In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

The Who That Horton Never Hears

Lauren

Shakespeare’s Sister, during email conversations with upper-tier bloggers under the condition of anonymity, finds out why women aren’t linked more often.

Women don’t give me much linkable material.

Women write on subjects that don’t interest me.

Women don’t know how to compromise on abortion rights.

Why don’t women post about Social Security? It affects them, too.

Women don’t write commentary, don’t come up with new ideas.

Gender politics is all secondary issues.

Some of this is directly quoted and some of this is paraphrased, but frankly I don’t give a fuck which is which. Somebody go through my archives, please, and reiterate that I don’t write original shit. Nix, even, all the posts I’ve made about icky girl uterus, since abortion is such a tired issue.

Naw, excuse me.

Compromise on abortion rights? Social Security? And women are accused of following trends like a dog with its nose buried in its own turds? Right. Real original, dude. And I’m not even going to mention how specious it is to suggest that women are “uninteresting” because we follow legislation that directly, tangibly affects us and only us.

Oops, here I go with that hysterical shit again. At least I’m more reserved than Jeff Jarvis’ rowdy channelling of Bushwick Bill: “Damn it feels good to be a cracka.”

This subject is so unbearably boring and repetitive — and yet so freakishly maddening. And this time especially so. Apparently the candle lit romanticism induced by wide-eyed men blogging about the sad dearth of femininity in the political sphere is nothing but a sham. Shakespeare’s Sister says:

…as long as there’s a collective reluctance to replace the faux suppositions with the real prejudices in the navel-gazing posts, there’s no one with whom to have that conversation. Except, of course, my fellow bloggrrls, none of whom ever actually believed it’s anything other than the same old tired biases, anyway. Being more creative at disguising them behind your wide-eyed mystification about where all the women are isn’t clever; it’s pathetic.

All the positing on the reasons behind female invisibility usually come down to this: the fairer sex is too ginger to stick a toe in the political whirlpool. And yet here we are again, calling in the dogs (or bitches, if you will) to suggest that we don’t so easily fit into that particular box. Roxanne calls more bullshit:

Now, which gender is it that doesn’t have the cajones to enter the fray, engage in honest, open debate, filled with passionate rancor? Okay, just checking.

Touché.

And something makes me think that some of this incendiary correspondence is from someone whose name starts with a K and ends with Evin Drum. Well, I might say that, but I wouldn’t want to start something by throwing out presumptions and opinions like they’re facts.*

More from Pam (and a hat tip to Norbiz for stealing his rhymes).

* Actually, I do find this current post on the subject to be far more thoughtful and researched than Drum’s last, but because SS suggests that thoughtfulness is the cover for willfully aiding in our invisibility I find such thoughtfulness suspect.

UPDATE: I was right about Drum playing coy.

18 thoughts on The Who That Horton Never Hears

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  5. Who Do I Have To Blow To Get Noticed Up In This Dive?”

    Yeah, really…unfortunately. It seems as if the only way a woman who wants to be known and acknowledged as someone who indeeds blogs about politics, has to–metaphorically speaking–suck cock, as a form of appeasement to the Male “A-list” bloggers.

    Fuck this “quid pro quo” policy of these so called “Progressive/Liberal” men. Progressive and Liberal my ass!

    I would expect something like this from male ultra-conservative Rightwing bloggers. Actually, I think they would want you to leave the workforce, bear them six children, convert to fundamentalist Christianity, chain yourself to their kitchens, fuck them and get pregnant on demand, and clean their houses–FIRST, and THEN, they’ll link to your blog. Just a thought. 🙂

  6. A most excellent rant, Lauren! I wonder what this anonymous high-level blogger would find worth linking to? A picture of two women pleasuring each other, probably.

    I do write on topics such as Social Insecurity. But I’d probably write better if my name was Brawny Bob. Maybe what we all need are namectomies?

