“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.

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.

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“Deep down, all insecure sluts just want to be loved.”

It’s not the kind of response you’d imagine a bride-to-be would receive after announcing her engagement, but that’s exactly what Jezebel’s Tracie Egan got after she posted about her coming nuptials earlier this month.

“I can’t imagine having the time on my hands to obsess about someone I claim to hate, follow their writing and then going out of my way to try to make them feel bad,” she wrote in her blog this week.

Few people can, though you’d think that with all the stuff that’s constantly going on in this fast-paced place we call the World Wide Web, that most of us would be too busy to waste time being discourteous to other people.

Wrong.

“The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness,” Amy Harmon wrote in the New York Times four years ago. “Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented—and often unintentional—degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent’s lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.”

But these aren’t adolescents we’re talking about here. They’re adults and even though the web isn’t as wild as it used to be, we’re still acting without any sense.

My good friend Atherton Bartelby is the one who turned me on to Time Out New York columnist and former Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. Allison, who gained celebrity online thanks largely to media blog Gawker, is a central figure in the microcelebrity wave and a frequent target of random reader hatred.

I got to see the metamorphosis happen first-hand and I still don’t know what happened. Atherton absolutely loved her columns up until some point over the summer, when he became cross with her over nothing in particular and started railing about everything she did with the fire of a thousand trolls.

Neither he nor I know Allison personally (she and I exchanged a couple of e-mails in June and I think may have I freaked her out with a rant about love and Stendhal), but she was so often a topic of Atherton’s rants that he and I actually had a fight about her.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked him one day over the phone, following a tirade about how reading about her at some tech event was giving him angina. “Julia is so pop! Andy Warhol is giggling from the other side. I think you’re jealous.”

He didn’t hang up on me, but I know he wanted to.

Ultimately, we have power over what we read. We can choose to spend our day reading content that inspires and informs us or waste it on blogs we don’t enjoy.

Personally, I don’t think there are any bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers I love and bloggers into whose target demographic I don’t fit. It doesn’t mean they suck, it just means they’re not for me. So I don’t read them. Simple, right?

“Dude, just stop reading her blog.”

But he couldn’t.

Dear Emily Post Institute,

I’m greatly enjoying your latest edition of Etiquette and thank you for the time you have put into making available an updated version of such a helpful guide. I must admit, however, that I find the chapter on electronic communication a little lacking. Seeing as most of our interaction in this day and age occurs on the web, I strongly recommend future editions give more space to this matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,
AV Flox

In August, Wired ran a story about internet fame featuring Julia Allison. The article, which was part of Wired’s How-To issue, gave tips for aspiring fameballs: seek photo ops with high-profile people, dress to draw attention, keep your readers guessing, let your minions fight your battles, and be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.

It was a fun, light-hearted piece. Most readers hated it.

“Wired is supposed to be a legitimate source for all things technology,” wrote a reader identifying himself as Tomcore, “and helping further propagate a wannabe-celebutant—clarification—wannabe ROFLcon celebutant like Julie [sic] Allison, discredits the source. Don’t waste your time or ours doing reporting on insignificant attention hungry parasites. They’re everywhere and hardly worthy a Wired cover. Or at least if you do—make it someone entertaining—like the Starwars Kid.”

The rest of the web wasn’t far behind. At Valleywag, where Melissa Gira Grant had written a piece on the subject, a commenter whined, “I just cancelled my Wired subscription because of this Julia crap. I’m sorry but she is not a geek, not news worthy, not VC funding worthy. She is a high maintanence [sic] attention whore making a mockery of the industry. There are so many women they could have put on that cover that are intelligent geeks but instead they chose her. It is completely wrong and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for falling for her bullshit.”

At Gawker, the blog that’d made her famous, commenters were busy discussing how badly Photoshopped her legs looked. And on this month’s Wired, a reader graced the Rants section with the following jab, “She’s not worth the pixels she demands on our screens, and if I could find a way to blame her for the current mortgage crisis, I would.”

