James — she's still going by the pseudonym, hasn't revealed her real name, and that's not her in the pic — says she started blogging to help support her kids during a tough financial time. She began using a male pen name one day simply to distance a project from her still-struggling business, and, she writes, "jobs became easier to get." She continues,

Taking a man's name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

Did I quit promoting my own name? Hell yeah.

Under her male name, James made enough money to buy a small house and give her kids a comfortable life. She's only coming out now because "someone I trusted got mad and decided to out me" (a motivation with echoes of Belle de Jour). Interestingly, the copywriting and web design blog she owns (whose About Us section reads, "Owner James Chartrand is the pen name of a female thirty-something copywriter, problogger and online entrepreneur from Quebec, Canada") has a very stereotypically male aesthetic, with a bullet ripping through its title, Men with Pens. The About Us section even describes another female blogger as "the team's rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol' boys club." Chartrand's disguise was, it seems, rather thick.

The success of BlogHer and the mommy blogger movement have led some to hail the blogosphere as a place of gender equality. While some mommy bloggers snag Wal-Mart endorsements, the world of business blogging — Men with Pens advertises its "business sense, branding expertise, and savvy sales and marketing smarts" may still be more of a Mad Men type of place. It's impossible to tell whether the bullets-and-bricks aesthetic of Men with Pens was a calculated decision, but it's possible that a male name and a stereotypically male persona are favored in the web marketing industry. Are mom-bloggers seen as fundamentally amateur, even if they shill for big companies, while men get the real professional gigs (even if those "men" are actually moms themselves)?

At this point, James seems to have built a brand, and it's unlikely that she'll suffer too much from her outing. But a post she wrote last year now seems eerily apt. In "Would You Become Someone Else To Achieve Your Dreams?," James writes, "Think about how you would react if someone told you that who you are is holding you back – and you knew they were right. This person tells you that if you were someone else, you could live your dream." She adds,

If you had the chance to be someone else, would you do it? Would you take on a role that makes opportunity possible, makes life easier, and makes your dreams become reality? More importantly… who would you be?

For James, it appears the answer was yes — and it's easy to understand why. Still, it's pretty sad that the "role that makes opportunity possible, makes life easier, and makes your dreams become reality" still has to be that of a man.

Why James Chartrand Wears Women's Underpants [Copyblogger]
Would You Become Someone Else To Achieve Your Dreams? [Men With Pens]
About Us [Men With Pens]

Belle de Jour revealed herself as scientist Brooke Magnanti in an interview yesterday with India Knight of the Times of London. She says she took up prostitution as a way to make quick money while finishing her Ph.D, and that she had begun to feel "it was time" to acknowledge that period in her life openly, not just in her anonymous books and blog entries. Knight's piece also references "an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth lurking in the background," but Helen Pidd of the Guardian says the real impetus was a forthcoming exposé in — of course — the Daily Mail. Pidd also writes that some are angry at Magnanti for "glamorising and normalising" prostitution.

Magnanti says she charged £300 an hour (her cut was £200, or about $335), and was "very lucky" never to have had any problems with her clients. But Pidd also quotes Finn Mackay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, who fires back:

To come out saying, 'It's so wonderful' is a slap in the face to the great majority of women who have had horrendous experiences in the sex industry. I'm glad to hear that she hasn't been burned, beaten, buggered, raped and spat on, but she shouldn't sell down the river those whose experiences are different from hers by glamorising and normalising sex work.

On the other side, public health professor Helen Ward says,

Belle de Jour's case is not the norm, but it's not that unusual either. Policy makers tend to portray sex workers as either drug-addicted young women [...] or as trafficked migrant women who have no control over their lives. But I've been working with sex workers for over 20 years as a researcher and as a doctor, and I know that there is a wide range of people involved in sex work.

This last statement is key. Not all prostitutes are graduate students pulling down hundreds of dollars an hour for safe sexual encounters, nor are they all streetwalkers exchanging blowjobs for drugs. What separates Magnanti from women Mackay mentions may be simply the presence of other options. Magnanti says she chose sex work over waitressing or borrowing from friends and family. She also worked as a computer programmer at one point but found prostitution "so much more enjoyable." Magnanti had both a support system she chose not to utilize and other marketable skills — sex work, for her, was freely chosen as the most attractive of a number of possibilities.

