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]

I frequently find myself having this conversation with people who've just found out what I do for a living. They ask, isn't writing for a women's blog ghettoizing? Shouldn't we just have blogs for everybody? Of course, this debate is both older and broader than the blogosphere. Critics have long asked why we have women's colleges, women's studies, awards just for women. Shouldn't women be equal players in a diversified world, rather than one divided up into compartments?

I'm always a little uncomfortable having this debate in the real world because I'm so obviously biased — this particular blog not only lets me write about feminism and Battlestar Galactica but actually pays me to do it, so even if sometimes I have to spend all night reading about Sarah Palin's energy policy (curse you, Lynn Vincent), I'm pretty pro-ladyblog. I do, however, understand some of the cons. The question of what's a safe space and what's a ghetto remains a concern, not just for women but for all marginalized groups. More specifically blog-related is the problem of the echo chamber. In a recent New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert explained it thus:

Conservative blogs like Power Line almost always direct visitors to other conservative blogs, like No Left Turns, while liberal blogs like Daily Kos guide them to others that are also liberal, like Firedoglake. A study of the twenty most-visited blogs in each camp in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential election found that more than eighty-five per cent of their links were to other blogs with similar politics. When the study's authors charted the links in graphic form, they came up with a picture of non-interaction-a dense scribble on one side, a dense scribble on the other, and only the thinnest strands connecting the two. In 2006, [author Cass] Sunstein performed his own study of fifty political sites. He found that more than four-fifths linked to like-minded sites but only a third linked to sites with an opposing viewpoint. Moreover, many of the links to the opposing side's sites were offered only to illustrate how "dangerous, dumb, or contemptible the views of the adversary really are."

Kolbert goes on to chart the role of such like-minded link-fests in making people's views more extreme, but there's something intrinsically sad about the compartmentalization of Internet speech as well. As nice as it is to feel comfortable with one's audience (though, with the presence of trolls, no blogger can ever feel too comfortable), it can sometimes be hard to find a place on the Internet where people with different opinions come together to talk rationally and learn from one another. Part of this is because the Internet can make an asshole out of anyone, but part of it is because the blogosphere encourages like to seek out like, and can sometimes feel like a whole bunch of separate choirs, each listening only to its own preacher.

But all that said, there are ways in which Internet speech is actually more open and free than earlier forms. In Planned Parenthood NYC's panel discussion a few weeks ago, Lynn Harris and her fellow panelists pointed out that blogs are the 21st-century version of 1970s consciousness-raising groups, except that they are public. You no longer have to personally know a feminist or drive to her living room to learn about feminism — you can access it anywhere there's WiFi. And what's more, you don't actually have to show your face. This is problematic, in that it allows people to say things they'd never say if they were actually personally accountable. On the other hand, it's liberating — the scared and unsure can expose themselves to new ideas and new politics slowly, without the barriers to entry that once existed. Sites may still link to like-minded sites, but Google makes it easier than ever to stumble across new viewpoints, and accidental enlightenment is more possible than ever before.

Because of these possibilities, women's blogs aren't just blogs for women. They're blogs about issues that affect women — issues as various as reproductive rights, healthcare reform, world affairs, and yes, Battlestar Galactica — for anyone who happens to read about them. Many of these readers are women, but many of them are men, and some of them — both male and female — are bound to be people who haven't thought much about feminism or women's issues per se before. Women's blogs can sometimes be echo chambers, but they can also reach a wide and diverse audience, some of whose minds will surely be opened by the experience. So I'm sad about the scaling-back of Double X, not just because some bloggers are likely to lose their jobs (an email tipster tells us associate editor Samantha Henig already has), but because it will mean fewer opportunities for women's issues to reach new readers. The Internet may be a divided and divisive place, but it's easy to move across its divisions, and a women's blog is really just a public space for women's concerns. With a smaller Double X, those concerns are a little less likely to be heard.

