDB, on July 1, 2009.

Now, to make that observation is to make an observation about The Daily Show's image as a TV program. But The Daily Show staffers' letter skirts the issue of image entirely, it seems to me, because it's so hard to dispute. It's the gigantic, entirely visible elephant that blots out their affirmations that their boss helped them through 9/11 (Really? 9/11's coming into this?) and is reportedly "charming." This even though, it seems to me, Carmon's original article (with perhaps the exception of its initial diagnosis of "boys' club") was about the image of The Daily Show. Carmon's piece thus dealt almost exclusively with writers and on-air talent, not the production staff. I'm not saying Carmon couldn't have been more precise about what it was she was commenting on about the show's makeup, but on the other hand it's not like she actually claimed no women worked there, and so, therefore, it's not like this letter is some grand corrective to the already objectively provable fact that women do work at The Daily Show.

Because here's the thing that we all know: just because you employ a ton of women (40%, they say!) on your staff doesn't negate the possibility that the content of your show, and its public image-as in, who actually writes and says the words, who, in a word, are presented as the show's "authors"-is male-skewed. No matter how porous the boundaries between the creative and production staffs, no matter how integral they are to the-day-to-day work of putting on the show, that's got to be obvious to you. If your male writers are, as The Daily Show's are, dominating your women writers at a rough 15:1 ratio, if it is men that you take onstage with you at the Emmys, then let's be honest about what that means.

The entire excuse of having a ton of female production staffers (in a mishmash of roles that includes two writers, a writer's assistant and a co-executive producer, as well as a TelePrompter operator, a hair and make-up artist and a wardrobe stylist) reminds me more than not of the time I was in a corporate diversity seminar where someone was reduced to trotting out the high levels of people of color they employed in the mailroom as evidence of the company's successes on that score. Women may be getting coffee, they may be building sets, they may even be giving comments on scripts, but the fact that they are almost entirely not in positions of creative control does, in fact, matter.

And in any event, I assume The Daily Show-like every other entity up to and including New York City's government-doesn't really want to talk numbers when it comes to diversity. The Daily Show can't possibly be claiming that its staff is actually representative of the American population writ large. Because if we're going to play that game, I'll point out that I don't see a lot of women of color in that picture they issued. (Not that you can tell just by looking, but still.) And when I went through the LinkedIn profiles of these women, trying to gather what it was they did precisely-and, absolutely, some of these women, like Kahane Cooperman, the co-executive producer, are involved at creative levels of the show-it was hard not to notice that many came from NYU, the University of Chicago, UVA, Yale. Their backgrounds are, indeed, uniform in a way, and probably uniform in a way that affects the way they view their audience and the comedy that they are prepared to do.

The thing about these discussions about diversity that's so frustrating is that there is, of course, an essential truth to the proposition that meeting some kind of quota-6 women, 10 men, 3 people with disabilities and one with a freckle on the left side of his nose, on and on-won't solve your diversity problem, necessarily. First of all, if you spend any time on any of the lady websites Gould mentions, it's impossible to avoid notice of the fact that ladies, even ladies of some similar political affiliations, sympathies and even backgrounds don't necessarily agree with each other on individual issues. (This makes her accusation that they are some kind of hive mind waiting on the Internet to pounce on successful women more difficult to defend, but I digress.)

Second of all, this is the entire reason the whole "My best friend is black" shtick can be so hysterically funny-it's that just because you happen to know some people of x characteristic who you can live with, employ, have a beer with, even marry, it doesn't mean you're immune to discriminating against them in small ways. That's because we live in a world, like it or not, that defines men as more qualified and reliable than women, whites as more qualified and important than people of color, etc. There are always different standards, and it was Gould who said-aptly!-that, "If a woman writes about herself, she's a narcissist. If a man does the same, he's describing the human condition."

