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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

(Your Googleicious rank is based on how much dirt about you is available online. For example: Chris Brogan, who has 317,000 available pieces about him, including several videos, isn’t as Googleicious as, say, Emily Gould, whose 60,400 results come jam-packed with all kinds of confessionals and exposes from ex-lovers and colleagues.)

Googling is now part of the dating process. It’s like running a background check from the comfort of your own home.

Except unlike a background check (or a simple search on CriminalSearches.com), the whole wide web is often much more thorough, revealing even the most embarrassing details, as provided by friends, colleagues, exes, enemies and the person in question themselves.

Case in point: a couple of years ago my sister and I were using YouTube to look for a commercial I’d been in for Coca-Cola Asia when we inadvertently landed on a video of my ex-boyfriend singing and dancing at some corporate benefit. He and I had had a horrible, drama-fueled break-up complete with a bull run and front page scoop but had since made up and become good friends.

Of course, even my esteem for him could not keep my tongue in check when I lay eyes on him dancing like a chipmunk caught on an electric fence.

“Oh dear god, I can’t believe I fucked him!”

I wondered whether he knew that he was online, at the reach of anyone with internet access. Then, almost reflexively, ran a search for myself. The number of items that came up were limited, but my Googleicious score was pretty high thanks to my blog.

I grew up on an island in the Pacific. A girl can only do so much reading, jet skiing, scuba diving, lounging and partying. By the age of thirteen, I had built myself a world online, a world I naively imagined no one in my daily life would find. Sexcapades, god-awful poetry, rants, obsessive odes of desperate want, tales of crashing comedowns—all of it was at the world’s fingertips via Google.

Richard and I had just started dating at the time. I mentioned it to him because I didn’t want it to be an issue later. What I didn’t know was that Richard had already read everything. Possessed, he’d Googled all night long and retraced my life without my knowledge.

“I got more than I bargained for.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, mortified.

“I felt wrong. You’ve been doing this online thing for so long, who am I to tell you I feel at odds about it? How could someone so new to your life demand that you stop doing something you enjoy?”

“You wanted me to stop blogging?”

“I would never ask you to do that. This is who you are.”

I wanted to tell him that no, I wasn’t my blog, that blogging was a byproduct of living, like a foot print I can’t help making as I walk. I didn’t—there was no point in confusing him with my self-indulgent rant. He had the main thing down clearly: that he should never ask me to quit blogging.

Then I started writing about him.

T.M.I.

My friend Katerina recently ended things with her boyfriend after a drawn-out battle about her musings on the internet.

Nathan didn’t mind that Katerina wrote until his ex-girlfriend and baby momma started stalking her on the internet. Now, Nathan’s ex knows everything about his new life with Katerina: the good, the bad and the downright mortifying.

“Why do you have to give her ammunition?” he demanded of Katerina when they last spoke. “If you could just stop, she would be out of our lives!”

“He’s wrong,” Katerina told me later. “His ex will stop at nothing. If she can’t stalk me on the internet, she’ll stalk me in the physical world. It’s who she is. I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over with Nathan about how I should feel ashamed for posting such personal stuff out on the Internet for the world to see. It’s like it’s my writing that’s the problem here. It’s not. Nathan enables that woman to continue with this craziness, if it’s not my blog, it will be something else.”

My husband gets where Nathan is coming from.

“Well, first of all, he needs to grow some balls,” Richard says, leaning against the kitchen counter and taking a sip of his Coke. “Next time he talks to his ex, he needs to tell her, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re reading, I don’t want to hear what you’re thinking, all I need out of your pretty little mouth is what time I need to pick up my child.’ Aside from that, though, I have to agree with the guy. I mean, there’s a line. No one wants their personal details all over the place. No one wants to walk into a room and know people are thinking, ‘O-M-G, that’s the boyfriend, he can’t keep it hard,’ or ‘he makes her cum fucking her in the ass.’”

“So you draw the line at sex.” I conclude, looking at him.

“Not necessarily.”

“Where do you draw the line?”

“At too much information.”

“How much is too much?” I ask and then, I invoke Emily Gould. “Shouldn’t he have known this would happen? Shouldn’t he have known that she, a writer, would write about him?”

BLOG VS. PRINT MEDIA

“At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public space where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt,” wrote Emily Gould in her New York Times Magazine debut earlier this year. “Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.”

Gould described how she and her ex-boyfriend Henry fought about the things she was writing about him in her blog.

“I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings was part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself with being part of the world I described.”

Henry eventually left her life. The guy after him, Joshua David Stein crucified her for blogging about their relationship in a piece for Page Six.

My husband thinks writing for “legitimate publications” is somehow different than blogging.

Former relationship columnist Matt Katz doesn’t agree. Beyond the fact that a blog has no restrictions on form and word count, a column and a blog are essentially the same thing: a writer, exposed.

I ask him whether his soon-to-be wife ever minded being written about.

“Nope,” he replies. “But she read beforehand.”

Smart man. Now that old media is merging with new media, it doesn’t really matter what kind of writing is going on. Essay, poem, column, song lyrics—if it’s in print, chances are that it will be online, making someone’s Googleicious score soar.

