The Art of Asking Why We Hate Amanda Palmer

• By Rachel Edidin
• 03.20.13
• http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/amanda-palmer-2/

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Disclosure: I have a prior professional relationship with Amanda Palmer as an editor for her graphic novel Evelyn, Evelyn.
Amanda Palmer is easy to hate. She’s loud. She’s demanding — and her rise to increased public visibility has come largely care of her willingness to treat the world as part piggy bank, part personal assistant. She stonewalls in the face of criticism. She’s got a large, vocal, and aggressively evangelistic fanbase; she’s one of those polarizing public figures it’s hard to casually enjoy or dislike.

Palmer has spent the last few years ascendant. Half of the cult-favorite punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls, Palmer recently split with her label and launched a crowdfunded solo career. It should come as no surprise that she’s a die-hard Kickstarter evangelist: Her first campaign sought $100,000 and raised $1.2 million, and since then, she’s been singing the praises of crowdfunding as a new populist paradigm for art, most recently in a widely publicized TED talk called “The Art of Asking.”

Criticism of Amanda Palmer flies fierce and fast online. Some of it is related to her shocking ignorance of the class politics and context of her so-called crowdfunding revolution. Critics cringe, too, at her sheer volume; her acting out in public; her unapologetic attention-seeking. And again and again, they call her out for her entitlement – to attention, to a platform, to funding, to favors.

It gets personal quickly: because accessibility and connection with her audience are big parts of Palmer’s routine; because her public identity is itself aggressively personal.

This is not a defense of Amanda Palmer as a public figure; of the willful class and context-blindness of her recent TED talk; of her practice of shaking one fist at an exploitative record industry while beckoning musicians to work for “hugs and booze” with the other. This is not a plea to let her off the hook or release her from accountability.

But when we criticize Amanda Palmer, I think we need to take a long, hard look at exactly what we’re reacting to — and why.

In a media landscape that typically reduces women to paragons or villains with strikingly little middle ground, Palmer is a self-styled anti-hero, from her feuds with the record industry to her Wicked Queen eyebrows. And it’s worth noting that the actions for which Palmer is attacked most often and most harshly tend to be the ones that conflict with what public femininity is supposed to look like — behaviors and traits that would often sit differently on the shoulders of a male performer.

After all, women are supposed to be nice. They’re supposed to accept what’s offered them and do it with a smile, and the backlash when they ask for more is swift and quantifiable. Or, it’s acceptable only when they’re sufficiently feminine and apologetic about it, as if their achievements can only be measured against a backdrop of personal passivity. It’s an insidious catch-22 for women, in which any success directly and aggressively sought is treated as fundamentally unearned. We excoriate a performer for courting attention; but if attention is one of the best measures of her professional success, why shouldn’t she be chasing it for all it’s worth?

Few critics fail to latch on to Palmer’s marriage to literary luminary Neil Gaiman, pointing out that she’s married into an audience much larger than the one she commands on her own, with the additional sting of implication that she’s earned her share of their joint following at best by canny alliance — or, at worst, on her back. That the same critics forget that Gaiman and Palmer’s relationship began as — and continues to include — creative collaboration is only marginally relevant; what’s more troubling is how quickly they fall into the pattern of attributing a woman’s professional success to the nearest well-connected man.

If we’re going to drag Gaiman into this, let it be as an illustration of just how profound a double standard we apply to Palmer. Look at the strength and volume of the vitriol directed at Palmer: how consistently (and, to some extent, justly) she’s been raked over the coals for her oversteps, particularly those that involve soliciting free work from artists and performers.

Contrast this with the popular reception of Gaiman’s current crowdsourced project, an ad campaign for BlackBerry. The website Bleeding Cool applauds Gaiman’s creative use of “teamwork” (mentioning in the same breath that he’s likely being paid “the GDP of a small Eastern European nation”) and the amazing opportunity he and BlackBerry have provided for the author’s legion of fans to produce work in nominal collaboration with their favorite storyteller — for free. Other coverage has likewise focused on the opportunity Gaiman’s offering his fans. Issues with ownership of the work those fans create for free surfaced briefly, before dissipating just as quickly.

But can you imagine the response, were Palmer to enter into a similar deal? The accusations of exploitation, attention-grabbing, entitlement? The cries of scandal?

Should Palmer be held accountable for her actual transgressions? Hell, yes. But please, check your double standards at the door.