For many prostitutes, that's not the case. The Chicago street prostitutes Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner spoke to for Superfreakonomics often don't have education or monied friends to fall back on, and for them prostitution may be more necessary than "enjoyable." As Levitt and Dubner point out, their experience with sex work is also very different — they make less money than Magnanti, and they face greater risks. Levitt and Dubner don't really address the fact that prostitution is just one of the many areas where being middle class and white gives you a significant leg up. But Magnanti is now in a position to address this.

Now that she's out in the open, Magnanti could point out that her writing doesn't "glamorize" prostitution — it merely reveals that for some women, sex work can have big payoffs and manageable risks. For others, it can be exploitative and dangerous. Women (and men, and children) around the world need protection from forced prostitution, no one should have to view sex work as the only option, and prostitutes living in poverty deserve protections (like legalization of their activities) that might not necessarily be popular with high-end prostitutes who rely on illegality for high prices. The truth is that prostitution as a whole is neither glamorous nor dangerous. Instead, it's as complex as the sexual urges prostitutes satisfy. Magnanti is well-placed to examine its complexities — let's hope she does so.

Belle De Jour Drops Her Anonymity [BBC]
Belle De Jour Revealed At Last: Scientist Who Penned Diary Of A London Call Girl Outs Herself To Foil Daily Mail [Guardian]
Now I'm Not Anonymous... [Belle de Jour]
Sexblogger's Tale: How My Life Changed Forever [Guardian]
I'm Belle De Jour [TimesOnline]
Belle De Jour Says Her Mother Supports Her [Telegraph]

A 2006 study showed 56% of blogs are created by women, and this created a a certain amount of buzz about the Internet as a new bastion of women's representation, in contrast to the old boys' club of the mainstream media. But according to a new Technorati report, 67% of bloggers are now men. As Marian Wang of Mother Jones points out, that's a worse imbalance than at American newspapers, where 63% of staffers are male.

So why aren't more women saddling up the WordPress pony? Dr. Melissa Clouthier has some annoying ideas! She writes,

When it comes the arena of ideas, the women who blog are not typical women. Over and over, the women who blog are tougher. Like the shotgun wielding Western expansionists of yore, women bloggers take shots and can shoot back.

I guess I could be flattered that Clouthier thinks I am some kind of Annie Oakley, but I'm more concerned that she thinks women who don't blog are wilting flowers. That said, I do agree with part of her explanation (despite the fact that she's defending conservative ladybloggers from "'enlightened' male liberal commenters and bloggers." She writes that "just about every conservative woman blogger, including me, has endured horrible personal, violent and sexual insults." And, she continues,

Most women simply do not want to put up with this garbage. They feel threatened and they worry about their safety and the safety of their children. Michelle Malkin had to actually move after her personal information was plastered on the web. She is a mother. She has children. There are nutjobs out there and in this business, there is a very real risk to personal safety. It's something guys just don't have to deal with as much.

I'm not a mother (and I do detect an unpleasant whiff of moms-are-special rhetoric in Clouthier's words), but I have felt unsafe as a result of responses to my posts. In general, both commenters and emailers are respectful, but I have been called some nasty names, as have other of this site's staffers. Are female bloggers more vulnerable to this type of harassment than male ones? Certainly men in the media receive plenty of threats, insults, and unconstructive criticism. However, I would wager that they get fewer comments on their looks, their weight, their sex lives and how all these things relate to their opinions. A female blogger, especially a progressive one, always gets a certain number of trolls who tell her she must ugly, lonely, and (horrors!) fat, and you don't have to be some kind of sissy to decide you don't care to subject yourself to this kind of hazing.

After this reasonably fair point, Clouthier goes off the rails into gender essentialism. She says,

In addition, women often don't like the intellectual jousting. Part of it is gender wiring. Men see verbal sparring as a testosterone-fueled challenge. Women see degraded communication and hostility. When they put an idea out there, it seems aggressive when someone rips the point of view to shreds. And, it is aggressive.

Emily Gould would disagree. On More Intelligent Life, the writer and occasional Jezebel contributor writes about becoming "the kind of person I can't bear: the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn't project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood." Maybe she just needs to get her "gender wiring" checked, but she writes persuasively about a type of girl-on-girl "intellectual jousting":

This critic believes it is her job to tear down women who are "off-message" because there is only so much publishing space allotted to women, and so more attention for them is less attention for her and other worthy types. This critic lives inside us all, but she is also embodied, occasionally, by real people. One of them, an online "feminist" columnist, once wrote a supposed defense of "women's voices" that dismissed something I'd written because the photos that accompanied the essay were of me lying (rather unprovocatively, to my mind) in bed. She'd said that the question wasn't why my voice was being heard–the implied answer being, presumably, my bed-lying ways–but why others weren't, "in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women's writing voices."

