Ed and I talked about Ellen Goodman’s intensely stupid wrapup from Yearly Kos (Motto:  “If you’re not irate to the point of incontinence, you’re probably a spy”) in which she lamented the supposed dearth of female bloggers, on the show last Saturday. 

Nevertheless, there is another, less flattering way in which broadband has followed broadcast and the liberal political bloggers mimic the conservative talk-show hosts. The chief messengers are overwhelmingly men — white men, even angry white men.

I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the “coed” mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.
…
Next year, Yearly Kos will undergo a name change. The assembly of progressive bloggers will call themselves Netroots Nation. But when will the members of these netroots look more like the nation?

The answers, of course, are head-smackingly obvious to anyone who doesn’t depend on Media Matters for their talking points; when non-whites and non-males want to. 

Because setting up a blog is probably easier than subscribing to the typical newspaper.  In fact, I’ll let you prove it to yourself.  Anyone who’s interested – especially you ladies out there – go to one of these sites (like this one if you’re right-of-center, or this one no matter what you are) and go to town.

From that point on?  It’s entirely up to you!  The blogosphere doesn’t care (indeed, needn’t know, and frequently has no idea) if you’re white, black, female, hispanic, gay, or even human. Indeed, many of the best conservative bloggers are, counter to the left’s inherently paternalistic stereotypes, women:  Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks, La Shawn Barber, and the list goes on and on.  Good female leftybloggers are much rarer – hysterical scolds are more the norm – but they do exist. 

But we’ll come back to that.

Jeff Kouba notes the blazingly obvious in a way that eludes Ellen Goodman (with my emphasis added):

Hard to imagine anything more wide open than the blogosphere. There’s no gatekeeper standing there with an iron rod ready to beat back any woman who aspires to enter.

Women have just as much opportunity as men to wade out into the Sea of Bytes and try and carve out an audience for themselves.

And Jeff notes…:

The blogsophere is both a seductive angel and a cruel mistress. It is fair and not fair. It rewards talent, or loses it in the shuffle…Maybe female bloggers (I refuse to use “women” as an adjective) do experience abuse in ways that men don’t. Just ask Michelle Malkin. But to allow oneself to be cowed and driven away by sickos, maladroits, cowards, misogynists and neanderthals is a choice one makes for oneself.

One can sure invite abuse when you write a blog – or, indeed, put yourself out there in any way at all.  I remember getting anti-semitic death threats twenty years ago at KSTP-AM (although I’m as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger; this was two years after Alan Berg was murdered in Denver, so it wasn’t entirely an academic issue to me (“Gosh, Mitch, why do you support “shall issue” laws?”).  And while I’ve done OK since the blog started, I’ve drawn my share of drooling moral incontinents to my comment section (never moreso than when Democratic Underground, Jesus General or the Freep linked to me, although most of the real persistent jagoffs came from another pack of delusional hysterics. 

Threatening anyone for what they say, or believe, is a loathsome thing, and should be punished to the full extent of both the law and society’s ability to inflict shame.  It doesn’t matter who the sender or receiver are.  Period.  If it were in my power to find out and punish (or at least humiliate) someone who sent a threatening email to, say, the shrieking hysterics at Shakespeare’s Sister, I’d do it as quickly as I would for someone threatening Michelle Malkin.  There is no compromise there.

Speaking of shrieking hysterics, MNob – a woman who writes for pretty much every leftyblog in the Twin Cities sorosphere, and who is reputed to be a lawyer, although I know I’m not paying her for legal advice, ever – tried to take Kouba to what passes for “task”, in her little world, writing this time at “Yowling From The Fencepost“:

Shorter Jeff Kouba: “Why, no, I’ve never received anonymous email with images of my face photoshopped onto a mutilated and ejaculate-covered corpse with my home address posted below. Why do you ask?”

So to sum up the “logic” of MNob’s “keen” “legal” mind:

• Kouba: the blogosphere is a meritocracy.
• MNob: But some women get threatened!  Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Even a strawman can get blog space for free at blogspot, I guess.

I don’t go to any leftyblogger for cool, incisive logic, least of all any blog that’d publish MNob – but sometimes, one has an academic craving to try to follow these “ideas” to their conclusions.

The blogsphere is (putatively) a male preserve, BUT there is no barrier to entry to anyone so there’s no real reason for this, BUT some slimebags send abusive emails to some female bloggers.  So – what do we do?  Create a DFL-like quota system? 

Aren’t women “tough” enough to handle the scrum of political blogging?  Clearly not true – Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks and La Shawn Barber all give much better than they get. 

Besides reveling in misplaced victimhood, what would MNob suggest?  An affirmative action program for under-blogged womyn?  A non-profit that teaches women and minorities how to blog (oh, wait, we already have that)?  A “Fairness Doctrine” and a set of “Speech Codes” to “level the playing field?”

Or is it just more fun to complain about the thin little fringe of a***ipes, politics irrelevant, whose anonymity gives them cover to say and do things they’d never dare in person? 

Sort of like a lot of anonymous bloggers, come to think of it?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under Blogs, Men and Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.