Correction
According to a Mr. John Hawkins, “Women on the whole are less interested in politics than men, therefore less [sic] women create blogs, thus the female talent pool in the blogosphere is smaller than the male pool, which leads to the dearth of ‘A-List’ female bloggers.”
Mr. Hawkins is wrong.
Let me follow his example by summing up my opinions and personal experience in sweeping, stereotyping sentences.
Online journals began receiving attention in the mid-late ninties. At that time, about 85% of the people writing online journals were women. As they got attention in the mainstream press, typical straight male web-goers decided that they wanted a piece of that attention. But they didn’t want to be the minority in the field. So they invented blogs. Overnight, blogs sprouted all over the world. Most of the bloggers were men. “We’re not online journalers,” they sneered. “We’re bloggers. We don’t sit around talking about our feelings. We surf the web and then make big lists of links. That’s better than writing a bunch of words. We’re the Blogosphere. And, hmm… here’s something interesting we just noticed… most of us are men.”
So then the mainstream media dropped online journals like hot potatoes and started foaming at the mouth over blogs. Oh my gosh, they said. What are blogs and why are they so much cooler than online journals? They didn’t realize that blogs got more hits, at first, because the most efficient way of gathering interesting links is gleaning them from other blogs.
All the online journalers felt like a bunch of losers, then, and they started calling their online journals blogs. They added links to their sites and removed the careful page-per-entry crafting of their entries. They piled their entries on top of each other in a long column, like the lists of links made by the original bloggers.
Eventually, the bloggers’ long lists of links became homogenous and the men had to do something to set themselves apart from each other. To compete. To bang their horns against the horns of others. So some brilliant freaking genius decided to invent “content” – i.e., words about feelings to go with the links. How incredibly original.
All the guys whose link lists consisted of political news stories started adding “content” – their opinions of those news stories. “Oh my god!” the mainstream media said. “Men who put their opinions about politics on the Web for the whole world to read are so freaking interesting!”
All the women who had hitherto only written about their own lives scratched their pretty little heads in confusion. Hadn’t they always felt the need to keep politics and religion off their own blogs, out of respect for their diverse readers? Hadn’t they always been taught that it was ugly to scream out negative opinions of others? Oh, that’s right… It all made sense, then. Men are the ones who are encouraged to bleat out their opinions of every single thing, be it politics, their god’s will, or which women they deem inspirational for masturbation. Not just at home, not just in the classroom, and not just at work – but now, on the Web, too! All that stuff you used to think about the Web being a realm of intellectual ideas free of sexism and racism? That was just silly, you silly little girl.
So, here we are.
I’m actually quite interested in politics. I read the news, vote, and discuss politics with my friends. I am not, however, interested in hearing what a bunch of anonymous rude people think about my views on politics, so I keep my political opinions off my site, for the most part. I save them for discussions with like-minded friends (or, at least, for intelligent peers). When I’m in the mood to listen to a bunch of hypocritical men accusing each other of hypocrisy, I’ll go to a news site and click on the link to political blog they’re publicizing that hour.
Or, if I don’t have the Internet handy, I can always walk over to the nearest real-world gathering of opinionated men with nothing better to do than argue. I think there’s a group of them playing checkers in front of City Hall. Oh, look – there’s a bunch of them inside City Hall, too.
