Picked up via Feministe, more coverage of the woman blogger "phenomenon". Some good points, some less good points, but the one thing I liked best:
"Blogs"--short for web logs--have become the most popular political tool since Thomas Paine stamped "Common Sense" on a pamphlet.
Pamphleteers. That's not bad. Now if only we had the equivalent of cool woodcuts like the cordeis about Lampião.
UPDATE: This hadn't occurred to me, and it's a good point:
Posted by binky at November 15, 2005 02:12 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Blogorama | Gender and PoliticsNot surprisingly, it's still a man's world, but that's not the point I want to address. It's the frame of "women bloggers." By addressing the issue in this way, we've already set the frame up so that the default "blogger" by itself is male, and adding a parameter -- "women" or "female" -- is necessary to feminize this default setting for the word.
It's like when people use "male nurse." The default state is feminine, and the "male" is added to masculinize it. Actually, it seems that, according to my spell-checker, "masculinize" isn't even a word... but "feminize" is. Why? I'm guessing that most words in our heads are already clearly masculine, and we've got a lot more feminizing to do than we realize.
I'm thus putting out a call to bloggers (and readers of blogs) everywhere to help make sure that this word gets firmly established as a gender-neutral, happily androgynous occupation. Stop using those pesky gender-qualifiers today.
