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.

I write all of you at once, a convenience of modern technology, and in a sense it is like sitting and taking coffee by your side. What I want to share is very personal, but you know how I am—I’ve never lacked candor. Ready?

I have decided that a man’s libido must have an invisible umbilical cord that connects it to the New York Stock Exchange; I have no other way to account for the fact that I don’t recall the last time I was intimate with my husband…

The e-mail went on from there, running with the stocks theme and culminating in a full-frontal exposé of my impending sexual Great Depression.

Being a veteran of the internet world of oversharing, I haven’t felt morning-after-post shame in years. But the night after sending that missive to my mother and aunts, I have to admit that I had a moment of doubt. We are close, but they are, after all, a different generation and culture, one to which such disclosures are not only uncommon, but censured.

Had I gone too far?

Why is there such a divide between students of literature and students of journalism? Don’t we share the same curiosity? Don’t we share the same attention to detail? Don’t we share the same medium?

Book burning is a higher offense than flag burning. But we have no trouble tearing up newspapers to wrap things when we move, or to line the box of a new pet so it won’t piss on the floor. Books are the highest art and newsprint is a lesser art—if considered art at all.

I consider news writing art. It, like literature, has form, rhyme and reason. It, like literature, tells the human story. It, like literature, can unite us and divide us.

Where do blogs fit in all this?

My writer friends laugh at the idea of a blog as literature. I don’t. In the beginning, we carved hieroglyphs on the great walls of the Web. Now, we have more structure, we have codes, we see how those before us did it and build on what we learn from them. The blog has stopped being a repository of adolescent, underdeveloped feelings and has become a narrative, an exploration, and a journey.

This is a return to the great tradition of story-telling. Instead of sitting around the glowing fire and listening to the great stories of those who came before unfold, we now sit in front of glowing boxes and share our own narratives.

“Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul’s journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one’s own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in her classic work Women Who Run With The Wolves. “Stories are medicine… They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”

When Emily Gould coined the phrase “overshare” at Gawker, she gave a name to something we were all doing but as of yet had no real name for.

According to Technorati’s State of the Blogophere 2008 report, 79 percent of bloggers are personal bloggers, meaning that they blog about topics of personal interest not associated with a blogger’s work. This is fertile ground for overshares.

While Technorati says that “confessional” blogging is not a priority among the top blogs they surveyed, their sample is limited to a thousand bloggers. The tag “life” beat “business” by 2,392 occurrences, and “technology by 17,349 occurrences in the month of June.

There’s a difference, you say, picking out any one of the 133 million blog records indexed by Technorati. Not all of it is art. It can’t be.

“The best work speaks intimately to you even though it has been consciously made to speak intimately to thousands of others,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her essay Sexual Semiotics. “The bad writer believes that sincerity of feeling will be enough, and pins her faith on the power of experience. The true writer knows that feeling must give way to form. It is through the form, not in spite of, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people.”

As personal narrative began to take shape, the blog stopped being a repository of endless rants and started to become a place where we shared self and experience. Bloggers began to connect. In many personal blogs today, we are riding the current of experience, but we see the power of form and embrace it.

I can’t define art, but I know that art stimulates consciousness. Stories do.

Blogs are life stories.

There is a part in Curtis Sittenfeld’s book American Wife that haunts me. Alice has escaped from her alcoholic husband with her daughter and sought refuge at her mother’s house. One night, when they’re alone, Alice asks her mother if she and her father ever quarreled while he was alive.

“But you and Dad never had serious fights, did you? Where you considered ending the marriage?”

“That was much more unusual then.” My mother was threading the needle, not looking at me, and her tone remained even. Still, I’m sure she understood exactly what we were talking about.

“It’s not so uncommon to get a divorce now, but years ago, I didn’t know anyone who’d done it. I suppose the Conners were the first couple I knew—do you remember Hazel and William? People said he had a gambling problem. She was a nice lady though.”

My mother turned the canvas over, peering at a particular stitch.