  7. Forgive me for cross-posting:

    I went back and looked at the history of links on this subject. Invariably, the male who starts it gets all the links. The intent is to show people where to go comment, but the effect has been to reward their idiocy. I was looking to see if I had any posts to add to the portal someone created, but my first post on the subject on my own blog (I had commented on others) was the announcement for What She Said! I was naive enough to think that if we had a list we could pull out and say “here we are” that you guys would welcome the information. Boy, do I feel like an ass.
    –snip–
    The bottom line is that men only seem to link to other men they want to impress. Women are much more egalitarian with their links, and I think that works against us. For a woman to link to a man’s blog in the blogosphere as it exists right now is equivalent to a blue collar worker voting Republican, or supporting a golf tournament at a restricted club. It is against our self-interest.

  8. Well, I’m a man and I don’t know how to compromise on abortionrights either. I don’t know what’s the point with the males vs. females debates either, it’s always this focus on differences and it doesn’t lead us anywhere.

  9. Oy, Lauren, come over for more on this here. Always pack equal shares of sense of outrage and sense of humor. The outrage will bring a fresh tomorrow, the sense of humor will allow us to enjoy today.

    Let us go then, you and I,
    When the evening is spread out against the sky
    Like an etherized patient upon a table

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  12. “Damn it feels good to be a cracka” slayed me. I’ve been wanting to see Jarvis put out to pasture for oh, ever so long, but it just keeps refusing to happen. He’s neither that bright nor that talented, but He Was in New York City on September 11 (no one else was, you know) so what he has to say is always Super Important.

    So Drum was among the guilty? Well, I’m not surprised, and I’m betting I can guess (social) which (security) comment was his, too.

  13. Ilyka, Drum has also written on several occasions that he wishes women and feminist would just compromise on reproductive issues so we can get more moderates in the party. Way more than Social Security – Drum’s being coy.

  14. And I’m not even going to mention how specious it is to suggest that women are “uninteresting” because we follow legislation that directly, tangibly affects us and only us.

    I’m assuming you mean abortion rights here, since that was explicitly metioned in the source quote. But I disagree that abortion rights affect women and only women. Yes, it’s women who will be forced to bear the vrunt of crappy abortion policy, but men are (or damn well should be) affected too. Consider: not all of us are testosterone-happy knuckle-draggers looking to spread our seed far and wide. Some of us might feel, you know, some sort of obligation were a child with half our genes to be born — and some of us, like some women, may not be at points in our lives where a child with our name on him/her would be in anyone’s best interest. So, careful though we might be, it’s important to know that abortion is out there as an option should all precautions fail and a fetus result.

    Also, there’s the emotional issue. I know it’s fun and popular to think of people as interest-driven automatons, but some of us — y-chromosone-bearing thugs that we are — actually care about the women in our lives, and would really prefer to live in a world where their physical, mental, economic, and overall social well-being was protected. That means access to good medical care, including abortion facilities — as well as affordable pre-natal and general gynecological care, easy access to birth control and prophylactics, decent job opportunities, a legal system that takes physical and sexual violence against women seriously, etc. Of course, a decent medical and legal system for women should translate into decent medical nad legal systems for men as well, but that’s only a part of the way that these issues affect men.

    In fact, I really can’t think of an issue that affects “women and only women”. Decent people want to live in a decent society, and a society where women face physical, sexual, legal, or social discrimination or are forced to give their bodies over to the state as fetus incubators is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a decent society.

  16. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m not part of the problem. I just inventories the links on my blogroll (which is way too long — almnost 150 links!) and I have 104 male bloggers and only 30 female bloggers linked. That discounts 17 group blogs and 3 I couldn’t identify, and of course, ones I missed because I’m not very careful. Still, that’s more than 3-to-1. Now why is that? Why is an educated, liberal, open-minded, sensitive guy like myself so heavily linked to other male bloggers? I don’t think it matches my reading habits very closely — but even so, why should I have found three times as many male as female bloggers “linkworthy”?

    The question might not be “where are all the women bloggers” — I know I’ve read far more than are linked on my site — but “where are all the women bloggers on my blogroll“? DO I ust find the male blogging voice more authoritative, more worthy of return visits, than the female blogging voice? If so, then why are my favorite blogs evenly matched? (Feministe, of course, but also Body and Soul, Bitch PhD, Purse Lip Square Jaw, as against Michael Berube, Jesus’ General, Tom Tomorrow, and Doc Searls, and the group blogs Boing Boing and Crooked TImber.) (Oh, for the record, I stopped short of doing a “gender inventory” of group blogs.)

