Pen-Elayne on the Web

Blogchicks!

A big and possibly wet & sloppy *mwa* to fellow female (can one be called a "fellow female?") blogger "Jeanne d'Arc" for wondering, in her Body & Soul journal (link at left bar), why The American Prospect only links to one female-done blog out of 27. I have a theory about this, of course. Even though historically (well, for as long as we've been permitted to learn reading and writing) diaries - which, come on, is what blogs are, diaries with hyperlinks - seem to have been more the province of women (if they were men I guess they were called autobiographies, on the "women were cooks but men were chefs" principle I suppose), I think the Internet itself is still pretty darn male-centric. Particularly the bits of it, like blogging, that are relatively new. (It's weird to talk about "newness" in netspeak, isn't it? Between my last job and my present one we've seen the explosion of the Web, message boards relegating Usenet to even further obscurity, Fark, the Onion, pop-ups... geez, just about everything except AOL being proprietary, it was always that. And I'm only talking like five years or so. It bloggles the mind, apparently.) I believe women my age and older tend to be a bit more reluctant to jump into new 'net stuff than their curmudgeonly male counterparts. So, although I'd be curious to see if any surveys have been taken yet, my instincts tell me that the ratio of female to male bloggers is probably around the same as female to male comics readers (a whopping 5%, last time anyone checked) or female to male gamers. In a way this is a good thing because not only does it leave room for mucho growth but it means that those relative few of us who are blogging will get all sorts of undue attention, and maybe candy and flowers for our birthdays in a week and a half-- oops, sorry, did I say that? Anyway, the down side is, of course, the paucity of female blog voices in relation to how many women are in the overall population, and the tendency of readers to expect women bloggers to speak with one monolithic voice, which naturally we don't do any more than any one male blogger speaks for all male bloggers. In any case, my-point-and-I-did-have-one was to thank Jeanne for not only plugging me in her rant (I'm the link embedded in the word "have" in the last sentence) and blogrolling me, but giving me a whole lot of gal-writing to check out now, as if my to-be-read stack wasn't high enough. :) And by the way folks, both Blogchick and Bloggles The Mind are available as journal names on Blogspot. You're welcome!