News About DoubleX [Double X]
Slate's DoubleX Online Site For Women To Shut Down [WebNewser]

Related: The Things People Say [The New Yorker]

As mentioned previously, these unkind words were launched at model Liskula Cohen by class-act blog Skanks In NYC. The 36-year-old model, who has appeared in Vogue and other fashion magazines, is suing Google, which hosts the blog, for defamation, in an attempt to force the blogger out of anonymity. In the lawsuit, Cohen states that the blog's slings and arrows paint her as a "promiscuous woman who is filthy, disgusting, foul and a whore," a rep that's not done much for her "desirability for endorsing products." While the uncharitable could perhaps suggest that this desirability was already somewhat in question — and, further, that said anonymous asshole is considerably more fixated on the model's activities than is the public; and, further still, that this is in fact the first we have really heard of her and this kind of publicity isn't really serving to distract from a site we'd otherwise be unfamiliar with — the real question, which Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory poses is, does she have a case?

Not exactly. As a lawyer tells her, for the case to hold water, the model would have to prove that Skank's assertions were not just their opinion, but rather, deliberately misleading: "a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to a person's reputation." In other words, well-nigh impossible to do. (Although it does seem like she could probably prove pretty conclusively that she's not the #1 skank in New York — surely there's gotta be some viable competition, both amongst celebrities and professional prostitutes, no?)

Of course, however much flack she'll take for the law-suit, her thin skin, the fact that she had an unpleasant bottle contretemps with a bouncer last year, and the possible publicity ploy — in short, however misguided it may be - we get why someone would want to do it: on a basic level, it seems wrong that a stranger (or, even worse, not) should be able to write vile things anonymously. Sticks and stones nothing, reading that has to be a punch to the gut for anyone not trained from childhood to weather gratuitous insults. And the internet is, as pundits are fond of saying, still the "wild west," legally speaking. There's certainly scope for precedent-setting and why not in this case, frivolous though it may seem? It would be nice if there was some resolution to this case beyond "Skanks in NYC" getting more hits, Cohen humiliating herself, and the rest of us just feeling really, really sad. Because we imagine the wild west being slightly more exciting than that - or at least involving more frontier justice.

Model Sues Over "Skank" Comment [Salon]

Earlier:Rag Trade: Model Sues Google After Random Blogger Calls Her "Old Hag"

ABC News:

Jezebel.com takes a look at a Redbook cover shoot of Faith Hill — before and after the photoshopping. It will make you gasp.

Thanks to Jezebel, we have yet another example of how fucked up magazine airbrushing is. Perhaps at her next concert Faith Hill will dedicate this song to the crack photoshopping team at Redbook.

Check out that picture of Faith Hill and she's lookin' pretty darn fine for a millionaire mom of three who's about to turn the big 4-0. She's even on the cover of Redbook this month! Anddddd that's where her trouble begins. Jezebel got their hands on the original version of Faith's cover photo prior to it being touched up with the magical tools that only magazines and wizards possess, and holy Hollywood standards are the results horrifying. The more you look at the touched up cover picture, the more you'll wonder why we as a society like our celebs to look like straight-up aliens. If the difference in her arm's shape and size isn't enough to freak you out, check out her eyes, her back, her posture and, oh, her disappearing hand. Faith was way better looking before she went under the digital knife, crow's feet and all.

This happened on the cover of Redbook. Not Playboy or Vogue or even Cosmopolitan, but Redbook, which is supposedly geared to more mature female readers. The fact that this same July cover includes lead stories such as "The new skinny pills — yes, they work!" and "Look and feel your hottest" only underlies the utterly depressing and spooky state of the American medium.... I'm appalled at what Redbook has done to Faith Hill, and everyone else should be, too, and this includes men, because most of you have wives or moms or girlfriends or sisters, or especially young daughters, the latter of whom are increasingly doomed to be swept away by our culture's perfection-obsessed tsunami.

Because there's no way a woman almost 40 years old can have wrinkles and be on the cover of a magazine ... And be sure to also read this great analysis of why it matters.

