•chapter number•
Posting With Passion:
Blogs and the Politics of Gender
A woman does not want the truth; what is truth to women? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than the truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.
—Texas Hold-em trackback spam[1] (2005)
I decided that if he noticed my notebooks, I’d say that I was writing in my diary. A safe girl-thing to be doing. Not that I had anything to hide from Detective Malloy. I just know from experience that trying to explain what it is that I write, what it is that interests me, makes me sound a little foolish, a little ineffective.
—Susanna Moore (1996, 15-6)
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ne of the more consistent debates to have accompanied blogging’s growing popularity has been the degree to which gender differences have manifested in the use of this emerging medium. Whether it is amongst blogging observers or participants, such discussions take qualitative and quantitative forms: on the one hand, the content of women’s as opposed to men’s blogs is seen by many to be significant, while it is the prevailing perception that the most influential bloggers are men—despite statistics showing the actual number of bloggers to be relatively even across gender lines—that remains troubling for many feminists. Each of these perspectives is in some way concerned with degrees of recognition: the content of women’s blogs is perceived by some to be less noteworthy than men’s by virtue of their often domestic and personal sphere of reference, whereas men’s blogs are often seen to be more engaged in political debate, especially when the notion of what counts as political remains undefined. Generalizations therefore serve to confirm ingrained notions as to the proper participants in, and issues appropriate for, the public sphere.
To the extent that these regular and typically inflammatory discussions are becoming almost ritualistic, a number of feminist bloggers now take as their primary function the role of promoting and highlighting women’s issues as they appear online and in the blog world in particular. Part of a wider movement to lessen the offence women bloggers understandably take at the well-intended if naïve question ‘Where Are All the Women Bloggers?’ specific hosts, filters and web-rings draw together blogs produced by and for women.[2] Group blogs such as Misbehaving.net (http://misbehaving.net) tackle any misconception that women are somehow not as interested in technology as men, or that they have not been involved in its development; while blogs including Ms.magazine.net (http://ms.magazine.net), Feministe (http://feministe.us/blog) and Feministing (http://feministing.com) review daily news from a feminist perspective. The Progressive Women Bloggers Ring draws together over 200 self-identified feminist blogs online, while Feminist Blogs (http://www.feministblogs.org) draws on the content of affiliated members to offer ‘independent alternatives to the malestream media.’ The Blog Sisters site (http://blogsisters.blogspot.com), to take a further example, includes the sub-title ‘where men can link, but they can’t touch’—a reference to the suspicion held by many women bloggers that their writing is only of interest to men when it describes sexual encounters or fantasies, or when the blogger includes pictures of herself for readers to gauge her attractiveness.[3]
These measures to increase the kinds of visibility granted women bloggers as well as appreciation for the depth and variety in their blog content are surprising given that women have been involved in developing some of the most popular blogging software around.[4] It is also puzzling given that the early hype surrounding the internet’s utopian possibilities put such emphasis on the liberating and playful opportunities it offered those looking to escape the confines of gender identity. Indeed it is strange in this context just how much attention has been given to cases of successful gender fraud by award-winning bloggers, most notably ‘Bizgirl: International Librarian of Mystery’ who played on the erotic cliché of the sexy librarian and was eventually revealed to be a man.[5] Still, the existence of web-rings which promote themselves as ‘gender-free zones’ testifies that the ‘virtual’ world is vital for many individuals seeking refuge from the difficulties and dangers of non-normative gender-identification offline.[6] Blogs offer a safe and fairly anonymous forum in which issues of concern and potential threat can be raised and discussed without fear. This is an important function whether in conservative local contexts or a wider political climate increasingly reflecting the values of competing religious ideologies.
