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Underground > Head Shop >

Blogging and sexism

Less searchable M0rd4nt

18:23 / 27.09.02

Okay, this issue has been doing the rounds recently, and it seems to merit a headshop slot. The questions seem to boil down to the following:

Are male bloggers in general accorded more credibility that female bloggers?

Do males get more linkage and traffic than female bloggers?

Are there any noticeable differences between weblogs written by men and weblogs written by women?

In your opinion, what makes a good blog-- are there certain things you look for? If so, is a blog written by a member of one gender more likely to offer those things than a member of another gender?

18:53 / 27.09.02

Most (but not all) of the blogs I read are written by women. In fact, one of the most interesting blog projects I've come across is *very* girly, in a way; it's a woman posting her old high-school diary entries, along with commentary and explanations of what she was really writing about then. (She sometimes used codes. and really *really* liked Jason Titus. Sometimes.)

And the most-linked livejournal I know of was the LOTR slash parody stuff, which I think was written by a woman (it was a female picture in the user slot).

It's intimate communication and broadcast-style social networking. Aren't those "feminine" traits?

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:46 / 28.09.02

It's also technology and geekage - very "masculine" traits.

I suspect that, if we are talking about being taken "seriously" - and Mordant, I would humbly suggest that could do with some explanation - then the many, many weblogs published by teenagers to a largely uncaring world are irrelevant. That includes a lot of teenage girls who are picking up on the usefulness of the weblog as a way to interact with the world in a diaristic fashion, and to mediate between public exposure and private editorial. These people may be making great weblogs in a decade's time, but at the moment are not even in the running for "being taken seriously". Which is why I think Livejournal (pretty much designed for the technically inept producer of generic weblog content) is a poor place to look.

The top of the blogging hierarchy is probably taken up by people with geek appeal, still, particularly in America. So, we're talking about people like Joel Gray, Jason Kottke and that Ev twat, who have designed or been close to the designers of very important pieces of software for blogging. People who are metabloggerati, in effect. Although we are *also* talking about megnut.com, so perhaps that is related to accident rather than gender. You decide.

The other element is the Will Wheaton factor- the audience for weblogging on the Internet still has a fairly high geek quota, so if you have been forgotten by history but were in Star Trek once, you can develop celebrity on the back of this. This may be worth exploring in the sense of parasitic blog celebrity or gravitas (Neil Gaiman's blog, or Warren Ellis' blog, or pretty laughable, as far as I can tell, but they have such devoted geekboy fanbases that it does not matter).

23:06 / 28.09.02

I really don't think that male bloggers/journallers are given more credibility than females. as a female I stereotype most other livejournals I read as written by girls. it's definitely a sexist thing to do because only women (or young women) are so willing to whore out their deep dark feelings. though others i meet online without disclosing my gender think i am male.. because i'm terribly mean and sarcastic.
fnarking sexism.

09:24 / 29.09.02

I'm also probably in the wrong place - Diaryland - to talk about such things, but I've been struck at the poor quality of the diaries. I keep trying to find good ones, and there have been a couple, but the vast majority do appear to be written by young women who are either constantly cooing over their boyfriends or whining about their recent break ups. I'll comment on the male ones if I can find any. It's probably significant that I always talk about my 'blog' rather than my 'online diary' - meaning I think it'll be taken more seriously if it's described as such. My name on Diaryland is more likely to be seen as male, and I wonder if this makes a difference when people come across it who don't know me (although some of the entries make it obvious that I'm female)?

Reading the above back, it sounds pretty callous. I think I'd better find some male-written diaries and see if they're similar.

14:57 / 29.09.02

I know what you mean, sfd, I think it's a bad combination of the fact that more women blog than men, and most blogs are dull. I'm on Livejournal, clearly since I am technically inept, and it is depressing looking at random journals. That's partly the problem with easy-to-use web tools, idiots are more likely to use them as long as they have minimum computer skills (which everyone under the age of 18 seems to these days), but it counts for Blogger as well [random bloggerblog] which is maybe slightly harder to use than Hotmail. Neither of them count as "geeky" at all. "Geeky" is setting up your own Movable Type system, even that's not that hard.

I don't think women's blogs are intrinsically more whiny in a bad way - the most annoying whiner who I've not removed from my friends list is a man - but motives for starting the blog in the first place seem to be statistically different. Special-purpose technical blogs are, as you'd expect, more likely to be written by men, and the amount of public soul-searching in general is a bit lower.

What I'm trying to get across is, familiarity breeding contempt in style terms. "god why does jeff hate me" blogs are mostly boring, and if you take a random sample you'll get mostly those. Other styles at least have novelty to make them less irritating.

Out of the blogs I rate as "good", I think the gender bias is about 50-50.

15:01 / 29.09.02

Another point - there's no generally accepted way of judging how "credible" a blog is, given that the number of readers of blogs way outnumbers those who talk about it. The technology is not integrated enough that you can tell. Advances such as Trackback (now usable in Blogger) try to address this but, unless the system has a strong community element (like LJ) how on earth can you tell? Are people reading your blog because they think it's insightful, or because they think you're cute?

19:41 / 29.09.02

i'm always surprised when guys comment on my lj as i do see it as a very feminine realm, but that is the way my life has been for the last decade so it will be reflected in my lj friends - and as men have begun to play more a part in real life, so its reflected online. nothing sexist in any of it that i can see!

07:37 / 30.09.02

[Really brief aside - would this be better in Lab since it's about cyberculture?]

12:19 / 02.10.02

i disagree about diaryland. i think the whole site rockeths because everyone is so open and fun and generally write whatever the fuck they're thinking. there is a huge range of people making diarylands there.
i think most blogs are boy centric and boring, which is one of the reasons i post to spizzazzz. it's fun and about pop/hip hop, and gender is not an issue there at all.
oh and i'd like to note that there is nothing bad about female blogs where they write about their personal feelings. it's extremely good for girls and women to get these feelings out there. it's healing and helpful. you don't have to read them! i think boys could take a leaf out of these girl's journals!