“Truth be told, Anaiis fills for all of us the same need Madonna does: we like to have a beautiful whore tell us what’s what,” the renowned author Catherynne Valente wrote in a review of my blog*, maybe six or seven years ago.
She mentioned that my writing was all right, even though it seemed to her I wrote the way most people masturbate: only caring about my own pleasure and with no regard whatever for my audience, which, I suppose, is kind of charming in a world were so many people are crucified as being crowd-pleasers. All in all it wasn’t a bad review, even if she did say I was a whore, dripped sex like a broken faucet in the Bronx and had an ego the size of the Incredible Hulk on a bad day.
What I’d never forget is that she said I was beautiful like this made some kind of a difference. I can depict myself as whorish in my writing, after all, as well as expose an oversized ego. But you can’t write yourself beauty. What does what I look like have to do with my writing?
* Refers to a blog that is no longer available.
GLASS CEILING OR SUN ROOF?
Yesterday Michael Duff at the Lubbock-Avalanche Journal wrote about his favorite online hoax: a male political blogger, tired of being ignored on the web, painted his site pink, stole an image from a mail-order bride site and began to sprinkle his political rants with references to style and college parties. He became Libertarian Girl. The result? Pageviews and pingbacks soared.
“So what does this mean?” asked Duff. “Is the glass ceiling actually a sun roof?”
Megan Carpentier at Jezebel was quick to respond: “What Duff takes away from this is not ‘don’t trust anonymous people on the internet’ but that lady bloggers have it so much easier than men. Oh, really?”
Carpentier linked a piece she wrote earlier this year for Glamour’s Glamocracy blog titled, “Why are all the big political bloggers men?”:
Amy Richards, an author and one of the co-founders of Third Wave, thinks that the amount of attention focused on the boys might be more than just their first-mover status—it’s an artifact of their historical control of the media. Richards claims that “Political punditry has always been dominated by men and thus blogging is likely to follow that pattern.” Richards agrees that women aren’t becoming blogospheric stars as quickly as some of their male colleagues. She says, “I know that women are jumping into this debate with their opinions and perspectives, but because they are doing so in spaces more likely to attract women—they aren’t being legitimized.”
Ezra Klein agreed with Amy about the ghettoization of female voices, noting that while male political bloggers are known as “political” bloggers, women are more often known as “feminist” bloggers. Male bloggers are seen as talking about politics with a universal point of view, but when we women bring our perspective to the field, it’s seen as a minority opinion.
Despite the discrepancy in opinion about who has it easier, both Carpentier and Duff seemed to agree in their conclusion: a pretty face only gets you so many readers if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
This was echoed in a recent interview at SFGate: when publications around the country started to ditch their sex columnists, Violet Blue interviewed Steve Hall, the publisher and editor of the hit ad blog Adrants, about hotness and the web.
“The old adage is ‘sex sells’ and it’s come to be accepted as fact. Where do you think this notion comes from?” Blue asked him.
“It comes from the simple fact everyone… well, at least most everyone, loves sex, has sex, likes to think about sex and likes to look at sexy people,” Hall responded. “It’s just the way humans are naturally programmed.”
Initially sexual imagery can “sell”—when it comes to attracting attention to an ad. After all, humans are innately programmed to respond to titillating imagery and the possibility of sex. It’s just in our DNA. So it’s natural for marketers to use this attraction and for people to respond. But, it can be a lame cop-out used by marketers who lack imagination to create more compelling work that will sustain itself beyond the initial titillation.
Hall’s conclusion falls in line with what Carpentier and Duff are saying: sexy is good, but sexy needs content.
“It’s hard to dispute the popularity of female bloggers, but popularity isn’t everything,” wrote Duff in closing. “Libertarian Girl got a lot of readers, but not much respect…. Women walk a fine line between popularity and credibility, caught in an eternal struggle between beauty and professionalism.”
IN NUMBERS WE TRUST
If blogging is so much easier for women, it would follow that there would be more women bloggers than men. Or do women have it easier because there is a disproportionate woman to male ratio?
It’s hard to make a correct estimate about the number of female versus male bloggers. Even Technorati, which analyzes the blogosphere annually, disclosed that out of the more than 1.2 million bloggers who have registered with them, the survey on which they based their report was based on a sample of a mere 1,290 responses. Their findings suggest that the blogosphere is split unevenly: 66 percent is male and 34 percent is female, with the gap being a little less wide in the US: 57 percent of bloggers are male and 43 percent are female.