Sugar and spice and everything nice: women’s blogs
Within a wider discourse of cyber-topianism, blogs have been celebrated for their capacity to reflect experiences that have been trivialised, denigrated or ignored in the past, particularly the views of women and younger members of society. In this way, blogs are helpful for breaking the isolation many women have felt faced with ongoing societal expectations that they are the ‘natural’ partner to stay at home, raise children and attend to housekeeping tasks.[7] Blogs have been used to recount the joys encountered in a typical day to show readers (and perhaps sometimes partners) the richness of day-to-day parenting.[8] They are also used to reflect upon the responsibility of being a parent, acknowledging fears, seeking advice and gaining encouragement from other readers. Stay-at-home mothers who blog reveal for a wide audience the actual conditions women face in the home, granting overdue recognition for the demanding and time-consuming nature of child-rearing and housework. It is no coincidence that one of the strongest retorts to the question ‘Where Are All The Women Bloggers?’ has been that women simply have less time to blog because of the unequal distribution of labour between genders. If anything, gender inequality in blogging demonstrates the reality of the ‘second shift’ (Hochschild 1989).
Aside from immediate family concerns, women are also perceived to spend more time than men blogging about pets, hobbies and other domestic concerns. Knitting, cooking and cats are the three topics typically associated with women’s blogs, leading to blogger in-jokes like ‘Where Are All the Male Knitting Bloggers?’ While these perceptions are little more than generalizations it is nonetheless the case that a local, domestic sphere of reference is a typical response to a subordinate position within wider structures of society (Hoggart 1958). A domestic focus fits within a history of interests—including reading and journaling as activities—that women have had to develop due to their systematic exclusion from more public forms of participation, long before information technology has become such a prestigious form of technological competence. Indeed feminist commentators are quick to point out that when a technology is used mostly by women (the telephone or the washing machine, for instance) its value within society tends to lessen (Spender 1995).
In this still early stage of blogging commentary critics appear to have stalled at the point of celebrating the opportunity blogs provide for expressing women’s unique preoccupations and pastimes. And while this celebration is necessary it does little to explain why the activities women write about on blogs might be considered more or less feminine practices. In a Western cultural context which has long separated the public (the official and sanctioned) from the realm of the private, blogging research must begin to grapple with the social and historical factors leading to women’s relegation to the inherently inferior sphere of the latter. An uncritical celebration of so-called feminine practices will only perpetuate the assumption that men are active agents leaving the home to work while women merely tend to the home’s reproduction, as if this were not also an exercise in labour (Morris 1993).
Stereotypes, subcultures and support: journals and gender
Aside from the way that certain content on blogs is seen to display
gender differences, technical features of blogging software are also argued to
demonstrate gendered forms of behaviour. The adage ‘Blogs are for boys, journals
are for girls’ summarized early observations that online diaries such as LiveJournal
(LJ) served as natural extensions of the highly personal and intimate practice
of teenage girls keeping a diary. With LJ in particular, the emphasis on interaction,
conversation and communities of friends enabled by the software has been argued
to facilitate girls’ ‘naturally’ chatty disposition. LJ reflects a different
relation to readers than blogs tend to allow because a journal page is often
simply a means of entering and keeping tabs on a community of friends. In
contrast to this, blogs appear to be more of an opportunity to espouse one’s
singular opinion.[9]
In the sense that LJ acts as a social device for its users it marks a new step in the practice of journaling. It allows for the public expression of thoughts that once remained inwardly directed. Blogging software here creates a form of solidarity and community-in-isolation that was rarely possible with personal diarying. As Danah Boyd (2005) has argued, this is particularly important for vulnerable members of society and those facing difficult and lonely periods in their lives (adolescence is only one example of this). Boyd claims ‘LiveJournal supports some of the most at-risk individuals, the most explicit subcultures’ in contemporary culture, and therefore acts as something of a social service within the wider community.
