I am not lacking for blog traffic because I have a vagina.

If I was crude and read too much FARK.com, I'd say "pics or it didn't happen." Pics or it didn't happen.

If she read other economics blogs, McArdle might realize she probably gets traffic more because she is a woman, than because she has an understanding of economics. She ain't that good at economics. And she's had a pretty stellar blogger career moving from her own blog to the Economist and then to the Atlantic. No offense to McArdle, but uh, there is some other reason to her hiring than her raw economics talent and her ability to write.

When I read the article, I had the feeling the only remedy was some sort of Title IX legislation mandating where I and other web surfers visit and read. I am clearly an unrepentant sexist and cannot be trusted to find women blogs to read. This would not be too hard to implement, I do most of my reading of blogs with bloglines and bloglines and google reader would be easily configured to mandate a certain number of views of women's blogs. And that would certainly help alleviate this problem.

Actually my bloglines feed is:
Duncan Black
Kevin Drum
Brad DeLong
Glenn Sacks
Oliver Willis
Paul Krugman

Amy Alkon
Jeralyn Merritt
Wendy Kaminer
Cathy Young (I wish she would come back)
Blue Girl, Red State
Renegade Evolution
Olivia Judson

And some group blogs and regular media blogs. I guess I read more women than men, or given Cathy Young's retired status, the same, but I assure you this is strictly a coincidence and given that I do read FARK, there really is no hope for me, and I do need that Title IX for bloggers legislation and a government locked down blog reader.

One question always haunt me when I read about the "Discrepancy between the sexes".

Were are the Men in daycare centers?

I never saw them. I walk in front of many Kindergarten and I fail to see them. Where are they hidden? I am sure there's good men out there who can take care of children, why aren't they hired?

Why Men get dismissed in ways that women don't? The day Ms. Jesella will answer this question, I will be ready to debate with her the problem of female low ratio in the blogosphere.

Men can't work in daycare centers. There's too much risk of getting accused of kiddie diddling.

And this is the point Amy; It is so easy to discriminate against men. Women can be all they want to be but the sight of one (1) men in a daycare center asking the same societal equivalent is seen as a predator.

On the other side, do the lack of men in Daycare centers give me the right to disregard women as corporate board material?

The reason male bloggers hit women with their looks is because males always attack their opponents weakness.

For the women who dont respond to attacks on their looks we will find something else to attck.

Women arent attcked in ways different from men, they may be attacked on different subjects but thaey are attacked in the exact same way that men attack other men

EXACTLY, lujlp. This is a point my pal Kingsley Browne makes in his book on sexual harassment. Because a woman gets teased in some sexual way in the workplace...well, maybe it's a sign she's being treated as an equal -- for exactly the reason you give.

A link to Kingsley's book is below. I have it, it's very smart, as is his book, Coed Combat, on why chicks shouldn't be in combat.

Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality (The Rutgers Series in Human Evolution)

Thank you for the link Amy. I will put this on my "Must Read" list.

Speaking of blog commenters, hasn't she ever heard, "On
the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."? All she has to
do if she wants to test her idea is to write her blog
comment, then flip a coin to see if she labels it with a
male or female name. That way she can see whether she gets
put down because she's (apparently) a female commenter or
because her comments just plain suck.

> She added that women are
> taught not to be aggressive
> and analytical

I'm so tired of hearing this from women... It's just lunacy. That phrase, or that belief, is the product of a tiny zombie microchip that gets installed in women's brains during gestation. It's not true, or meaningful, or in any way relevant, it's just an automatic response when certain circuits get connected.

Perhaps women aren't as naturally inclined towards physical aggression (actually clumsiness) or analytical thinking (obsession) as men are. But it's just childish whining to blame society for making you them way.

... making you that way.

This really steams me. It's a personal thing. People are much more eager to blame society than to blame their own nature when something's unpleasant.

Agree, Crid.

And, of course, I do have to mention, whomever it was who taught me not to be aggressive and analytical clearly failed miserably.