But if you raise these issues, as Carmon did, the reaction is always ferociously defensive and immediate. For example, the words "Jon Stewart is a sexist prick" do not appear in the piece. Certain of her sources did make comments on Stewart's behaviour, but the only money shot (heh) is aimed at former Daily Show host Craig Kilborn. (And who remembers That Guy?) But the moment Stewart used that phrase, this became about his hurt feelings, about his character, about whether or not you like the damn show.

And I can tell you, as someone who found the criticism somewhat trenchant: I do like the damn show! That's exactly why it irks when it makes stupid jokes about sex workers, calling them "used vagina salesmen," (which, uh, right?) because fundamentally I think it's beneath them. That's why it'd be nice if it didn't feel like a show that was written for people other than me. That's why it annoys me that they are plainly uncomfortable and out of step whenever they have to make jokes about gender. I have no desire to be a Daily Show writer, you see-I'm not Just Jealous-but it sure would be nice to feel as if the funny was meant for me too.

And now, I'm off to make myself a sandwich.

Michelle Dean has written for Bitch and The American Prospect. She blogs at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

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A little over a month ago, we began experimenting with syndications, that is, publishing already-existing content in order to bring a broader range of voices, and material, to the readers on our site.... Our interest in showcasing new voices and compelling content extends far beyond already established and well-known blogs, and, though we like to think our awareness and aggregation of stories for women on the web is fairly comprehensive, we do not have the time, or womanpower, to delve into every topic we'd like. This is where you come in. If you know of (or are) a web writer or blogger whose work would make a great addition to the site, please, let us know via email (send to submissions@jezebel.com with the subject header SYNDICATION SUGGESTION) what blogs/writers you're excited about, why, and provide some links to relevant material.

We once accidentally syndicated a piece to a Gawker Media site, because it was a weekend afternoon and we were confused. What happens is they republish your piece in full and then provide a small link to the original source at the bottom! There is actually nothing in this process of "syndication" that resembles "syndication." And then we were like NO THANKS and then we set an official No Thanks Policy (although of course contributors here are free to make WHATEVER decisions they think are best for them).

Because none of this means that young writers shouldn't try to appear on Jezebel or Jalopnik or whatever! If it's good for you, or you just plain feel like it, you should do it! But what's happening is that those sites, which make a good deal of money, now are trying to have two tiers of writers. There's the ones they pay (some well, some less well) and then there's everyone else, who now they don't pay at all. That this is how "figuring out a freelance rate" has devolved is unfortunate. (And in general, at least a few Gawker Media site editors are so confused by their budgets right now that they can't figure out how much they pay freelancers, if at all. Some use the bonus pool as a slush fund for freelance; some are just like "I DON'T KNOW WHATEVER.")

(As a sidebar, this is similar to what's happening at magazine websites, where they have two tiers of writers, one for the web site and one for the mag. But at least they pay the website people!)

In the end, though, the freelance pay rate confusion is easily settled, when you take the pay rate down to "no money, just attention."

The post on Jezebel is fascinating because, while it's written really straightforwardly by the site's editor, Anna Holmes, the headline is out of place, if you stop and think about it: "In Case You Missed It: The Brave New World Of Syndication." Subtle! But she clearly gets it.

Update: Can I add something here? I just wanted to be clear that I'm a Jezebel fan, and none of the gripes above have specifically to do with Jezebel-and my beef largely has to do with the company and this new initiative that's taking place across all the Gawker Media sites.

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If I'm starting to sound pissed, it's because I'm starting to GET pissed. These adventures in unhelpful, self-righteous semi-hysteria (yes, I went there) completely overlook the dozens of thoughtful, passionate, courageous and engaging women on self-described feminist blogs who actually deserve to be featured in fancy Sunday newspaper editions and on the pages of ambitious new websites, women who are grappling with and debating issues of a whole host of issues, including the wage gap, women of color, the ongoing epidemic of violence against women, the continued attacks on abortion rights...I could go on.

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