The significant support journaling offers to those displaying non-normative gender behaviour has been demonstrated in the recent case of ‘MySpace’ user ‘Zach’. Zach’s online journal documented his parents’ decision to send him to a Christian camp run by the group ‘Love in Action’ in an effort to reform his professed homosexuality.[10] After being picked up by a number of high-traffic blogs, Zach’s journal was inundated with hundreds of statements of support from readers alerted to his situation. While the long-term effects of this case will only be known later, it is a topical example of the manner in which online communities offer solace for those whose identity proves to be questionable and even subject to discipline within the immediate geographical and social location of the blogger.
Zach’s case serves to show the crucial role online journals can play in situations where role models for non-normative behaviour are few. Yet within blogging culture, the phenomenon of ‘Live-Journal bashing’ (O’Neil 2005) –joking about online journal writers – arises from the assumption that the personal chat of young people is trivial in comparison to the weighty political content discussed on pundit-style blogs. An implicit power dynamic enables this distinction which deems some issues to be trivial while others are more significant. As the opening quotation for this chapter indicates, such a distinction also follows a long tradition of philosophical thought which places women’s culture in the domain of emotion and affect as opposed to the rationality and reason of which men are capable. The debate about gender and blogging has therefore suffered from a lack of clarity in three main areas: what counts as a blog, what counts as an online journal and what counts as political. Mainstream perceptions of blogs, when they exist at all, currently gravitate between the stereotypes that blogs are online journals written by young women about their personal lives or that they are the territory of older men seeking status as a political pundit or provocateur. As other researchers have argued, however, these perceptions create a hierarchy whereby the group or pundit blog—sometimes called the ‘filter’ blog—is the authentic form against which other styles of blogging must be judged:
by privileging filter blogs and thereby implicitly evaluating the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors, public discourses about weblogs marginalize the activities of women and teen bloggers, thereby indirectly reproducing societal sexism and ageism, and misrepresenting the fundamental nature of the weblog phenomenon. (Herring et. al 2004)
What these debates also typically avoid is any significant debate about what makes a topic ‘political’, ‘newsworthy’ or ‘important’ in the first place, and the history of gender bias within the bastions of knowledge production (such as educational, media or political institutions) which have set the terms of public debate for so long. In blogs two forms of ‘mastery’ combine – that of technological competence and that of authoritative speech. Both are forms of mastery gained by a past economy of exclusion, which is to say that they rely on a familiarity with, and access to, various forms of literacy that for the most part have only been available to white men until very recently. If distinctions do exist between women and men’s interests on blogs, this may still be a reflection of previous restrictions placed on education on the one hand and participation in the public sphere (as a corollary) on the other. Against this history it is only understandable that there is a lag in priorities and some variation in interests; the opportunity blogging offers is that this kind of unequal access, and strict division between the public and private sphere, remains a thing of the past.
It is also against this history that we might question the logic behind the following statement, representative of many canvassed during blogging’s gender wars.
Women on the whole are less interested in politics than men, therefore less women create blogs, thus the female talent pool in the blogosphere is smaller than the male pool, which leads to the dearth of "A-List" female bloggers… In other words, there aren't as many really successful female bloggers because percentage wise, there aren't as many women who are interested in doing political blogging. It's just that simple. (Hawkins, ‘Why There’s A Dearth of A-List Female Bloggers’, 2005)
While there is much to debate in this passage, the logic behind this position is that politics itself is static, that what counts as political does not need to be debated because it is self-evident. Not only is this truly worrying for the prospect of any kind of effective political change or agitation, as it assumes an unchanging list of priorities for political debate, it refuses any mention of second-wave feminist movements of the 60s and 70s which established personal issues as political. Feminism has shown that there is no easy separation between individual experience and political perspective, and to demonstrate this point a little further, we need only take note of a subsequent post from this same pundit, describing how many blogs he reads per day:
On a slow day, I may only hit 40-60 blogs and websites, but typically I hit somewhere in the neighborhood of 75-100 blogs and websites a day Sun-Fri. Here are the blogs that I have bookmarked as "daily reads," which in practice, means that I hit them 3-5+ times per week. Hopefully, you'll find some new reads.... (Hawkins, ‘The Blogs I Read Daily’, 2005)
The amount of time such a routine would demand indicates the kinds of conditions typically required of those seeking to participate in ‘political’ debate on blogs. It requires predictable priorities, a distinct method, and above all a lack of interruption from off-line demands. This helps to illustrate that time influences women’s participation in political punditry blogs in two senses. A continuing unequal division of labour within the home affects women’s sheer ability to keep track of debates among bloggers and the amount of time required to write regularly enough to sustain a wide readership. Secondly, women continue to fight the consequences of the amount of time men have enjoyed occupying positions of power in the public arena, time spent establishing their outlook as rational, right, accomplished and authoritative.[11]
Alternative spaces, different outlooks
My own blog, Home Cooked Theory, (http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~gregg) records the experiences of being an academic from the perspective of a young woman who is in her first job. I write about everyday happenings to do with my job but I also use the space as a way to think out loud about current research projects I’m involved in. This is part of an attempt to demystify some of the isolation and secrecy of academic practice, to hold my work accountable to the public which supports it. The title of the blog indicates its intention which is to question the ‘traditional’ locations for intellectual and political debate. Shifting between more personal matters and the political issues at the heart of my research concerns, the blog avoids any fixation on matters deemed important within the public sphere. When referred to, such material tends to be tempered by, or situated within, the blog’s professed interests.
Since starting my blog I’ve found that my writing tends to solicit more responses from men than women, which worried me enough that I raised it for debate on the blog itself. Commenting on her hesitation to engage in blogging discourse, one reader explained:
The ‘thrust and parry’ approach that many bloggers adopt is, for me, exhausting and unproductive – unless you are training to be a professional debater. This will undoubtedly prove to be a controversial observation, but there seems to be a fair bit of bravado informing these textual performances.
While for many, such a position could be read as a reference to gender differences in blogging encounters, the reader goes on to add:
I suspect this may also have something to do with the structural and temporal limitations of an electronic ‘exchange’ which doesn’t function as a fluid real-time conversation between participants, but as a series of (at times inter-connected) scriptural fragments. (‘Kirsten’, Comment on ‘Call for Submissions’, Home Cooked Theory 2005)
This example is useful to highlight that gender differences can be ascribed to a lot of the behaviour which takes place on blogs, just as it can in ‘real life’. But to fully appreciate how the medium functions requires a multi-faceted approach that doesn’t rely too heavily on one interpretive lens. In assessing the uses of blogs it’s dangerous to start with the assumption that new media will necessarily replicate hierarchies of access and recognition that exist elsewhere, or worse, that technologies themselves are inherently gendered. But nor are we naïve. The performance cues of particular individuals who blog can certainly be read within a history of gendered practices and privileges, and it shouldn’t be such a laborious and necessary task to point out those recurring instances where gender does (or conversely, fails to) become a factor.
At this early stage of reflection, as blogs are called into meaningfulness through commentary, it is important that they aren’t trapped within vocabularies and categories that fail to reflect their unique potential (Cohen, forthcoming 2006). During this exciting time we should remain wary of any factors which may affect our ability to recognise a new medium or practice for and of itself. Indeed, perhaps the most fitting way to conclude a chapter on blogging and gender is to point out that it is partnerships between women and men that have enabled so many of the crucial developments in blogging so far: as I’ve mentioned, Meg Hourihan and Evan Williams formed the company which developed Blogger; but Mena and Ben Trott co-founded Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and now LiveJournal (Six Apart is named after the fact that the married couple were born six days apart); flickr, the photo-sharing website servicing many blog platforms, was developed by another couple, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. This unfolding history tends to indicate that it is by sharing and valuing our distinct perspectives between and across genders that we will be in a position to work together to fully realize blogging’s potential.
References
Bausch, Paul, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan. We Blog: Publishing Online With Weblogs. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2002.