Gould and Clouthier are alike in one respect: they both conceive of a special status for women's discourse. Clouthier apparently thinks women are naturally nice and non-aggressive (which: bullshit), but Gould's statement is more complicated. She sees the columnist she discusses above (that would be Salon's Rebecca Traister, and if putting feminist in quotes isn't a "joust," I don't know what is) as part of a kind of female representation police, a group that jealously guards a supposedly finite female canon against unworthy interlopers. Do these police exist? Maybe, kind of — but I think Traister's piece is far more than an attempt to kick Gould out of the sandbox. She wraps it up with the line, "So rather than being troubled by the fact that Gould [...] has the spotlight, why not question why so few other versions of femininity are allowed to share it?"

I'd say, rather than being troubled by the fact that women criticize each other, why don't we embrace it? Yes, some girl-on-girl criticism is a form of misguided feminist gatekeeping, and no, we shouldn't expect all women to offer a comforting vision of our gender. But women's criticism of other women is too often discounted as cattiness, as infighting — men's writing of the same stripe would often be said to present "ideological" or "political" objections. I understand that Gould is talking about a very specific form of criticism, but I'd like to be able to participate even in that form — taking to task someone's representation of "women like me," without feeling like I'm committing a special female sin. Women supporting each other is often held up as a solution to their underrepresentation in all spheres, and it's an important one. But we also need the freedom to speak out against each other when we want to, as men have always done. We need the right to be "tough," in Clouthier's words, without second-guessing ourselves — and without holding ourselves to special standards just because we're women. When we have that right, maybe the world of blogging — a very critical one, but productive nonetheless — will be more open to us.

Where Are All The Lady Bloggers? [Mother Jones]
Why There Are Fewer Women Bloggers [Dr. Melissa Clouthier]
What Are Women Fighting About? [More Intelligent Life]

The Times article focuses on the blog-abandoning phenomenon, wherein a well-meaning internet user starts up a blog and then decides that the blog isn't worth the time or the energy. I know, you guys, this is pretty deep stuff. I'd post about it on my Friendster/MySpace/Blurty/Xanga/Angelfire/Geocities/Blogger/Wordpress page, but I don't remember any of the passwords to those and haven't used them in a looooong time. Where's my NYTimes trend piece?!

Anyhoo, the article focuses on blogger Judy Nichols, who once started a soccer mom blog before getting sick of it and abandoning it completely. "Like Mrs. Nichols," Douglas Quenqua of the Times writes, "Many people start blogs with lofty aspirations - to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?"

Quenqua notes that blogging platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have killed off the need to blog for many people, and that the immediacy of such programs has rendered long-form blogs into tl;dr territory. Many bloggers, he notes, drop their blogs when they realize that nobody is reading them, or when they feel that their privacy is at risk. Some people, he claims, get sick of blogging and want to do other things. I know, right? My mind is also blown.

So here's to you, blog orphans. May you go on forever, time capsules of those three weeks we were really bored in 2004, a memory locked in a basic blogging platform format, left to wander in the Dickensian hallways of the internet, darkened corners filled with the detritus of the era and lost to technological revolutions, so that our children may someday find you and have the ability to mock us for our lame taste in music and emo poetry. And here's to you, New York Times Style Section, for always keeping it real, 5 years after the fact. Hit us up and we will totally let you in to our ICQ chat room.

When The Thrill Of Blogging Is Gone [NYTimes]

Lopez started blogging from her seaside home in Galicia, Spain, two and a half years ago on her 95th brithday, according to the Telegraph. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog," she wrote on December 23, 2006, in her first post on her Spanish-language blog, amis95.blogspot.com.

She posted once a week and sometimes daily, and had to dictate to her grandson because cataracts impaired her vision. In the past few months she had been posting video messages instead of written posts. "It's like having a conversation, and those who read what I say become my friends," she told the International Herald Tribune in a 2007 profile.