    But then other disparities emerge — there’s few links to single-issue political bloggers, few to gay bloggers, few to non-white bloggers, few to conservative bloggers, few to non-academic bloggers, and so on. Is the echo-chamber effect working me over? Am I linking only to people more or less like me — white, middle-class, academic, liberal, straight? Obviously I link to people whose blogs I find interesting, but am I so narcisistic that I only find interesting people who are pretty much like myself?

    So maybe I am — like everyone else, I guess — part of the problem. And I doubt I’ll stop being part of the problem by equalizing my blogroll — the issue is how do I get into myself enough to figure out how I contribute to the ongoing inequalities that structure our lives? How do I — and you, and everyone else — become better people?

  17. Dustin, what I meant by that statement is that overall you seem to “get” feminism, whatever that means.

    My beef with the “woman bloggers” question is not so much about the linking as it is about the implications of how people with a bit of power feel about the presence of women among that power structure. Effectively, every time the question is raised, the answer we get is that women and women’s words are dismissable by those with even an inkling of power.

    “Power,” when related to weblogs, is such a silly issue. Weblogs are interesting and fun and engaging, but only a microcosm of those who fall under a slew of very particular demographics. The word I should probably be using is “agency,” as in, the ones with the largest readership have the agency to lead readers to women’s (and others’) writing and opinions instead of repeatedly wondering aloud why we don’t have larger readership. Those of us women who are seething over the cluelessness of these questions and posed answers are angry because we don’t have as much agency to promote – and of course we can’t force others to promote us. Thus, when repeatedly told that the world of blogs is a meritocracy, the underlying assertion is that our writings are without merit.

    Yes, we all have our own opinions and likes and dislikes, and our blogrolls will reflect that. But that doesn’t mean that because writer number one’s opinions don’t align with two’s, writer number two is “boring” or “unoriginal” or “apolitical” as the A-listers in question have stated.

    Of course, having the F-word emblazoned across the top of the page is going to leave me with a rather select readership. And in truth, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I do sometimes feel cheated that the only “big” bloggers I ever hear about in MSM are white men when I am aware of plenty of other marketable female voices that are producing similar material on the same par as the big dogs. Good representation is as validating for the representative as it is for those who feel they are being represented. Sometimes I like to see a face, or hear a voice, that looks and sounds like mine.

  18. Lauren made a comment in another place about the women at WhirledView being able to take on Kevin Drum.

    As one of those women, I’m coming into this discussion late, but I’ve read two Drum pieces on this subject and find them undistinguished. I’m also coming at it from a different place, which is what we try to do at WV.

    I suspect that there is a lot of herd behavior in blog-linking, as there is in other activities. Of the three WV bloggers, I have the most experience with internet forums, having contributed for four years now to a discussion board that I won’t link to because it has deteriorated, one of the reasons that I started a blog.

    I was the only regularly contributing woman on that board, and a moderator. The amount of garbage thrown my way, and particularly the insistence that I must believe such-and-such because I was a woman and a “leftist” was finally too much. It was depressing, and it messed up my head. I still hang out there because I still like some of the guys (and we’ve got another woman poster), but it was not a vehicle for hard and clear thinking.

    There’s a balance between reading other people’s blogs and being able to think for oneself. At WV, the balance is toward writing our own stuff, although we try to highlight particularly good stuff elsewhere. My co-bloggers spend much less time on the Web than I do.

    Vituperation for its own sake, the driving engine of a lot of blogs, is not of interest to us. We’d like to connect with our readers at a higher level, explain or clarify things that may seem arcane, and express ourselves clearly. The blog is to help us think out what we’re doing as much as to share that with others.

    We’re pleased with the reception we’ve gotten so far. We go up and down in Bear’s ecosystem, but, after watching that for a while, I’ve decided that he isn’t measuring what’s important to us. What’s more important is that we’re getting good comments and e-mails from readers and links from Lauren and others we respect across a wide range of interests.

    Would we like more? Sure. But we’ve only been on line since November.

    Anecdotal. Only one opinion. But that’s the only one I can speak for.

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