Bill’s House of Insomnia, “So Biz Girl is a Phony.”: http://msmvps.com/williamryan/archive/2004/11/14/19095.aspx
Boyd, Danah. “Turmoil in Blogland.” Salon. Retrieved July 19, 2005, from
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/01/08/livejournal/index.html
Byrd, Lorie. “Women should embrace
the blogosphere.” Townhall.com.
Retrieved July 19, 2005, from http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Byrd20050610.shtml
Cohen, Kris. “A Welcome For Blogs.”
Continuum. forthcoming, 2006.
Gregg, Melissa. “Call For
Proposals.” Home Cooked Theory. 2005.
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~gregg/archives/2005/04/29/call-for-proposals/
Guernsey, Lisa. “Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)” New York Times. November 28, 2002. Retrieved August 5, 2005, from http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9504E3DF1538F93BA15752C1A9649C8B63
Hawkins, John. “The Blogs I Read
Daily.” Right Wing News. Retrieved
July 19, 2005, from http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2005_07_17.PHP#004128
———. “Why There’s A Dearth of
A-List Female Bloggers.” Right Wing News.
Retrieved July 19, 2005, from http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2005_02_20.PHP#003488
Herring, S.C., Kouper, I., Scheidt,
L.A., & Wright, E.L. “Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction
of Weblogs.” In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J.
Reyman (eds.), Into the Blogosphere:
Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. 2004. Retrieved July 29, 2005,
from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
Hochschild, Arlie with Anne
Machung. The Second Shift: Working
Parents and the Revolution at Home. New York: Viking, 1989.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1958.
McLelland, Mark. “Private
Acts/Public Spaces: Cruising for Gay Sex on the Japanese Internet.” In Nanette
Gottlieb and Mark McLelland (eds) Japanese
Cybercultures. London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 141-55.
———. “Live Life More Selfishly: An
On-Line Gay Advice Column in Japan.” Continuum.
vol. 15, no. 1, 2001. pp. 103-116.
Moore, Susanna. In The Cut. London: Picador, 1996.
Morris, Meaghan. “At Henry Parkes
Motel.” In John Frow and Meaghan Morris (eds) Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. St Leonards: Allen &
Unwin, 1993.
O’Neil, Mathieu. “Weblogs and
Authority.” Paper delivered at Blogtalk Sydney. Retrieved July 29, 2005, from http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=107
Perrott, Alan. “Gorgeous, But This
Blogger’s Fiction.” New Zealand Herald
13/11/04 Retrieved July 20, 2005, from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=3609947.
Ratliff, Clancy. “The Link Portal on Gender in the Blogosphere.” Culture Cat. http://culturecat.net/node/637
Spender, Dale. Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace. North Melbourne:
Spinefex, 1995.
More links for the Gender and Blogging debate:
http://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/17/gender-and-blogging
http://www.rebeccablood.net/archive/2005/03.html#18men
http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004/03/why-dont-more-women-have-political.html
http://culturecat.net/node/303
http://utopianhell.com/blog/the-women-in-blogging-reader
http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/03/07/wherearethewomenofweblogging
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/04/17/my_own_linking_practices.html
More links
to feminist bloggers:
http://the-goddess.org/whatshesaid/
http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=carla;action=list)
Posting With Passion: Blogs and the
Politics of Gender
[1] Texas Hold-em is the
name of one of the most prolific spammers to have targetted weblogs, employing
a difficult-to-control technique which operates by ‘trackback’ pings, a
reference function in many weblogs. The original source for the quotation is
Frederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil, first published in 1886, and I use it here to indicate the long
history of gender stereotypes affecting Wetsern thought and against which
blogging commentary must be understood.
