This Word Blog...

Apparently, Duncan was on C-SPAN the other night and got nailed with the "where are all the women bloggers" question. Lance Mannion undertakes the now-rote deconstruction here (although what exactly is this dichotomy between "wonks" and "writers"? Which is James Wolcott, for instance? Digby?). What seems to pop up in his post, though, is that the definition of blogger varies in context. To the political world, a blog is an unabashedly, overtly, conventionally political opinion site. Think Yglesias or Kos or Drum or Willis. And so when C-SPAN wonders about women bloggers, the question isn't so much about women with websites as it is about women who write like, well, political savants. And when the swift and harsh rejoinders from female bloggers hit, they're not pointing to women who spend all day poring over the Washington Post, they're aiming at a larger variety of blogs with broader topic choice that zig-zags along that fuzzy line separating the personal from the political.

The problem, however, is that neither side quite wants to redefine their question into the other's terms. C-SPAN does want overtly political bloggers, Lance Mannion is sincere in his preference for wide topic choice over electoral minutia. Think back to the recent scuffle over where the female op-ed writers were. Pointing to a bunch of female style or arts columnists wouldn't have answered the question because, in that case, both sides were talking about the political sort of op-ed. Not so here. But neither can the two worlds shake hands and ignore each other. The central trouble, as it happens, is that the beltway blogs -- by which I mean the deeply, obsessively political sites -- have attracted an inordinate amount of attention. When the outside world asks about blogs, more often than not they're wondering about James Joyner, Duncan Black, and their many imitators. As a result, the blogs that keep getting promoted, and thus garnering larger and larger audiences, are the beltway blogs, and they keep linking to their brethren because that's what they're interested in, and the cycle spins on.

So when Atrios gets asked where the female bloggers are, the correct answer is all over, but not in the way that interests the interviewer. And because of that, the subset of blogs that males write in larger numbers keeps growing in recognition and influence without bringing the other, less well-defined but more equally-gendered blogospheres with it. It is thus only a matter of time before the first serious work of philosophy comes out about how to create a "just" blogroll. Do we need to retreat to the Original Position and recognize the role of chance in sensitizing us to topics or are all individuals autonomous and informed enough to freely compete for publicity? Crooked Timber, we're waiting...