The cover of this month's Redbook has a stunning photo of country megastar Faith Hill. Well, someone resembling Faith Hill! Thanks to our friends at jezebel.com, who dug up the original photo, TMZ readers can have a look at Faith in all her real glory, and see how she was "cleaned up" for her cover. Through the miracle of Photoshop, they gave 39-year-old Faith a body like 24-year-old Carrie Underwood! For a mother of three just a few months shy of 40 with a non-stop schedule, the real Faith looks amazing!

If someone like Faith Hill is not good enough as is to be on the cover of a woman's magazine, than doesn't it make you question why some of us are killing ourselves trying to look celebrities who don't even look like themselves. It also sends the message that no matter how beautiful you are, you're still not perfect enough. Hmmmm?

As individual women, it can be easy to wonder why we fall into the trap of trying to live up to an unattainable standard. It's something we absorb on an almost subconscious level. Deconstructing this month's Redbook magazine cover shows us just how manufactured the images of beauty we see really are. I didn't think twice about the cover image of country singer and actress Faith Hill when I first saw it. But an untouched original photo obtained by Jezebel shows just how much "digital magic" even a certified star needs to be ready for her close-up....am at a loss for ways to combat the media's standards of beauty. But seeing the curtains of digital magic pulled back to reveal reality can remind each of us to give ourselves a break when we look in the mirror.

To say that magazines contribute to an unattainable ideal is to undersell the point: The art directors and retouchers of the world get paid to create women who literally do not exist and never could. It's worse than the old Women's Studies 101 complaints about Barbie's proportions; everyone already knows Barbie isn't real. The more insidious — and therefore more dangerous — manipulation occurs when they take away the natural crook of a woman's arm or tighten up her droopy earlobe. Really: They digitally adjusted her earlobe!...And to add verbal insult to visual injury, the cover line next to Faith Hill's head screams, "The New Skinny Pills: Yes, They Work!" To my knowledge, science has not yet yielded a pill that can create a 1-inch elbow.

Have Redbook gone a bit too far with this one? Jezebel have a wizzy animated picture so you can see all the details. So what's with the arms? Seriously? Is this what Redbook readers must aspire to? Bone replacement anyone?

Why Don't Women Feel Beautiful? Jezebel.com has uncovered the Photoshopping of Faith Hill committed by Redbook Magazine. It should make every woman mad....No wonder regular women feel bad about themselves - none of us walks around with a photoshop editor fixing our acne and wrinkles or making our actual back disappear - yet, we are told we can expect to look like this picture. NO ONE LOOKS LIKE THIS PICTURE - not even Faith Hill and it's a picture of Faith Hill!

Basically, Redbook has taken a majorly attractive 39-year-old woman and digitally airbrushed her back into some indetermine 20-something age, erasing eye wrinkles, thinning out arms and straightening out her back. The end result looks great; it's just doesn't look like what Faith Hill actually looks like. What should be done about stuff like this? Not much, I suppose; I don't see how, say, outlawing the Photoshopping of celebrity covers on women's magazines would much of anything useful, even if it were constitutionally possible, which it isn't. But what I think that such extensive Photoshopping indicates is a tacit admission by women's magazines that the image they're trying to promote — that they're trying to get their readers to buy and live — is absolutely unobtainable.

Faith Hill is a beautiful, tall, elegant woman, but even she needed to have her imperfections airbrushed out in order to be beautiful enough to grace the cover of Redbook....Why the facade? Why do we accept this? Why do continue you believe this to be true?...It's all part of the game, and they gotcha. I guarantee you will walk past a newstand in the next 24 hours, compare yourself to the covermodel, and think about what you can do to measure up. The fashion industry is demented. From today forward, they can kiss my ass.

Earlier: Here's Our Winner! Redbook Shatters Our Faith In, Well, Maybe Not Publishing But God
Faith Hill's Photoshop Chop: Why We're Pissed