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]

"How sad and backward that we have to give it a nickname, animalize it as if it's outside the boundaries of civilized human behavior, make it a trend, pretend that Demi Moore invented it. That's not progress, and it's not a step forward for women." She continues:

Cougars. Pussies. Foxes. Faster pussycat! Kill! Kill! Active, aggressive female sexuality is always talked about as feral, often feline. When it's older, apparently, it develops sharper claws and teeth. Unless, that is, it's exhibited by a primmer and more contained MILF. That's just a lady with kids who men want to fuck. It's impossible to tell, until we get closer to the specimen, whether she has any interest in doing the fucking herself.

But what about women of a certain age who want to feel fierce, sexy, powerful? Haven't older women historically been stripped of their sexuality? Instead of making them feel like their "best" years are the fertile ones, shouldn't we allow them to celebrate a healthy sexual life?

Traister says yes. "Communication of the fact that women have sexual motors that run far into their retirement years is of course valuable." But: "turning those revelations into mindless characterizations of va-va-voom youth seekers who wear too-tight animal prints and talk like children about stalking men as prey is not important, valuable or empowering in any way."

Also, she recalls, "When Cher used to date Rob Camilletti, I think they called him a 'boy toy,' and they called her 'Cher.'"

The problem is that this country loves a buzzword, and right now, "cougar" is it. In addition to the new TV Land show The Cougar, and several cougar-themed books, there's an indie film called Cougar Hunting, a website called UrbanCougar, and Courteney Cox-Arquette is producing and starring in a pilot for an ABC sitcom called Cougar Town. The question is, are we allowed to be glad that women of a certain age are in the spotlight as sexual beings and not as dried up spinsters? Or does hating the term "cougar" mean not supporting any cougar-themed projects? Let's just say, for instance, that Courteney Cox's show (about a newly single 40-year-old mom with a 17-year-old son) was called something like Aging Disgracefully or Back In The Game? Would you watch it then? Or are you willing to give it a chance with the word "cougar" in the title? Is there a dignified way to survive this cougar attack?

Hot Cougar Sex! [Salon]

In a scenario familiar to many of us, Traister finds herself bowing to the tyranny of the internet age. A "comparative Luddite," she still finds herself devoting an unseemly amount of time to the sirens of email, Facebook, and online word games. What's worse, as Traister describes it, she doesn't even know why she's online half the time; it's become an automatic and unhealthy compulsion that has nothing to do with acquiring knowledge or enhancing communication.

And so, like an increasing number of others, Traister has turned to a newish program called Freedom, a free application invented by a UNC student who's asked only for donations, since he designed it, apparently, for the common good. In Traister's words,

Freedom will disable the networking, only on a Mac computer, for periods of anywhere from one minute to eight hours. No Web sites, no e-mail, no instant messaging, no online shopping, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Jezebel, no iTunes store, no streaming anything. Once it is turned on, as it hilariously claims, "Freedom enforces freedom"; you cannot turn it off without rebooting your computer.

Despite her embarrassment of admitting she has a problem, Freedom turns out to be a boon:

It's been about a week with Freedom, and I like it, I really do, even if I'm a bit ashamed that I need it. I still use it mostly for about 15- or 30-minute periods...I have gotten an immense amount of work done, and it has demonstrated, again and again, in ways that I've known intellectually but not viscerally, how Web-dependent I have become. And I'm not referring to connectivity simply as a time-waster or procrastination tool, but as a work resource. Where once I would have reached for dictionaries or thesauri, or written notes and references, I have found exactly how hungry — and temporarily starved — I've become for all the instant information I'm so used to having at my fingertips.

As anyone who's had an internet outage knows, we've come to think of internet not merely as essential, but as our due: the rage we feel in these moments - the depth of our frustration when a connection flickers in a cafe - is disproportionate. And while we might say it's because we need email or spread sheets (and we do) it's also infuriating not to have the weather at our fingertips, movie showtimes, the resolution of an IMDB bet, the ingredients for a dinner dish. While Traister's larger point about the brain-melting effects of constant media bombardment, mindless, unsatisfying surfing and endless demands are well-taken, so too is this idea that it's healthy to ween ourselves off intellectual laziness. And, just as much, intellectual entitlement. Remember that scene in Ghost World where the officious guy comes into the coffee shop where Rebecca works, produced a computer and summarily looks up the daily trivia question's answer, before smugly demanding his free coffee?
"That's awesome," says Enid.
"It's really not," says her friend wearily.

