All the animals in Internet Park are female...
In a discussion with Christopher Lydon on Lydon's blog last year, political consultant Dick Morris made the following comment about blogging:
Cox herself has made several observations on her role--that of the prominent female bloggers out there, most are right-wing, and that other females criticize her for "talking like a sailor" on Wonkette. Both speak to a larger issue: That because the blogosphere thrives on sites linking to one another based on shared commentary, blogging is the ultimate boys' club. Wonkette doesn't fall in with the right-wing women, and she always seems in danger of being dismissed by the "serious" political blogs.
Steven Levy, Newsweek's tech guru, was one of many who addressed the issue after a Harvard conference on blogging this spring featured very few women (and even fewer non-whites, but that's a fight for another day).
Will this change as blogs go mainstream, or will the blogs be the last mainstream refuge for the old boys' club? If blogs are so democratic, why are the top blogs so overwhelmingly male?
Let’s remember that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale.A comment truly designed for the bloggers to feast upon, I'm choosing to focus on the first segment: Is the Internet more male than female? More to the point, is blog a masculine word? The article I just linked to claims that of the top 20 American blogs on Sitemeter.com, only one is written by a woman--Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette.
Cox herself has made several observations on her role--that of the prominent female bloggers out there, most are right-wing, and that other females criticize her for "talking like a sailor" on Wonkette. Both speak to a larger issue: That because the blogosphere thrives on sites linking to one another based on shared commentary, blogging is the ultimate boys' club. Wonkette doesn't fall in with the right-wing women, and she always seems in danger of being dismissed by the "serious" political blogs.
Steven Levy, Newsweek's tech guru, was one of many who addressed the issue after a Harvard conference on blogging this spring featured very few women (and even fewer non-whites, but that's a fight for another day).
Will this change as blogs go mainstream, or will the blogs be the last mainstream refuge for the old boys' club? If blogs are so democratic, why are the top blogs so overwhelmingly male?
posted by politiae at 11:15 PM
2 Comments:
From my admittedly non-scientific research on the matter, I've certainly found the blogosphere to be very male-centric. Of course, much of that is probably due to the fact that I really only read about a dozen blogs regularly any more, all of which are written by men; hardly a legitimate sample.
Kevin Drum had a long discussion on this topic at the Washington Monthly blog (the link is a good place to start), and it was nice in that it really shone some light on many of the quality female bloggers out there, of which there are quite a few.
Still, i think there very clearly is a male tilt to the blogosphere. Perhaps the drunken barroom brawl nature of many of the conflicts that rise up make it a more attractive place for men than women, but that's just speculation. I think it will be interesting to see if the divide balances out as blogs become more mainstream, as perhaps men just got a head start on women in the early days of the blogosphere for whatever reason, and have simply been catching up since.
I actually followed the Washington Monthly discussion as it was happening in March, and I had the same reaction you did--hey, isn't it great that someone's pointing to all these great female bloggers.
I'm a bit depressed, though, that women may have to play catchup in the blogosphere, as they've had to do in the entire political world. Why, with such a democratic, community-focused medium was it once again men who took the top spots for themselves?
Post a Comment
<< Home