A Little Lady Blogger Signing In

It's that time of the year again, the time when we find to our utter surprise that there are more men than women blogging on Important Matters (note the careful definition of those), and then we speculate on Innate Differences which make women incapable of blogging when in fact nobody at all is stopping them! Or we wonder why girls can't take the malicious trolling as well as guys can take it!

So hard to be cheerful and lady bloggerish and kind and understanding about that, because I have been on this merry-go-round several times in the past. Indeed, I feel my fangs growing longer and demanding the blood of idiots.

How the f**k do you do lady blogging? Do you spray the keyboard with Chanel 5 first? And does that keep the trolls at bay, hmh? Do you put up a picture of yourself with cleavage? The Mother Jones story does suggest that both of these things are required for women to blog. The poor little things.

I'm being unfair. The piece itself (on why men are the majority of some type of bloggers) is not bad and does address a few important questions (though not others, such as whether mommy bloggers were sampled in the study). But honestly. Why do we have this silly conversation over and over again? And if we truly want to do something about getting more women into blogging, why not do a really careful study of all bloggers? We might begin with the study which shows that female pseudonyms get more harassment on the net than male pseudonyms.

Sigh. Now that post was a big FAIL. I can't do lady blogging.
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Added later: It seems that the original study was focused on political blogs, where "political" was defined to exclude feminism? That's what I have heard. If true, this means that I don't count in the statistics, for instance, despite the fact that I write a lot on politics. Well, pretty much everything I write is on politics when the term is widely defined.