Stop the Internet, I want to get off! [Salon]

Rebecca Traister's "So you still want to date a banker?" asks: why is the media so desperate to trumpet the anachronistic archetype of sugar-daddy and golddigger? In the past few weeks we've been hit over the head with the hoax group Dating A Banker Anonymous (which, as Traister points out, the Times lapped up eagerly in the unpleasant "It's the Economy, Girlfriend!") and the all-too-real douchebaggery of the Washington Post's "Market for Romance Goes From Bullish to Sheepish: Are Guys With Less to Spend Less of a Catch?" in which youngsters complain about how their reduced portfolios have put a crimp in their social lives.

The truth is, those who are pining for the days of free bottle service and the outmoded gender stereotypes it carries are a tiny minority. More to the point, the proliferation of such stories is misleading: in fact, as men lose their jobs in greater numbers than women, the workforce is increasingly female, and right now a female breadwinner is a more common phenomenon than the whiny leech the media is so fond of. So why do we keep reading about the outmoded dynamic of acquisitive strumpet and hapless douche? Traister suggests that in some wise we find it comforting: a sign that cliches are in their heavens and all's right with the world. Just as rom-coms traffic in well-worn stereotypes, so too do we look for their comforting familiarity in our real lives. As the article puts it, "In hard times, we want to be served stuff that is cheap and comforting: meatloaf, Campbell's soup and tales of women and men that conform to our most dated expectations of gender, money and power."

Of course, it's not just that: as much as anything, we want escapism, and these alleged golddiggers make for good copy. Then too, these women are presented, uniformly, as horror stories: a disgusting Other being forced to reap what they sowed while the rest of us sit back in pious judgment. Traister points out that part of this is our cultural love of watching the rich suffer: In a time when it seems like very few of the Haves are getting their just desserts, we're eager to seek retribution where we can find it. But I'd take it a step further, even if it's not a pleasant step: it would seem we, as women, take an especial relish in punishing those women who'd seek to cut the line with anachronistic wiles. In this regard, the phenomenon may be regarded as misogynistic, sure, but a less simple case than Traister would indicate: there's an element of girl-on-girl shaming that's ugly. Where she asks, why do we take comfort in sexist tropes, I'd say, why do we take such pleasure in seeing other women get their comeuppance? The DABA hoax was perpetrated by women, after all, who saw the rage such a phenomenon could provoke, and on both the Times' website and the blogosphere some of the the harshest comments have come from women. It's we who feel a visceral sense of shame and rage when we see the cause betrayed by such naked avidity and such blatant disregard for gains made and opportunities squandered. We may be pushed to the defensive, but it would be disingenuous to suggest there's no relish to such attacks. The fact that we can't see such cases as isolated but feel the need to distance ourselves is sad and telling. To dismiss this as a simple bit of patriarchal nostalgia ironically does us a disservice: while it may be forced upon us, we are complicit.
So You Still Want To Date A Banker? [Salon]

It's The Economy, Girlfriend! [NYT]
Market for Romance Goes From Bullish To Sheepish: Are Guys With Less To Spend Less Of A Catch? [Washington Post]

Earlier:Underemployed D.C. Douchebags Are Depressed By Recession

First, disclosure: Managing editor Anna Holmes, former editor Moe Tkacik and this website's commenters are all quoted at length, posts are cited, and Jezebel is credited as one of the progenitors of the the new openness, "the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation." And we can't deny it: we have been known, on occasion, to wax anatomical. Not only do we as a community not happen to find the female body an uncomfortable subject, but it's safe to say we all appreciate that there's something uniquely fascinating about its mysteries. Graphic accounts can be gross, sure, but also comforting, reassuring, informative and funny in ways probably mysterious to men but very important to women.

In a larger sense, it is, of course, as Anna terms it, "cathartic." Traister identifies the phenomenon's larger implications: "Oversharing is in. And for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much "too much information" as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body." What may have been rooted, as Traister says, in a touchy-feely second wave Our Bodies Ourselves mentality, in more politicized "reclaiming" of the female body and, more lately, vaginas-are-outrageous shock-value humor is, hopefully, morphing into something neither shocking nor particularly charged.