I say we should take this with a grain of salt because last year, a Synovate/Marketing Daily survey conducted online with 1,000 adults in the US revealed that “more women than men are bloggers, with 20 percent of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 percent of men.”
It’s incredibly hard to conduct a proper census.
On a whim, I looked over my blog roll and counted how my favorite blogs were split gender-wise. Women: 24. Men: 22. I was a minority among my friends, who, upon a quick survey, found their blogrolls were largely male-dominated.
Upon closer inspection, I found that the web industry part of my blogroll was heavily male and that the only reason I had close to a tie was that I had a whole section devoted to sex columnists, who are primarily female.
BEAUTY MYTH VERSION WEB 2.0
Kara Jesella at The New York Times, who covered this year’s BlogHer conference, touched on the topic:
There is a measure of parity on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among Internet users, 14 percent of men and 11 percent of women blog.
A study conducted by BlogHer and Compass Partners last year found that 36 million women participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs…. Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming four women on its list of 25.
“Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t,” said Megan McArdle, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly who writes a blog about economic issues. She added that women are taught not to be aggressive and analytical in the way that the political blogosphere demands, and are more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say.
If we’re successful, is it that we’re a hot piece of ass? And if we’re not a hot piece of ass, are we just not worth reading? That’s the thing, see. Duff thinks women have it easier than men—but he seems to forget that not all women look like a barely legal mail-order bride.
“God help you if you are an ugly girl,” sings Ani Difranco in 32 Flavors. “‘Course too pretty is also your doom, ’cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”
IT’S (A) COMPLEX
After Duff was eviscerated by Carpentier, I shot him a note cynically stating that I didn’t think anyone would read me if they didn’t think I was hot. I don’t know if this is true or not and though I have toyed with the idea of doing a survey, I’m not exactly crazy about knowing the answer.
When I was fifteen, my mother had a dinner party and introduced my sister and me to a friend as follows: “this is my genius and this is my model.” To this day, my sister and I joke that she gave us both a complex. I like to pretend it’s not really true, but if I’m to be perfectly frank, I spent such an inordinate amount of time during my adolescence trying to prove that I had a brain that my mother forbade me from bringing up physics at dinner parties. Heavy topics lead to indigestion, darling, and who wants to think about GUTs and TOEs while eating anyway?
For the longest time I had no pictures of myself on my blog. I do now. I want to say it’s not true that it matters. But I think it does. Physical appeal won’t get you everything, but it can get you noticed. As we drift further from words online, pulling more media into our work and being more social within our industries, getting noticed becomes increasingly important.
There is no denying that there is a danger in this. The last thing any of us want, after all, is for physical attractiveness to become a bona fide occupational qualification for the blogger. It’s distracting.
Further, the man behind Libertarian Girl felt he was being discriminated against because he was male and unattractive. He’s not the only man who has expressed this idea. Remember that August article on Wired about how to be internet famous? The fifth commandment: be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.
DEEPLY SUPERFICIAL
I judge magazines by their covers, I judge newspapers by their front pages, and I won’t deny that I gravitate toward good looking people.
Nancy Etcoff is not wrong when writes in her book Survival of the Prettiest, which explores human tendency toward the physically attractive, that “Beauty will continue to operate—outside jurisdiction in the lawless world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly collides with reality.” Physical attractiveness does have consequences that cannot be erased by denial.
But what we can do is bring the focus back.
It’s not just that “the anonymous nature of blog comments allows teenage boys (and way too many adult men) to abuse women online,” as Duff suggests: name-calling is an equal-opportunity blood sport. Women abuse women as much, if not more, as men do. And we abuse men, too.
We see fights on the daily explode across the blogosphere that invariably go there: fat, anorexic, old-looking, twig-legged, troll-footed, lazy-eyed, bad-complected, ugly, fug. Hey, even the most decorous of us have thought it at some point if we’re to be honest with ourselves for one moment.
Let’s commit ourselves to staying on topic. Don’t bring the body into it unless the body is central to the discussion.
Even if it’s a compliment like “beautiful.”
ADDENDA
Now can someone send me names and links to female web bloggers and male sex or relationship bloggers? Blogs are made popular by the masses and that means that evening out the playing field is largely in our hands.
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