Last week Atherton published a piece featuring the ten most charming and often overlooked places in Hawaii. The piece, which was a final tribute to his time on the islands, took him days. He was so excited, he actually IMd me a link as soon as he wrapped up.

Not even a day later, an anonymous commenter hit his blog: “I find it interesting that on this list of must-dos almost none of the photographs are yours… surely in ten years you’ve actually ‘done’ these places at least once, enough to snap a pic or at least give us something more personal about your recommendation. Fairly or not, this leads one to believe that your recommendations are based not from personal experience but rather a spastic and deliberately obscure aggregation of ‘bests’ from travel blogs or hiking trail sites.”

While we build better blogs with criticism than we do with fawning praise, I’m disappointed that someone would take the time to reply to a carefully put-together blog post simply to scold the writer for not using his own images, insinuate he has never visited any of the specified locations, and attack him for being “deliberately obscure”—isn’t the whole point of the post to bring to light the lesser known wonders of the islands?

I don’t disagree that seeing these places through the blogger’s eyes would have been more interesting, however unprofessional or blurry the picture. A constructive suggestion would have been, “I know a lot of people don’t carry cameras when they hike and if they do, don’t always take the best photos, but this post would have been better if you had shared what you saw of these locations that touched you so deeply, even if they aren’t professional quality.”

There’s an immense difference between helpful critique and hurtful criticism. Critique may not always be easy to take, but those offering it do it with the objective of helping those whose content they enjoy to develop even better content. We do it with firm words but never lose sight of the effort the creators of the content have put forth.

“When you’re a victim of a personal attack online, the first thing to remember is this: It’s extremely difficult to put yourself out there on the web, but it’s supremely easy to critique or mock others who do,” wrote Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani a couple of years ago.

Her comments are something that will always stay with me because of how simple and true they are. It’s not easy to put your thoughts and experience out into the world, especially in a culture that believes that they have the right to destroy everything that isn’t hidden or somehow protected.

“Would you graffiti a car in the street just because it wasn’t parked inside a garage?” I asked a friend once.

“That analogy doesn’t even make sense,” she responded. “The car belongs to someone.”

“So do the words used to represent the thoughts this person is expressing. So does that blog. The internet is a space and a post is a person’s property. And by leaving a vicious and useless anonymous comment, you’re vandalizing it.”

She didn’t respond.

“The web is crawling with overcaffeinated surfers who have been staring at a glowing box for hours—not the ideal environment for human interaction,” Trapani explained in her Lifehacker piece. “It’s easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don’t quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are ‘small’ and ‘weak.’”

“I’m really glad it happened,” Atherton told me the following day over coffee. “It’s helped me appreciate Julia Allison on a whole other level.”

Just then an e-mail tumbled into my inbox directly from my blog’s contact page: “Your piece about Philip Noble [sic] is insulting. First Nick Douglas and now this? You’re a male apologist and a cheap male-pleaser and you need to have your va-jay-jay card revoked.”

The e-mail address the commenter had included is telling “not@telling.com”. If a commenter can’t even include a working e-mail address or URL, he is a coward who lacks the courage of his convictions and isn’t worth another thought.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s OK to disagree with people, but always ask yourself if you have something to bring to the table. Personal attacks and assumptions about the people who have expressed their views before you are not valid arguments for anything. If you’re so enraged by what you read that you can’t function, then don’t try! Offending others will not make them more likely to listen to you. In fact, it often has the exact opposite effect.

It’s not that difficult to present an opposing viewpoint in a constructive way. Just follow the rule of the Cs: be civil, clear, concise and constructive. Build, don’t break.

I can’t imagine anyone calling me a misogynist to my face, and neither can I see anyone walking up to Egan and calling her an insecure slut.

In a web 2.0 world, I think we need to change the old saying, “if you can’t say something nice” to “if you wouldn’t say it to my face, then don’t say anything at all.”

If you still can’t play nice, then, to quote Egan, “FAQ you.”

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