Amy,

Thank you for your thoughts on this. The whining about the female blogger is eerily similar to that lunatic in Southern Ontario you've written about who uses an average word length of about 17 letters and complains that everyone who disagrees with her is a racist.

On a personal note, in times past I dated a few women who translated me saying "I don't agree with you" into "Robert is a sexist bigot who doesn't value my opinion".

Maybe there's a forthcoming book from you entitled "The Epidemic of Victimology"?! Clearly you have a lot of examples (and letters) to draw from!

"She added that women are
taught not to be aggressive
and analytical"

It's also just doesn't fit the facts or the books like "Queenbes and Wannabes" or "Odd girl out" or the common relationship most girls have with their jr. high and high school years.

It's part of "Sugar and spice and all things nice and snips and snails and puppy dog tails" theory, the theory that claims that women would never start wars (Boadicia, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and many many other strong women to the contrary). It's related to patriarchy theory -- the theory everything is due to how men rule society.

I'm telling you, we need Title IX legislation to fix the corrupt, broken, and patriarchal bloglines and google reader.

Compare these sentences with McArdle:

"The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like “You are perfect.” Nearby, women were being dusted with blush and eye shadow, or having the kinks in their necks massaged.

There was a lactation room, child care, and onesies for sale emblazoned with the words “my mom is blogging this.” No doubt they were."

And McArdle's response:

"Women are ... more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say."

"The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like “You are perfect.” Nearby, women were being dusted with blush and eye shadow, or having the kinks in their necks massaged.

I would be too frightened to go to an event like this.

Also, I don't have friends who spend all their time discussing men.

I was recently out for drinks with my friend Jill Stewart, a political writer who's taken over as news editor of the LA Weekly (she is NOT a communist, I must add!), and a really cool, smart, beautiful sergeant in the West LA detectives I've become friends with -- after overhearing her talk about identity theft at the counter of my favorite designer resale store, and introducing myself and giving her my card and inviting her out for drinks with Jill and me. (She's amazing -- for example, she could spend a lot of time driving around and arresting people, and will, when necessary, but sometimes just calls the perps up and convinces them to come turn themselves in. And...they do.)

Anyway, we were out at a bar, and apparently, these two guys behind us were listening to our conversation for quite some time, which was about politics and crime and life in Los Angeles in general, when the guys started hitting on us. They assumed, since we weren't complaining all night long about guys, that we didn't have any. And actually, as Jill explained, we all have longterm guys in our lives. Boyfriend, boyfriend, and husband. And we're all quite happy with them.

Women who spend their entire time talking about their love lives bore me senseless. They're less interesting to listen to than iceberg lettuce. And I say that as somebody who is very interested in love, sex, etc. problems and solves them for a living. There's a difference between listening and applying reason to somebody's problem and just listening to them whine about it.

But Amy, haven't you heard? Thats one of the million defects we neanderthal males have - when we women tell us their problems, we (being pigs) always want to SOLVE their problems when we don't understand they just want us to LISTEN.

Thats the spin they put on "we just love to snivel and its more fun to snivel to somebody than do it alone."

> And McArdle's response:
>
> "Women are ... more likely to
> receive blog comments on how
> they look

Go watch any of McArdle's several appearances on Bloggingheads.tv.... About every seventy seconds or so, she does this googly-eyed blink with a tiny little neck-rock.... Not a the smirky, Princess Di-style chin-drop, but a sort of "You're-basking-in-the-radiance-of-my-cheekbones" maneuver that's straight out of kindergarten... When, we can be certain, she was even then the tallest and prettiest girl on the block. I'm not making this up... If you go look for it, you'll see it. It's the quintessence of charisma as described by Freud & Paglia:

| Charisma springs from a presexual
| narcissism that is both male and
| female. - V&T, p169

| True charisma, true magnetism, is
| when you see the childhood glow
| inside the adult face in some way.
| -- The Guide, 1995

Women, even smart ones, often aren't aware that they've integrated this stuff into their personality, though they'll quickly fault men for being unaware of their hurtful "aggression". Pisses me off.