[2] It is worth noting from
the outset that feminist discourse within the blogosphere is noticably white,
college-educated and US-centric. A recently developed blog, Womens Autonomy and Sexual Sovereignty
Movements (http://the-goddess.org/wam)
exemplifies that key debates tend to hinge on legal matters such as the right
to abortion and contraception. The blog’s manifesto begins by claiming that ‘Women are free citizens of the
United States’ which raises the question, where do non-US women gain
recognition for their quite different and culturally specific concerns in the
blogosphere? Further, while significant research has
been done into the use of websites and online communities as a means to assert
queer identities in non-Anglophone contexts (McLelland 2003; 2001) there is
little research currently available which looks at blogs specifically in terms
of such self-expression.
[3] Clancy Ratliff, a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, has compiled an extensive list of blogging and gender debates on her blog, Culture Cat: http://culturecat.net/node/637. Rantliff’s thesis promises to be the first in-depth study of the way blogging can be seen to challenge gendered notions of political discourse and the public sphere.
[4] Meg Hourihgan, blogger and contributor to one of the first books dealing with blogging (Haughey et al. 2002) helped found Pyra, the company that created Blogger. She recounts the story of Blogger’s development at IT Conversations, available at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail541.html. An interesting feature of this interview is that blogging was something Meg and her colleague Evan Williams found useful for recording ideas so as not to disturb the other when working in a cramped workspace. The irony of this now is that blogs are so popular and numerous they are often used by people to procrastinate in the workplace, or indeed make public comments about individual co-workers which have been known to lead to recrimination from employers.
[5] On hearing of the expose one blog included the comment:
HA! That's great! I was so fooled...but he
was basically playing on our male fantasies of a hot librarian...hell screw
librarian, our male fantasies of ANY woman to be hot...damn reality is a bitch!
;) (‘skicow’,
Comment on “So BizGirl is a phony,” Bill’s
House O Insomnia 2005).
Bizgirl’s blog remains at http://bizgirl.blogspot.com.
[6] See ‘Gender Free Zone’ at http://www.steeltoed.com/genderfree/index01.html and ‘Love Knows No Gender’ at http://m.webring.com/hub?ring=bipeoplewholove
[7] Feminist blog Ms. Musings recently drew attention to a shareholder in the condiment company Heinz, who claimed that current levels of obesity in society were the result of feminist careersism: "With both parents working full time, too few adults and children eat nutritious, portion-controlled, home-cooked meals," he warns shareholders. "To reverse the epidemic, more mothers need to be at home to prepare nutritious balanced meals and supervise the childrens' snacking."
http://www.msmusings.net/archives/2005/07/social_condimen.html
[8] Winner of the Best
Australian Personal Blog in the 2005 Australian Blog Awards, She Sells Sanctuary recently featured a
series of posts listing the many things the writer loves about her son. http://she-sells-sanctuary.blogspot.com/2005/06/counting-ways.html
Yet this blog, written by single mother Gianna, also responds to news stories
of the day, particularly those which impinge on her everyday life and identity
as Australian citizen. Gianna’s blog is strong evidence of the manner in which
women are often interested in politics as it is conventionally defined yet the
particular demands of their situation often mean that such issues are
contextualised within more pressing daily matters.
[9] As Danah Boyd (2005)
notes, while the distinction between blogs as ‘amateur journalism’ and journals
as ‘public diarying’ create a dichotomy, and therefore cannot adequately reflect
the complexity of either form, ‘in terms of identification, there is often a
split. Most people who use LiveJournal talk about their "LJ," not
their "blog."
[10] At the time of writing, Zach’s page was available at:
[11] For women interested
in joining the ranks of A-List punditry or filter blogs, a key complaint has
been that men rarely link to women bloggers, and that women comprise smaller
numbers amongst both contributors and blogrolls on filter and pundit-style blogs.
Many male bloggers have since acknowledged this as the case, yet such reprisals
fail to acknowledge that links from another blogger may not signify respect or
esteem—that linking can have negative as well as positive intent. It also
betrays the assumption that blogging is best understood within a framework of
celebrity, when for many bloggers, women and men, it is the quality rather than
the quantity of readership that makes writing online so rewarding.