So, alas, Radley beat me to most of what I had to say about this silly blogburst on the purported sexism of blog linking inaugurated by Dawn Olsen. The charge makes very little sense. If there’s a place where gender can be put aside more easily than in the übertextual Blogosphere, I can’t think of it. Hell, it’s only since this debate started that I realized one of my semi-regular stops, Cut on the Bias, is written by a woman.
There may be relatively few big-time woman bloggers (Galt, Postrel, Jacobs, Tushnet, and Asparagirl are the big ones, off the top of my head), but they’re in rough proportion to the total relatively small number of general interest female bloggers. (I’m assuming blogs of the non-general interest, e.g., “this is what I had for breakfast”, type aren’t going to be linked much unless the author’s a celebrity.) Given the right/libertarian skew of the blogosphere, the candidates for hyperlinkage are further narrowed. Are there tons of female blogs out there that I just haven’t heard of, which are equal in quality to the others, but tragically underlinked? Maybe, but the people complaining haven’t linked them either. Sure, Listen Missy and Amy and a few others deserve more attention, but so do plenty of bloggers of either gender.
Really, it looks a lot like the complaint comes down to Dawn and a handful of other folks feeling that they’re not linked as much as — or in the manner that — they’d like to be. But frankly — and I really hate to say this, and I don’t mean to diminish the absolutely top-notch blogs just mentioned — it seems as though, if anything, the bar is lower for a woman-authored blog to be widely linked. I like Dawn’s blog, and I enjoy reading it now and then, but you know why her general thinky-posts don’t get linked as much as, say, James Lileks‘s? Well, my humble suspicion is that it’s because they’re not anywhere near as good as James Lileks’s… or Eve Tushnet’s, or Norah Vincent’s. Neither are mine, of course, but then, I’ve never been linked by InstaPundit, either.
The sexist part, apparently, is when Reynolds does link to Dawn’s half-naked pictures and erotic fantasies, but not the other material. Well, if the other stuff were up to snuff, she wouldn’t have to get by on quasi-nudity and erotica. But it seems just a tad hypocritical to exploit the allure of the sexual matter to drive traffic, and then complain that the other stuff isn’t taken as seriously. If Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman ran photos of themselves in speedos and intersperesed BJ lessons with the international affairs and econ in their NYT columns, does anyone think they would be taken as seriously? That’s not a gender thing; it is, for better or worse, a “general tone” thing. The ironic truth here is: if she weren’t a fairly attractive woman — if she posted the de-sexed stuff she now posts without any personal identification — Dawn probably wouldn’t be linked very much at all. She’d be one of thousands of other relatively obscure bloggers. Dawn’s quite brilliantly made strategic use of the fact that she is an attractive female blogger — enough that her lament has set the blogosphere spinning. But in a blog world without gender-revealing names or JPGs, what 90% of you wouldl be thinking at the end of this post is: “Dawn who?”
Blech, writing all this gives me that “no-really-I-swear-I’m-not-a-misogynist” feeling, so I’m hoping someone will point me in the direction of many grossly neglected woman bloggers, allowing me to post an abject apology for this neanderthal screed. There are probably plenty; but are there more of those than equally good neglected male-authored blogs? Well, pretty much by definition (“neglected”), I don’t know. But I doubt Dawn does either, and it’s a little irritiating to see gender so readily trotted out as the first explanation. I wonder if she stopped to think: “Hmm, maybe it’s just that I’m just not that much better than scores of other bloggers who get a lot less attention than I do”?
One final note on all of this. Why is being linked so all-fired important? Yeah, it’s nice when people read something you’ve written, and nicer still when they like it. But given the incredibly tiny percentage of bloggers who ascend to the Pantheon, I’m gonna have to say you’re on the wrong track if you’re doing this for the fame. I’m still sort of astonished that people I don’t know personally look at this page, and I’m delighted if they get some enjoyment out of it. But ultimately, I started this because I like to write and I’m too lazy to update a longhand diary that regularly, and because I’m sitting at a keyboard for hours at a clip anyway. If your primary motivation is to be stared at by lots of strangers, there are plenty of [ahem] other sorts of websites that would be more effective for that purpose.
