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]

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]

• "I am genuinely sorry for all the times I fed us a Luna bar and called it food."
• "I apologize for wanting a nose job in the seventh grade."
• "Three words: nine dollar pedicure. Okay, four if you count 'infection.'"
• "I am also sorry for all the times that I decided to save time and money by skipping dinner and going straight for the after-dinner drinks. Well, maybe not all the times, but any of the times I ended up vomiting, blacking out or being violently hungover the next day. The rest of the times were a success, I think."
• "I apologize for 20 years of smoking cigarettes."
• "I'm sorry for the time I got drunk and ran in flip flops and stubbed my toe on the sidewalk so hard that the toenail had to be removed and i had to get a tetanus shot. I have a picture if anyone wants to see the bloody toenail bed."
• "I'm sorry for the time I fell down an escalator while living abroad and broke my clavicle and shoulder and was too nervous about my poor language skills to seek proper physical therapy once I had healed. Now one of my shoulders slopes and my back looks weird."
• "I apologize for asking my hairdresser for 'the Rachel' in 1996."

Now you go!

[Image via NOW and Anand McCorquodale]

A Letter To My Body For Love Your Body Day 2008 [BlogHer]

Zoe was sitting down to write her post on BlogHer's site, and her dad said he had some ideas for her.

He went on to tell me that I should write about why gay people are so unhappy…Also implied was, if we (gay people) only all followed the teachings of the catholic church, then we'd all be happy. So the last bit was my own inference because my dad is like a broken record about the church, it's his answer to everything. Converts are the most passionate about their religion. After collecting my thoughts, I started by pointing out that you can't say all gay people are unhappy, that's just untrue. I mean, generally speaking I'm pretty happy. Then I pointed out that there is going to be the same percentage of the gay population as is in the rest of the population who has an inherited form of depression and anxiety, like Betty Please does, which has nothing to do with her sexuality. Now, I won't argue that there is probably a larger proportion of the gay population who suffer from depression and anxiety that is more of a situational form than those in the general population, but really, do the reasons for this need explanation? As you can imagine this went on for while, but I actually feel like it was a small victory for me. I stood my ground as an adult, I didn't back down, and didn't fall back into being his child, which given the complexity of the dynamic we have, that's progress. With my dad, it's not ever going to be him coming around to my point of view, but rather that he respects that I have one and it's my own. We agree to disagree.

I though Zoe perfectly described the push and pull we all feel with our parents as adult children — one which is particularly trying for her, since her parents do not condone a major part of her life. It's so easy to fall back into childhood patterns of insolence and annoyance, which is why just the small fact that she stood her ground is a big deal. I think it's worth pointing out, though, that parents are trying too, and often children do things that they just can't wrap their minds around. A good fictional example of a fraught father/daughter relationship from the father's point of view is Mary Gaitskill's pitch-perfect short story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy." In the story, a father has learned from a friend that his daughter, Kitty, has written a personal essay about him in Self. She never told him she wrote it. He spends the entire essay trying to pinpoint when things went so horribly awry with his only child, and most of it wishing they could just go back to those simple days of her little girlhood. "When Kitty was a little girl he would do it to make her laugh," Gaitskill wrote. "'Well,' he'd say, "do you think it's time we played with the hairs in our nose?' And she would giggle, holding her hands against her face, eyes sparkling over her knuckles."

Father Adult Lesbian Daughter Moment, Will It Ever Change? [BlogHer]
Because They Wanted To [Salon]

The first criticism we read of the piece complained that it appeared in the paper's 'Sunday Styles' section whereas a piece about male bloggers wouldn't. I have to take issue with that, since the 'Styles' section ran a piece about male bloggers (including Crappy Hour guest Spencer Ackerman) about 5 months ago. So, it's not exactly true that the Styles section isn't the appropriate place for the piece per se.

However, it is interesting that BlogHer took place the same weekend at the DailyKos mega-conference Netroots Nation, a bit of a sore subject with some of the political bloggers at BlogHer who called the "scheduling conflict" disappointing. NetRoots Nation had guest appearances by Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, which would've garnered headlines regardless of where they appeared. But, a cursory search of the Times' archives shows no less than 10 stories filed with the paper or its blogs during Netroots Nation, including several on panel discussions held at the conference. This weekend's story on BlogHer was the first the Times had filed about the event.

Was a panel discussion on the use of profanity in political blogging of more pressing important to Times readers than Michelle Obama's first blog post or the aforementioned discussion of how to get taken seriously as a woman political blogger (both of which were mentioned in passing amid a rundown of corporate sponsors)? Or is the Times just trying to prove the point of the BlogHer founders and users — that women just don't get taken quite as seriously as men? Maybe we should ask Julia Allison, or the 5 other pretty bloggers that ought to be on magazine covers. She, at least, seems to get plenty of press.

Blogging’s Glass Ceiling [NY Times]
Why Are All The Big Political Bloggers Men? [Glamocracy]
New York Times Thinks Women Bloggers Are a Fashion Story [the f word]
Washington Doesn’t Sleep Here [NY Times]
Easing Off Online Obscenities [NY Times]
Five Female Bloggers (Not Named Julia Allison) Who Should Be On The Cover Of A Magazine [The Frisky]