Lopez's posts on international and Spanish politics, and her memories of life during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, eventually attracted more than 1.5 million visitors. The popularity of her political commentary led to a visit last year from Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. However, she wrote about many topics, including her health problems and old age, often using humor to share her personal insights into aging with her readers. She said:

Elderly people like me - and there are a lot of old people who are younger than I am - should all have someone who shows them how to use the Internet... You have to stay informed.

She even commented on fashion from time to time, writing in January that she wondered how girls in church stayed warm with "their little knickers showing and their hips all bare." But, she did like some modern fashions. "A miniskirt with a pretty pair of legs - that, I love," she wrote. "But you really need to have good legs."

Lopez's grandson was inspired to set up the blog because she had been asking him about the internet and said, "I want to understand your culture. I want to be on top of things." In a 2007 interview with Reuters, she said:

No one pays any attention to old women any more. Not many people love us. But I was surprised by the internet, because young people who were 18 years of age, or 14 or 15, tell me about their lives and what they think and ask my advice.

In one of her final posts in February, she wrote: "When I'm on the internet, I forget about my illness. The distraction is good for you - being able to communicate with people. It wakes up the brain, and gives you great strength."

CNN reports that her family left a final post on her blog, thanking readers for their support.

"[There were] 880 days when her blog made her happy... the support she needed to enjoy her last days of life," they wrote.

"When somebody leaves after 97 years, living with joy from the beginning to the end, we can't be sad.

"Wherever you are, grandmother, you will read these comments, all of them without doubt. She will laugh at some, will learn with others, she might get annoyed at the specific 'language' used in some ... but she will be happy reading all of them."

Readers have already left more than 600 comments mourning the woman they affectionately called, "the blogging granny."

[Image via Flickr]

World's Oldest Blogger Dead Aged 97 [Telegraph]
95-Year-Old Spanish Blogger Gaining Fame [International Herald Tribune]
Spain's Blogging Gran A Hit With Surfers [Reuters]
Spanish Granny Dubbed 'World's Oldest Blogger' Dies [CNN]

Blogging Through History [CBSNews]

Resnick's article centers around the idea that prominent female bloggers come under tougher criticism from their readers due to the "stud/slut dichotomy of men and women that exists throughout all threads of media thrives on the Web. There are endless examples of female bloggers coming under the knife for being bitches or media whores, while male bloggers' gender is either ignored or heralded."

As someone who gets to see the unapproved comments on this site, I can tell you that this is true: in many cases, we have random people stop by just to drop "You dumb whores should shut the fuck up and go back to the kitchen" comments on various posts. "Feminazi," "stupid bitch," and the ever popular "you're just jealous because Ann Coulter/Sarah Palin is hotter than you'll ever be" comments come along quite often as well. The actual content of the articles is ignored: the focus of these commenters' wrath is gender, appearance, and the notion that women should keep their opinions to themselves, unless these opinions happen to fit in with their worldview.

Yet attempting to paint the entire blogosphere (ugh, that word) as a place where only women get attacked is a bit ridiculous. As Breslin notes: "If there was ever an equal opportunity attack forum, the Internet is it. Mostly upper-middle class, well-educated, by-and-large Caucasian women who seek to publish their words on the Web get what everyone else gets online: a free, uncensored platform with a roving pack of readers who have the right to say whatever they want as part of the "conversation." Get over yourselves, and get on with it, ladies."

The internet, unfortunately, is a rather nasty place. Whenever a blogger of either gender posts something, that work becomes the property of the readers and commenters, who react in ways that are often surprising and sometimes quite upsetting. At this blog, we have a system in place to remove those who can't hold a respectful discourse; we don't expect everyone to love or agree with every article, but we do expect our readers to come back with something a little more clever than "stupid whore." The pieces are a springboard for discussion; often enough, personal stories from the writers will bring out several opposing viewpoints from the commenters, and these discussions are often heated, yet respectful. The "shut up, dumb bitch" comments are disemvoweled as a means to remove unnecessary distractions and keep the discussions on topic.

While I can't deny that I have seen examples of Resnick's article in action, I don't think the overall answer is to paint female blogging as a "dangerous" occupation; that only reinforces the idea that women should be afraid to express their opinions, and only feeds into the notion that our gender restricts us from writing the pieces we need to write, for fear of not being able to back our own words in the face of opposition or internet taunting.