As Moe says in the article, these pieces are about more than just tampons, female ejaculation and garlic cloves: they're about vulnerabilities, insecurities and fears - a female shorthand that implicitly evokes the biological push-pulls that govern so much of our lives. Such accounts can be frank, but what people are learning is that they are not inherently vulgar. Quite simply, when talking openly and honestly about women's issues, it would be disingenuous and bizarre not to "overshare" about our bodies. The female body will not be ignored: it burbles and leaks and creaks and drips and emits and produces and reproduces and generates and puffs and inflates and occasionally reeks. It is fascinating. It is scary. It is alarming. It is hilarious and silly and mysterious. As the range of experiences in "My Little Red Book," the new "first period" compendium, makes clear, this openness is a stark contrast to the fear and secrecy and implicit judgment that surrounded anything anatomical in the past. So when you're grossed out, just remember: we overshare because we love. And you can always skip the post - at least we have the option.

The Great Girl Gross-Out [Salon]
Earlier: Aunt Flo Visiting? My Little Red Book Demystifies Periods
Ten Days In The Life Of A Tampon
Shejaculation: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gush
Where Garlic Has Never Gone Before: Or, How Not To Cure A Yeast Infection

Is it good or bad to have a girly-girl politician?

Our version of "Talk Me Down" on Sarah Palin and gay rights

(By the way, if you watch the entire video, Anna makes a special appearance in the background.)

Just as Gould is infuriated by all those "Scary Sadshaws," wandering around in search of baubles and boys... [I find it] maddening to have to wonder — Carrie Bradshaw-style — if Gould's story would have run had she not been beautiful, and maddening to then hate oneself for having had to wonder that at all.

But perhaps most maddening is the way the buildup of critical attention to a piece like Gould's — or to a cultural phenomenon like "SATC" — only affirms that certain kinds of women, and only those kinds of women, are worth elevating to begin with, in part because of the delight people take in tearing them down.

And this:

No matter how angry you felt about Gould's piece, it was almost impossible to read the comments and not feel terrible: for her, about her, and about yourself for having even peeked. The process is exhausting, and not good for anyone, especially women who get stuck with some lame avatar they feel does not represent them, but whom they do not particularly feel like burning at the stake just for having been clever, lucky or talented enough to wind up drawing a spotlight.

Another Pretty Face Of A Generation [Salon]
Related: The Times Magazine Dapples Sunlight On Its Memoirist [NY Observer]
Exposed [NY Times Magazine]


Earlier: 5 Things About That Times Magazine Piece On Masturbatory Blogging
The Problem With Chick Lit

"...In our reluctance to appear nagging, scolding, hectoring, or petty, many of us have made a practice of enduring minor affronts not realizing that a failure to decry the smaller indignities can foster blindness to the larger ones," writes Fortini, who, three paragraphs later, explains that her "first experience" with sexism occurred when she was asked by a high school debate coach to loosen the bun in her hair). "We then find ourselves shocked when one of the smartest, most qualified women ever to run for public office is called 'fishwife-y' by a female pundit on national television."

Who exactly is this "we" Fortini is talking about? Are the young, well-educated women quoted in these articles — most of them economically secure and white — really so shocked to discover that misogyny exists, even among their seemingly-sensitive male (and female) peers? You can argue that young women's failure to see the pervasiveness of sexism in this society underscores the fact that the work done by second-wave feminists in the 60s and 70s has paid off, and maybe you'd be right. But I'll go out on a limb and say the problem isn't that women are reluctant to "decry the smaller indignities" of being female, but that a lot of them seem so willfully blind to them in the first place. (Talk about the dumbing down of America.) Maybe that — not the identity politics in the race for the Democratic nomination — is a good thing for elite, solipsistic, newly-outraged Americans, female and male, to start focusing on.

The Feminist Reawakening [NY Magazine]
Hey Obama Boys: Back Off Already! [Salon]

Earlier: Some Men Who Hate Hillary Are Sexist. We Get It. Now Let's Move On
Ms. Matriarch To Daughter: When Push Comes To Shove, [Why] Can't You Vote For A Woman?

Hillary Clinton is a woman. Barack Obama is black. We've been talking about this for at least six months. If Traister had found a new way to look at the identity politics in this race, I'd be all ears. But she hasn't. Her essay doesn't draw any conclusions about this sexism — Traister merely points out its existence. And the simple demographic facts at this point show that most of the people who are voting for and supporting Barack are not these Jon Stewart-loving, powerful-women fearing upper middle class man-children whom Traister derides. There is a whole diverse country out there, many of whom could give a shit about Hillary's vagina and Barack's lack thereof.

