Blog who? No, blog you!
In a rather ironic moment of slight editorial mishap, the New York Times’ story on BlogHER, a conference of women bloggers in San Fransisco, was categorized by the web team or somebody in the higher ups in the “Fashion & Style” section. (Full Disclosure: It is also cross-categorized in the “Technology” section. But if you click on the link, you’ll see that its main category is supposed to be F&S, as “Fashion & Style” appears in large emboldened letters.) Normally, I wouldn’t really point this kind of finnicky detail but I think in fact that Times has done it on purpose, with the intent of attracting women readers, but it’s sort of funny in that the article and the conference really in whole deals very little with Fashion or Style. I guess having Maureen Dowd as columnist allows a couple of offenses against women.
As do most journalistic treatments of blogging or the blogosphere, this article mentions the sea change in the situation (mostly financial) of popular blogs and the bloggers behind them. And because this article was on BlogHER–a conference of women bloggers, the focus was on the really successful “mommy blogs,” some of which like Dooce have allowed the bloggers (and sometimes their husbands!) to blog full-time(whatever that means). And of course, in turn, BlogHER, now has corporate sponsors the likes of General Motors (they could use a bit of good PR nowadays) and K-Y(yeah, it’s who you you are thinking of). Some companies like Chevrolet ventured to even loan the blogger a new Malibu during the conference, in the hopes of her blogging about it. “I think they knew I’d love the car so much I’d want to write about it, too, on my blog . . . I’m not making any money off of it.”
In all honesty, I can’t really knock that hustle. Hell, if an auto company hollered at me to drive their whip for a while, I’d do it in a second. So what really interests me is not so much the “corporatization” of the blogosphere but the real reason why BlogHER exists in the first place–the gender bias against women bloggers, which to me is quite complicated.
There is no doubt that women bloggers have a far more difficult time gaining legitimacy and recognition from other media pipelines like print and cable news. In fact, as someone who reads a couple of political blogs, there are, as the article in the Times notes, very few women political bloggers that are at the level of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Talking Points Memo and DailyKos, besides The Huffington Post. One simple explanation is that the blogosphere, although seemingly a far more “democratic” social space, remediates a culture that doesn’t really take women seriously…still…well, fine…only if you’re naked, and keep your mouth shut.
It seems to be rather true that the political blog hustle is a male-dominated hustle but I think this isn’t a point to be more mourned over! Why?
I think the bankability and monetizing potential of women-oriented blogs signal a newly carved space for and by women (kind of like FUBU….anyone get this reference?), and able to stay that way. Why ask to be included into the boy’s club (e.g., the male-oriented domains of blogging like political blogs) when there is a girl’s club of blogs that collectively receive a crazy amount of unique visitors. Traffic and ad revenue are the objects of desire for all bloggers, and it is clear that the bloggers at BlogHer basically have them at their fingertips. Why bother dealing with the whole business of asking to be let in the door, when you are already in the house that they (male bloggers) are begging to be in? The second-wave feminist retor would be that it’s another form of domination to withold legitimacy from what women do. And to that, I have to say absolutely it is. But isn’t it also true that by using the dominant (hence: male) standard of legitimacy in blogging in order to measure the equality of men and women’s reception and influence in the blogosphere, using “the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house,” as Audre Lorde once so aptly put it. In other words, isn’t asking to be let into the realm of political blogging without changing the rules and conditions that keeps that realm male-dominated just as bad as the originary exclusion based on gender?
