Political blogging: a Boy’s Own Adventure?
1 June 2006Sorry for the general lapse in blogging. I’ve been very busy with moving house and work. Seemingly over the past few months, blogging has been half-heartedly adopted by the national media in Britain. Sadly this doesn’t seem to have made journalistic coverage of the blogosphere any better, judging by Catherine Bennett’s latest contribution in The Guardian, arguing that blogging is replacing angling as some sort of sexist old boys’ club. She’s distortingly selective in her examples, largely drawn from blogs that are either conservative or where right-wingers feel at home. For instance, nicknames like ‘9inchknobber’ are hardly typical of Harry’s Place! And that Bennett seems to think only men are interested in cycling perhaps says more about her than about blogging. While I welcome Bennett’s challenge to casual sexism, I would suggest that it would be more properly directed at the casual sexism of men who happen to blog then any special bias of the political blogosphere. Bennett’s article did a deep disservice to women bloggers by not bothering to mention any of them, such as the excellent Antonia Bance and The F-word (group) blog. It’s also revealing that she didn’t to bring any international dimension to her article. In particular, she didn’t mention the fact that political bloggers in the US used to have discussions about where all the female bloggers were — discussions that tended to reveal that there were plenty of female bloggers who weren’t getting the visiblity they deserved. Of course, even those discussions now look out-of-date given that you can’t swing a cat without coming across some women blogging about American politics (Majikthise and Pandagon are both fabulous), and that one of the biggest fish in the sea is Michelle Malkin. Under the guise of a feminist critique, Bennett has offered up a hackneyed portrayal of blogging as yet another man’s world — a portrayal which doesn’t help female political bloggers gain recognition, and is seemingly oblivious to those already well-known to bloggers everywhere.