Traister also talks a lot about second wave feminists, whom the media has largely portrayed as strident Hillary lovers. For many of her points, Traister relies on anecdotal evidence (for instance, she quotes Feministing founder Jessica Valenti, who says, "I pinpoint sexism for a living. You'd think I'd be able to find an example [of sexism against Hillary]. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there's some woman's way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know."), and I will do the same. The two biggest Obama supporters I know are my mother and my boyfriend's mother. Both went to elite universities in the late 60s/ early 70s. Both have held high-powered jobs. Both live in liberal enclaves. And both these second wavers are so fucking PISSED at the Clintons for ruining the democratic party. My mother especially thinks that Bill completely neglected his presidential legacy and the health of the party to support Hillary's senate run, and later her Presidential run. She feels that time and again, Hillary has chosen self-promotion over party preservation.

That's just one example of Hillary dislike that has nothing to do with her gender. There are so many other reasons out there for loving or hating either of these candidates, and not just if you're white and a college graduate. Can we please, please start discussing those?

Hey, Obama Boys: Back Off Already! [Salon]

Erica used me, and she used my husband, who was a very kind man, a very handsome man. I just felt I had to do it. It was not a novel; it was a memoir, but it was a memoir something like James Frey's memoir. A lot of nastiness went into that book. But I forgive her for everything, except writing that my husband crawled into her bed, which he didn't, and asked her to perform fellatio, which he didn't.

However, as the New Yorker points out, Jong used specific details of her sister's life to pad out Flying. But Suzanna's outburst does raise an interesting question about memoir-ish writing in general: is it worth the price of hurting loved ones feelings to create an arguable masterpiece? In this world of TMI and blogging every conquest and conflict, are there too many personal casualties? Isn't it anti-feminist to sell your sister down the river to further your own success? Or is this just a case of sisterly jealousy gone awry?

What Makes A Feminist Book A Classic? [Salon]
Still Flying [New Yorker]
Fear Of Flying [Amazon]

Related: Is There Something Extra-Special — And Extra-Stressful — Between Sisters?

This weekend was actually pretty hard to watch. A gross example of exactly how much malicious satisfaction we get out of the embarrassing weakness of an addictive, postpartum, out-of-control mess of a human being. But as sad as anything is that the young musician shows zero interest in making it stop.

And:

Britney embodies the disdain in which this culture holds its young women: the desire to sexualize and spoil them while young, and to degrade and punish them as they get older. Of course, she also represents a youthful feminine willingness — stupid or manipulated as it may be — to conform to the culture's every humiliating expectation of her.

Wonder why your daughters have eating disorders and hate their bodies? Maybe because they're reading reports that label the thin young woman dancing around in a bra and panties physically unappealing and obese.

I'm willing to believe that she was pushed into show business by a striving mom, molded into a confusing vamp-virgin and told to sing songs about being hit while wearing a schoolgirl outfit; I'm willing to believe that she was offered no moral structure or opportunity to build a personality of her own; I'm willing to believe that she is a victim of grotesque class expectations that chucked her back in the Cheetohs-and-trucker-hats ghetto as swiftly as erotic expectations plucked her from it. But I'm not willing to believe that she was forced by anyone to show up on national television on Sunday night.

Hit Her, Baby, One More Time [Salon]
Earlier: It's More To Love Britney, Bitch
In Defense Of The Badly-Behaved Britney Spears

• Marsden grew up in Vancouver, Canada. She says she was a record-breaking, competitive swimmer who also liked to listen to talk-radio.
• In 1993, Marsden began attending Simon Fraser University; in 1995, she accused Liam Donnelly, a SFU swim coach she knew from Vancouver, of date rape and sexual harassment. Donnelly was fired, but claimed that it was Marsden who had been the harasser, not him.
• Marsden may have been in possession of a voice-altering machine with which she made creepy calls to Donnelly. Oh and she also may have vandalized Donnelly's car, subscribed to Playboy in his name, and scattered condoms all over his driveway.

• Marsden publicly copped to some of Donnelly's accusations against her but claimed she was attempting to "entice [Donnelly] into meeting with me so I could obtain...an apology from him for the abuse, harassment and rape I suffered at his hands."
• Neil Boyd, a Simon Fraser professor, calls Marsden "feminism's worst nightmare". Oh, and he says Marsden harassed him too!
• Marsden may have at one point lived in her car.
• More men Marsden (who also gave herself the name "Elle Henderson") reportedly harassed: Vancouver radio host Michael Morgan, whose computer she may have rigged in order to forward her copies of every email he sent.

Fuck this. This chick's probably crazy, we're sick of typing, and we're only on page 4 of 7. We suggest you just go read the story. It's worth it. We promise.

Fox's Ann Coulter 2.0 [Salon]