To be honest with you, writing the headline for this article made me feel ridiculous. Is it "perilous" to be a female blogger? In my limited experience, it's a bit nerve-wracking, often exhausting, sometimes upsetting when a particularly nasty comment or email is lobbed your way, and at times a bit scary when you publish something incredibly personal for the world to read (though I do post somewhat anonymously, which is a safety net I suppose many others do not have, in fairness). Yet "perilous" seems a bit much. There are women all over the world working under extremely dangerous conditions to improve the quality of women's lives everywhere. Danger and peril are a true everyday occurrence for them. To put yourself out there on the internet and face the consequences is scary and, as I said, at times quite upsetting, but I'm not sure "peril" and "danger" are appropriate descriptions, 99% of the time.

And yet while my first reaction was "Uh, no. It's perilous to dismantle land mines, not to sit here, eat Pop-Tarts, and wax poetic about Jem," I recognize that the majority my blogging is much more lightweight than the women focused on here; women like the editors of this very site, who openly express their political opinions and share personal experiences with abortions, relationships, sexism, racism, sexuality, rape, and other issues that often elicit strong reactions from readers—both positive and negative—on a daily basis. But I don't believe they do so under some impression that it's "dangerous" as much as it's important and necessary.

There are also certain instances where women are threatened with violence for expressing their opinions; in 2007, the Washington Post reported on several women who were forced to shut down their sites after receiving graphic threats from readers. "Two factors can contribute to the vitriol, experts said: blogging in a male-dominated field, such as technology, and achieving a degree of prominence," wrote Post writer Ellen Nakashima.

What say you, commenters? As readers, do you feel more inclined to criticize writers of your own gender? Or does a writer's gender pale in comparison to their actual words? And do you think blogging is "perilous" for women? Or, perhaps just a platform to express our ideas, in spite of the potential reactions?

Is Blogging While Female Really So Perilous? [XXFactor]
The Perils Of Being A Female Blogger [Austin Chronicle]
Sexual Threats Stifle Some Bloggers [Washington Post]

[Image via Married To The Sea]

True to form, I decided to beat the dead horse about the 20 percent of Clinton supporters who still say — unlike Ms. Steinem — that they're not ready to support Barack Obama. I asked what Ms. Steinem thought Obama should be doing to win them over.

She said, "I see the polls, too, but I don't personally know anyone who supported Hillary Clinton that isn't supporting Barack Obama." But that's not all! She pointed out that she never said she wouldn't support Obama, were he the nominee. She knows that in some states, like Minnesota, Hillary supporters are planning on writing her name in "but they wouldn't be doing it if they weren't sure the whole state were going to go for Baracj Obama, so they're aware of the Nader problem." (Minnesotan Hillary supporters, please take note that the latest Quinnipiac/Wall Street Journal/Washington Post poll has Obama only up by 2 points with a 2.8 point margin of error, thanks!). She said the most important thing was that we had to realize our "enlightened self-interest" was not in helping McCain get elected.

On a more substantive note, Steinem suggested that Obama had been very good about speaking out on reproductive rights issues and on work/life issues, but would like to see him speak out more on domestic violence and international women's issues. In addition, she thinks it would be helpful to add women into his regular policy rhetoric — the example she used was that when he talks about health care policy, he should talk about women's experience in the health care system and why his changes would be good for women specifically.

Then the host, Steve Scher, asked me to answer my own question. I tried very hard to not think that I was supposed to say something not stupid to Gloria Steinem, a cause not helped by the fact that I used her name in the first ten seconds after opening my mouth. I said that as much as I was grateful for his work on reproductive rights, I'd like to see him stand up a little more forcefully in favor of them rather than saying that he wouldn't want his daughters punished with a child and that I'd like to see him talk a lot more about comprehensive sex ed and a lot less about abstinence education.

And that was it. Other things she said included the fact that she doesn't blog because she's "a more hung up writer than that" and that she feels that she didn't write clearly enough in her aforementioned OpEd to deny people the opportunity that they were clearly looking for to tag her as one of those supposed feminists who doesn't understand racial issues. The MP3 of the full interview is here and if you want to hear exactly how young I sound, they pick up my call at minute 26 (just short of halfway through).