Like Amy, I think McArdle's worth enjoying for the excellence of her insights presented in text. But I haven't followed the links in this post, because hearing her whine about about being judged by her appearance would be terribly annoying...

Yes, this is definitely a picture of a woman who has no awareness of her looks:

http://www.umbc.edu/blogs/changingaging/meganmcardle.jpg

Women who spend their entire time talking about their love lives bore me senseless.

This is why I have so few female friends - I get bored and suddenly "need to be elsewhere."

But to the topic, I think that McArdle has a point that women do tend to be less talented at expressing themselves on blogs in a way that comes across as analytical. A comment from someone who is used to tap-dancing around a topic to not hurt someone's feelings is not going to come across as powerfully as someone as someone who is willing to be more cut-throat.

The answer of course isn't to whine about the unfairness fo the world ('cause whining is always SO helpful!), but to be aware of your shortcomings and actually say something worthy of comment.

"and a really cool, smart, beautiful sergeant in the West LA detectives"

OK, that's kinda hot.

> someone who is willing to be
> more cut-throat.

I dunno, my favorite girl writers are Paglia, Postrel and maybe even McArdle (though I've never read anything of hers longer than a big blog post). It's not like any of them are all that aggressive, they're just real freakin' clear about what they're saying.

OK, OK, Paglia's somewhat pugilistic. But the people who critique her can be such robotic ninnies....

I'm kinda serious about that. There are two kinds of people who pout and complain about the rudeness of online exchanges.

The first kind is are print and/or broadcast professionals. Not only are these people facing heartbreaking new competition, they're being exposed to straightforward feedback which circumstances had hidden from them in earlier days.

The second kind is people who've never had their ideas scrutinized by strangers outside a context of externally enforced propriety. Pretty girls, for example. And white people who've spent their lives in schools. Almost everyone else in the world has been in a situation where someone who didn't care about their feelings has said “Your beliefs have no merit.” Until that's happened to you, in front of other strangers, you're going to assume that the world agrees with you about things you've never discussed.

The web hurts the feelings of presumptuous people. One need not excuse assholes making death threats in order to admire that about the internet.

(PS- Even Paglia's scared of Dr. Laura...)

HUH? I figure your audience (i.e., the people who who take you seriously or think you're a dill) is determined, to some extent, by your topic. I have two gardening blogs and my readers are predominantly female, and over age 40. Other topics will have other demographics. BUT wouldn't your audience, regardless of gender, "rate" you based on CONTENT? Helllllo!

Monica - I want to read gardening blogs, can you put a URL in your comment? I like hot women over 40 almost as much as I like beautifully tended yards so it sounds perfect.

"I am not lacking for blog traffic because I have a vagina."

You get readers because your vagina isn't doing the writing. I hate to kick the easy targets, but someone like Stephanie Klein of Greek Tragedy? Totally wimpy whiny vagina blog. Her Ill Na Na must have writer's cramp. It's all needy girly stuff, and then some husband and baby stuff. GAAK.

You rock, and when I very often despair over our gender it is the women like you who remind me that it isn't all pink sweatsuits and fighting like girls and I don't need to get gender reassignment to be a dude. Yet.

The only problem with your blog Amy is that I spend far too much time here.

Not only is your content interesting but so are your commenters. (No, I'm not trying to suck up though I know it sounds that way.) I spend so much time here that I have only time for one other blog and mostly, sometimes but most of the time, no, I just read his input, which I do find interesting, and skip his commenters.

I get bogged (blogged) down with the give and take here and comment myself. Even when we aggravate each other and sometimes hiss and snarl, it's interesting. A good reflection on your writing, Amy. You get us all thinking and that's what a good writer should do. You not only get us thinking, you get us reacting. And discussing. We may not convince each other but this blog is the essence of free speech -- the exchange of ideas is definitely going on here.

I don't read these other blogs to know but that's the trick they need to learn to generate traffic.