FODDER

My husband’s attitude toward my blog changed when my posts changed from the praises of a fawning girlfriend in the throes of passion to the musings of a woman trying to make a relationship work with a man who didn’t have a lot of time, whose family largely hated her, and whose desires in the bedroom were different than hers.

Few mind being praised, but no one likes being cast in a critical light. Suddenly, the blog took center stage in our fights.

“Going to your blog for him must be like walking into a party where everyone is talking about him,” my mother reflected one night during the worst of the fights. “Only instead of quickly shushing themselves, they keep right on talking as though he’s not there at all.”

It’s true—it wasn’t just me who was talking about him in the void of the web. I was engaging a roomful of people about our life and they were waging in with everything from helpful advice to, “BTW, AV, you left your bra at my place last night!”

Richard never asked me to stop, but he referenced the blog enough to let me know he was displeased.

“You know what?” he screamed at me once. “Forget it. Just go fucking blog this!”

And I did.

PASSWORD-PROTECTED

“I offered to make the posts that mentioned Josh inaccessible by password-protecting them,” Gould wrote, recounting the last conversation she had with her ex, before he detailed their affair at Page Six.

Stein’s response? “You should be password-protected.”

Of course, according to Stein’s piece, the fateful talk outside Gawker headquarters went a little differently. He told her his privacy was his, not hers, and she smiled and responded, “You should have known better. After all, I’m a blogger.”

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

How do you sleep with a writer?

“Carefully,” writes fantasy author Catherynne Valente.

First of all, you must be prepared to see yourself dressed up in her clothes. In drag, in costume, in spangly eyeliner and a fedora hat.

You have to steel yourself, and accept the following with equanimity: She is going to write about you.

It takes a strong person to bear this: you’ll see your private jokes, your secrets, your childhood, the angle of your penis, the heft of your breasts, your personal griefs, your complaints, your house and your profession ground up and mulched, composted and laid out bare, for anyone to see, in her books. Her books are naked, and she will make you match her. It will not be comfortable. She’ll use everything you are—but she’s fair, she uses everything she is, too.

Every time you touch her, she will store that touch away, to be accessed later, spooled out, smoothed over, given to characters she hasn’t even thought of yet. Every time you fight, she will mentally catalogue your turns of phrase. If that seems inhuman, well, she can be like that. Computers are not so ruthless about retaining information.

Whether a novelist, columnist, poet, essayist or blogger, if you hang with a writer, you will eventually become fodder. But are Gould and Valente right? Is it fair to say that anyone who goes to bed with a writer should be prepared to see themselves exposed?

“At some point or another,” Katz says. “Even if it’s two years down the line.”

“Has anyone written really personal stuff about you?” I ask him.

“I can’t think of anyone who wrote too much.”

I’ve been written about. I think now about the first time it happened, on a bathroom stall in high school (yeah, I’m old. Back then we didn’t have JuicyCampus or GossipReport). I remember I walked into the cafeteria and the entire room went silent. With all eyes on me, I cocked an eyebrow and gave a little wave of my hand as if to say, “shoo,” and sat down at my little group’s corner table, hell-bent on not allowing my face to betray the insane beating of my heart. Over the course of that lunch, at least 20 people came over to tell me what they’d seen on the bathroom wall.

I refused to go look at it because I wanted to actively deny the person who’d done it the pleasure of a reaction. But I forgot about it and, later that week, found myself looking up at the words. I can’t remember now whether it said I was a “Perusian” slut or a bitch or both, but I will never forget the other things people had written around it, things like, “You spelled her name wrong,” “UR jealous cause your boyfriend thinks she’s hotter than U,” “Is Perusian someone of Persian-Russian ancestry?” and “She’s the antichrist.”

It wasn’t pleasant, but it was kind of funny, too. And flattering, in a weird way.

It wasn’t funny or flattering when an ex-fiance launched a blog about all the reasons I would make the worst wife, including the fact that I can’t have children, which at that time wasn’t something that I readily admitted. But it wasn’t the end of the world, either.

But maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe it’s different for people who blog and who expose themselves on a regular basis than it is for someone whose online presence is minimal.

FRONT ROW

It’s hard to draw the line. When you love someone, especially someone creative whose self expression is found in words, you don’t want to be the asshole who sets limits.

At some point, my husband stopped reading.

I have to admit that when he first told me he didn’t read my blog, I was a little hurt. In a way, it felt like he was rejecting a part of me (so much for “I’m not my blog,” huh?). But now I can appreciate the space he’s let me have within our relationship for me to explore what I think and what I feel—even when it’s about him and not always entirely positive. He views my blog now the same way he does my nights out with girlfriends: a sort of necessary thing he has no business being a part of, though he figures largely in the conversation.

“If there is anything you need to tell me, I know you’ll have no problem telling me,” he said. “I don’t need to read your blog because I have a front row seat to your life. I get parts of you no one else will ever see.”

He does.

Still, every once in a while, especially when we’re apart for longer than usual, I’ll spot him on my site and laugh because he always skips to the entries with pictures.