A Conversation with Gloria Steinem [KUOW]
Women Are Never Front-Runners [NY Times]
VP Pick Might Chafe Hillary Supporters [Politico]
Lunch with the FT: Gloria Steinem [Financial Times]
Minnesota: McCain vs. Obama [RealClearPolitics]
"Stop These Abortions."[Politico]

'World's Oldest Blogger' Dies At 108 [CNN]
The Life of Riley [This URL didn't work for us, but keep trying!]
World's Oldest Blogger [Olive Riley Blog]

Grossman notes:

Writing long has been considered a therapeutic outlet for people facing problems. A 2003 British Psychological Society study of 36 people suggested that writing about emotions could even speed the healing of physical wounds: Researchers found that small wounds healed more quickly in those who wrote about traumatic personal events than in those who wrote about mundane activities. But it's the public nature of blogs that creates the sense of support.

We got an email from a reader yesterday. She claims that Jezebel has been her therapy. "This is what I dreamed of in high school and after, a space of kindred spirits and friends," she wrote. She continued:

My husband cheated, with my best friend, thank you very much. The Jezebel editors AND especially the commenters were there. Giving out advice, support, and snark. In real life, where people where choosing sides and making bland, passive aggressive statements to my plight, the sheer volume of outpouring and sincerity of I got was both heart-warming and bolstering. EVERY SINGLE DAY, there were words of support, so many of the commenters, there are waaaay too many to name. And it helped, more than I can articulate in words. On Monday, I received a hand-written note from my landlord telling me my children and I have to be out by Monday the 12 (end of lease). There's a whole story behind that, but its still the same story. The Jezebelles mobilized into action! People looking up links, offering advice...

Your Blog Can Be Group Therapy [CNN]

[Image by wjmckelvey via Flickr.]

• We don't think we can design clothes, so why do clothing designers think they can blog? The Proenza Schouler boys, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, will be blogging for the New York Times's T: Style magazine's new site all this week. Says T's online editor, "One of the things I'm trying to avoid is solipsistic navel-gazing." Um, good luck with that! [Fashion Week Daily]
  
• What would you do with $15 million? If you're Mr. Dolce and Mr. Gabbana, you use it to give your New York flagship store a little make-over! [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• And apparently it took $15 fucking million for Mr. Dolce and Mr. Gabbana to haul their Italian booties here to New York. The designers will be back in New York for the first time in two years to celebrate the re-opening of their store at a private dinner tomorrow night. No, we weren't invited. [NYP]
  
• Say what you will about Sarah Jessica Parker, but at least she understands decorum. Of super low-rise jeans she says, "There is not going to be any inappropriate midriff showing, regardless of age," she says. "It's provocative in a way that I just don't feel comfortable with." Also? Kind of 5 years ago. [Daily Express]

• Prepare yourselves, people: Snowjoggers are the new Uggs. Just as ugly, and worn by Lohan too! [Independent]
• Stop the madness! Fashion houses are now hiring meteorologists as consultants to help them best predict the upcoming weather patterns and what kinda clothes folks are going to want to wear given the climate. Ridiculous? Or inspired? [NYT]
• The new apartment building in New York designed by Zac Posen's boyfriend is being shot by Elle international creative director Gilles Bensimon for an "advertorial" for Elle Decor. Follow? No? The lesson here is: It's all about who you're fucking. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Claire Danes walked as a model for Cynthia Rowley when she was 16. And waved to the other model going the opposite direction. Thank God this bitch isn't always so perfect! [Sassybella]
• Teen Vogue continues its strange dance between "art" and life as senior editor Kimball Hastings leaves the Condé Nast title to become the head of celebrity dressing for Polo Ralph Lauren. First: That's an actual job? Second: Apparently now Hastings himself is a "celebrity" because, uh, he's been on The Hills. [WWD, 1st item]
• The Wilhemina modeling agency is 40 years old! Mazel tov, models. [WWD, 5th item]
• Luxury markets? Not doing so well. Our guess? People are over expensive shit. [WWD, sub req'd]
• You've heard of a shaman — Rupert Sanderson is a shoe man. And when he sees a woman on the street in a pair of his handcrafted shoes, he has been known to "hurr[y] along behind her checking the balance and the line of the shoe, to see whether she [is] comfortable walking in them. [Then I] realise that I [am] getting a bit close though so I ha[ve] to cross the road in order not to appear like a stalker. But I got a better perspective on the shoes from the other side anyway." [Vogue UK]
• Burberry designer Christopher Bailey not only won Menswear Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards last week, but he also took home the Bambi Award for Fashion on Thursday and an honorary degree on Friday. All these people giving him accolades do know that he designs for Burberry, right? [Vogue UK]
• OMG cutest thing ever: A website where you can try to find your glove's lost mate! [Sassybella]