I don't want to sound sexist, so I'll let Creek Running North do it for me:
I've been around the Internets for some time now, about a decade and a half, and have been genuinely enjoying the explosion of good writing to be found on blogs over the last three or four years.
But it has become increasingly obvious that the truly well-written blogs, the blogs with incisive commentary and thoughtful analysis, the blogs that are truly interesting and reflect a wide range of expertise are almost entirely written - OK, here goes - they're almost all written by people of one specific gender. So I have to ask:
Where are all the male bloggers?
Just wait, Atrios will announce next month is "Testosterone Month". And Kevin Drum will begin noticeably linking to men bloggers, and even Roxanne and Shakespeare's Sister will apologize. Then The Heretik will add a "There's More Than Three Wise Men Here" blogroll.
(I'd link to more male writers myself, if only they wouldn't write about subjects that don't interest me.)
This reminds me of a "test" going around a few years ago, that purported to tell whether a writer was male or female based on a writing sample. My writer friends, two of whom were award winning authors, and I took the test, and guess what? The test thought we were all male! We tested it repeatedly, filling in chapters of our novels, trying to get it to guess correctly—but it wasn't until we inserted draft material, with half formed sentences and a less linguistically rich vocabulary, that the test guessed we were female.
It assumed good writing was male; poor writing was female. (What I want to know is, which male blogger wrote that test?)
I'll let The Heretik respond:
On the Estrogenated Elite side of things, process and success seem to come more from a continuing adding up of more, more of everything. More varied interests, more time and depth to a subject.
My point is: why are women continuing to define their success by what men have? Who needs these dorks with a my link is bigger than your link mindset? Walk away from the abusive marriage, delete the dorky guys from your links. They lose, not you. It's clear to me women already have so much more. How you frame things determines the picture you see. If you don't accept their rules, you don't have to play their game.
You mean cat blogging's not deep enough for you?
After almost two months of this, I've realized I don't want to be a one-note song with nothing more on my mind than us vs. them, who's on first, who's a wanker (and it's ALL about the wanking, isn't it?), whose traffic counter is bigger, whose blog mating call is loudest/most colorful/most likely to produce links.
So, until more guys start coming up with some new ideas, I'm hanging out among the Estrogenated Elite and A Few Good Men.
