"I've been faithfully doing catblogging every Friday for a year now, and I'm afraid I need a rest," wrote Kevin Drum of Calpundit recently, throwing in the kitty litter in an attempt to preserve his manly honor:
"Sometimes I get these incredibly angry emails about the Friday cat blogging," he says. "It's a blog, you know? If you don't like something, you can scroll down to the next post. But some people get really upset about it. Blogs aren't like newspapers, where you'll see a lot of different content. People only want to read about what they're interested in, and that's it."
Well, yes. And bloggers only want to write about what they're interested in. According to Brian Montopoli at CJR Campaign Desk, it's a Mars/Venus thing:
Men and women, recent studies show, blog in roughly equal numbers. A notable exception: Women are responsible for as little as four percent of political blogs -- "sites devoted to politics, current events, foreign policy, and various ongoing wars" -- according to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) . . .
The blogosphere . . . shows us that while women are just as interested as men in spouting off, they're fundamentally less interested than men in spouting off about politics.
While there are always exceptions to any rule, this analysis sounds sufficiently Darwinian to suit us but leaves the otherwise all-knowing Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette! at a loss, seemingly a victim of gender-studies indoctrination:
"I was running my own personal blog for a while, and I like to think it was pretty good, but it didn't get anywhere near the attention Wonkette! gets," says Cox. She argues that there would be more female political bloggers if more women were led to believe that their opinions matter. "Vestiges of hundreds of years of gender stereotypes are still with us," she says. "Women get a different message from men about how to express their opinions. Women are not as encouraged to shout out their opinion. At times they're actively discouraged."
We hope she said that with tongue in cheek: Cox doesn't strike us as the kind of woman who sits around waiting to be "led to believe" anything.
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