Last week, I wrote about the benefits of actually meeting people with whom you disagree, face to face.  It tends to humanize the argument, and drag people out of the petty, stereotype based bickering that attends so much online “debate”.

For example I’ve met the likes of Chuck Olson, Luke Francl and Chris Dykstra from New Patriot; while I disagree with all of ’em on most everything, I’ve found them to be great guys and had a great time talking with ’em all.  I even met some of the giggly fratboys from MNPublius; ditto.  Nice kids; they’ll be smart when they grow up.

Another example; I met “Tild”, who, like most leftybloggers, seems to write for dozens of different leftyblogs.  She was writing for “Norwegianity”, I think, when I deduced from her writing that she was a joyless shrieking scold.  Then I met her at Flash’s place, and found that, in person, she was not joyless.

I stand sit corrected.

But meeting people and becoming acquainted with their arguments pays other dividends.  For example, last month I pointed out that I am the foremost feminist you will ever meet.  Of course, much of the local Sorosphere reacted like I’d farted in church at a Wellstone seance, and responded with great ire in various degrees of “oh, no you’re double-dog not!” 

But Tild referred to something that Mark “Labor Goon” Gisleson put on Norwegianity that went somewhere nobody else has gone; actually using science and stuff to try to attack my claim.

And I’m chagrinned.

Because for all these years I thought that feminism – especially equity feminism – was about working to make sure that women, like my daughter will one day be, don’t face discrimination because of their gender, and have all the doors open to them that their merits and innate drive can kick free.

Silly me.  It’s about how much your blog says “She” versus “He”.  According to this tool, the word “he” outnumbers the word “she” on my blog by 71% to 29%.  Go ahead, check it out!

Of course, since Tild is a leftyblogger, we have to assume that even that ludicrous context is mangled beyond recognition – and, as usual, our assumption is confirmed:

What does this ratio tell us? If you think it reveals that e.g. a site with a higher “he” count is primarily consisting of or appealing to a male audience, that’s not true; for instance, both BlogHer.org as well as AskMen.com show a higher count for “she.” Whatever correlations you might discover, they’re likely not as linear. Below are a couple of examples from different sites:

[Oh, go ahead and look!]

I should’ve figured; it’s all about superficial bean-counting!

Very well.  I’ll redouble my effort to insert feminine pronouns.

Criminy.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 5:54 am and is filed under 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.