EARLIER this year, the fashion blog Go Fug Yourself celebrated its 10th anniversary. The site has a simple concept: the blog’s authors, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, grab wire images of celebrities on the red carpet, the stage or out and about (which, for the Duchess of Cambridge, sometimes means inspecting ceramics), then identify their outfits and weigh in with commentary.

What makes Go Fug Yourself different from other pioneering celebrity gossip blogs, and why it has remained such a vital staple of the internet, is its tone. Heather and Jessica, as their bylines on the site read, know their designers and have definite opinions about what looks good or disastrous on tricky-to-dress women like Christina Hendricks. But their remarks are never cruel or weight-oriented: instead, you always feel like they want the best for the women (and occasional gent) they are analysing. And over time, they have developed an uproarious and arcane lexicon, as well as a sharp eye for famous women’s evolving tastes.

That fine balance has made Go Fug Yourself special. And it also makes the site feel like a forerunner of one of my favourite developments on the internet: the rise of female humorists who are working with other women in mind, and who signal their respect for forms of feminine culture from fashion to texting by holding them to high standards and using them as tools of criticism.

Among those women is Mallory Ortberg, the humorist who, with Nicole Cliffe, is the founder of the Toast (the site recently spun off the Butter, being overseen by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay).

Ortberg has had what feels like a breakout year. She published her book Texts from Jane Eyre, which re-imagines literary classics in text-speak, a mode that not only makes novels such as Wuthering Heights sound a little silly, but reveals the pretensions of famous fictional men and menace that linger below immortal love stories. Among her ongoing projects at the Toast is a sly and silly imagining of what women in famous pieces of art are really thinking, a device that shifts women to the centre of the canvas and unpacks the assumptions that show up in famous painters’ work. Another reinterpretation of fictional characters and famous literary men casts them as selfish teenagers, shining a wicked and unflattering light on behaviour that is often treated as genius.

And then there is Lindy West, the comedian and critic who embodies what might be called the “I Don’t Care If You Like It” ethos that commentator Rebecca Traister described earlier this year, drawing on an anecdote in Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants to describe women who have other things on their agendas than making men happy and comfortable. A veteran of the Stranger and Jezebel, West may have made a career of crashing through men’s comfort zones — earlier this month, you could find her snarking on Twitter about “TEDIOUS J. MANFEELS, ATTORNEY AT BLAH.” But it turns out, a woman simply being herself can be pretty appealing to men, even if that is not her primary goal. GQ hired her away from Jezebel this year.

At a moment in American politics when things can feel awfully grim if you’re a woman, places like Go Fug Yourself, the Toast and anywhere West is writing are real refuges. Sometimes, you need to laugh or you’ll cry. And Cocks and Morgan, Ortberg and West provide constant reassurance that the jokes don’t always have to be at our expense.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, December 1st, 2014