“There were times when your father made me mad, but I can’t say the thought of leaving him ever crossed my mind. I suppose I made a decision—” She paused. “There was a good deal of conflict in my family growing up, and it wasn’t very pleasant to be around. It only causes more of the same—once people work themselves up, it hardly matters what the disagreement was about, does it? After I married, I decided if ever your father and I had a cross word, I’d meet him with kindness. I decided, if I think he’s wrong or if I think he’s right, I won’t try to prove it. I’ll remind him that I care for him in the hope it reminds him that he cares for me, too. I was fortunate because your father had a gentle nature.”

She looked up, offering a willfully bland smile. “Not every man does.”

I’m not encouraging to divorce Charlie, but if you do, I’ll understand—wasn’t that what she was saying more or less?

She had turned the canvas over again, she was stitching steadily, and I leaned in to look at it more closely. I said, “That’s going to be a beautiful pillow.”

How familiar that is to me! My family is like this—not my parents, thankfully, but everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s the end of the world, if you ask any of them how they’re doing, the answer is invariably, “fabulous, darling!” Topics like grief, failure and dissatisfaction are not welcome—they’re to be quickly derailed and navigated into more pleasant subjects.

I wonder sometimes whether my parents were ever like this, too, whether they changed only because we moved. There are no secrets on the islands. If something goes wrong with anyone, you’ll know all about it—and pitch in however you can. Micronesia is a world that welcomes all comers regardless of heritage. The overhare is a social currency.

My grandparents undoubtedly think my sister and I were uncivilized by natives.

They should see me shimmy up a coconut tree.

As with everything, detractors have risen across the blogosphere mocking those who dare to share in the same way that polite society once shunned those who dared to speak their truths, simple and complex.

But we have our voices and we’ve found courage in those who told their deeply personal stories before us. We’ve found kindred spirits who share our trials and we have opened our eyes to the realities that others are living.

In a Sex and the City world, we don’t seem to have a lot of trouble talking about their significant others. I know my friends and I never did. But I’ve noticed something funny in suburbia.

Silence.

The rare spouse who mentions a quarrel or the slightest shred of displeasure at parenthood more often than not finds his words swept away as others wax poetic about how much they just adore their spouses and offspring.

I think it’s reckless to perpetuate the notion of a happily ever after. I hold silence responsible for much of the marriage malaise.

So when people ask me how marriage is, I say it’s a pain in the neck. It’s like taking care of a giant, ancient machine that can help you accomplish a lot of tasks in the emotional fulfillment department, but which constantly needs maintenance and calibration.

The question that preempted my overshare to my aunts was: “how’s the perfect marriage?”

My response was that it was anything but.

I thought perhaps I had crossed a line.

Then, in a few days’ time, the responses began to arrive. The things I found were startling. Truths and secrets began to come out. My willingness to expose my not-so-perfect marriage enabled some of the women I loved and respected the most to share in their own stories.

All of a sudden, we weren’t so alone.

Every time we blog, we take a risk like the one I took in calling a congress of people together and lying yourself open for them. It’s risky and largely indecorous by normal societal standards, not to mention that it leaves you vulnerable to anyone who cares to cast a stone as they walk by, but what is art if not an expression of self, and what is an expression of self, if not risk?

If for every twenty stones cast, someone silenced can feel they’ve been given a voice or are at least not alone, then throw those stones. It’s why I once decided to embrace the thankless career of the journalist and why I blog today.

“In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself,” says Clive Thompson in closing to his New York Times Magazine piece about ambient awareness. But it’s much more than a personal journey because it’s not kept hidden under your mattress. It’s a generational journey, all of us making it together as more and more of us link to one another online.

I think Muriel Rukeyser was right when she wrote the following lines of Käthe Kollwitz: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”

Women and men are splitting the world with their truths, one word at a time.

Amber Rhea points out that Dooce used the word “overshare” in an interview with Glamour Magazine as far back as 2005. (October 19, 2008)