June 3, 2004
Girls keep out?
funny, but the cast of characters you mention here made me read down your blog with a keen eye for finding a woman to see what they/we might be up to in the making news department. I read lots of posts down into May. Didn’t see one.
What this says to me, you being the ultimate fair and balanced blogger, and that is said sincerely, is that we women are just not flying above the blog noise radar these days.
This isn’t so much a comment to you, David, but more to me, reinforcing what I’ve been feeling and why I haven’t felt like writing anything meaningful lateley. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s getting creepy. Too much noise from the homogeny of voices, who are all starting to rather resemble one another. It’s like people looking like their pets.
Either that, or I gotta get out more.
(Jeneane blogs more about the joy ebbing from her blogging.)
Well, that’s a damn interesting observation.
Just to get the facts out and on the table, I went through my entries back through May 1. I did blog Halley’s interview with Andre Durand a few days ago, but that’s a “Some of my best friends are [whatever]” sort of excuse. And the Berkman brief was mainly written by a woman (or, at least that’s who I dealt with when I provided my own comments on it), although my blog entry makes no mention of that because, well, it would have been more than odd to say “And, imagine, it was written by a woman!” When I reprinted an e e cummings poem, I credited Zephyr Teachout with pointing it out to me. I blogged a blog run by a 2nd grade class, led by a woman teacher. I blogged Heather’s reaction to the Berg murder. I blogged a paper on semantic latent indexing, the lead author of which is a woman. That’s it. Not a proud record.
Part of the explanation of Jeneane’s dispiriting observation is that I have, it turns out, been blogging much more in response to the mainstream media than to other blogs. And much of the news that I cared about in the past 5 weeks was made by men killing other men, men running for president against other men, and men marrying men (and women marrying women). So, the sexism of interests is definitely at work. The fact is that I have spent less time over the past few weeks reading blogs than I have in the past: Work has been busy, the news has been dramatic, I’ve been slacking. If one were to analyze the number of blogs I’ve blogged about, the percentage of them written by women would be shameful but above zero.
So, I guess after browsing through 5 weeks of blogs, I want to dispute the severity of Jeneane’s judgment but not the importance of her observation: Women’s blogs are not impinging on my attention the way they deserve to. And for this blindness I have no acute explanation.
(FWIW, i.e., not much, the two multi-author blogs to which I contribute, Many2Many and Worthwhile, are both mixed gender, so I don’t feel like I’ve been only in the company of men.)
