In the year 2013, misogyny and gender inequality persists in part because male editors pay women to write anti-feminist screeds, allowing men to continue feeling good about their misogyny.
Am I supposed to do a “George Bush looking for WMDs under the tablecloths” maneuver?
Where are these women of which you speak?
Do you mean the ones employed by Fox or the past-their-writing-prime variety like Maureen Dowd who graduated from Catholic school when women still wore doilies on their heads in church?
There are pitifully few women writing for major newspapers in the op/ed section and even more pitifully, a mere tincture of women bloggers cited by blog aggregators like Greg Sargent’s PlumLine. It got so bad last year that we started a Plumline metric, a ratio of female to male blogger citations. The numbers would have had to triple before they were even slightly significant.
I’ll be the first one to support the notion that women should stop bashing women. But when the DNC threw all of its support behind Obama, bashing women became inevitable- because his main opponent and best qualified candidate was a woman. Since the DNC determined that he was going to be the nominee, women were forced to bash their own in order to keep the slender reproductive rights they had in 2008. And how did that turn out?
This problem didn’t just spring out of nowhere. It has always been there because our numbers in the op/ed world have always been few. It’s just worse now because the graduating class of 2008 was almost exclusively male.
If Atrios had been paying attention, he would have noticed that there are plenty of female bloggers waiting for paying gigs who are not writing anti-feminist screeds. Oh wait, he would have had to seek out those writers on his own. They never get mentioned by the opinionmakers and they’re not bloody likely to get mentored by anyone. Heck, WE can’t even get on his blogroll.
Nevermind.
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Hey, remember this little ditty? I know *I’ll* never forget.
Filed under: General | Tagged: 2008, editors, female writers, greg sergeant, op/ed, plumline |
The Confluence 
How do blogrolls work?
The owner of a blog decides whose blogs he/she thinks are worth reading and links the blog in their blogrolls. We have added/subtracted blogs over the years and periodically review our blogroll.
We have never been on Eschaton’s blogroll AFAIK. Atrios is a particularly powerful blogger so the people he puts on his blogroll tend to benefit from that association.
Now, it *could* be because we were vocal Hillary supporters and were part of the PUMA thing in 2008, Atrios and his affiliates are too embarrassed to include us. In other words, we are being snubbed. That affects the amount of attention we get from the rest of the blogosphere. But you know, we *were* PUMAs. We didn’t follow or lead the rest of the PUMAs off a cliff nor did we ever abandon our liberal roots. But that’s who we were and it would be absurd for us to pretend we weren’t. We also happened to have been right about Barack Obama when the people on those blogrolls tried to have it both ways- supporting Obama tepidly and talking down Clinton in order to pacify the party who was helping them pay their mortgages with blog traffic.
Who knows, maybe he doesn’t like the way I write. I’ll be the first to admit that I never edit. I write once and touch up if I feel like it. But when I consider that my stuff is first draft, it’s not too shabby. If someone wants to pay me, they’re entitled to force me to edit.
Whatever.
The bottom line is that we have never been on Atrios’ blogroll or the blogrolls of the vast majority of bloggers affiliated with Atrios. It is unlikely we ever will because we can’t change who we are. It would be dishonest and I don’t think we have anything to be ashamed of.
So, Duncan can bloviate all he wants about women who bash females. To get to the top, to get to the position where women can have an effect on the op/ed world, you need to be recognized, mentored and promoted by your peers and as far as I can see, most of the female bloggers on the Eschaton blogroll are the ones who voluntarily decided to capitulate to the pro-Obama forces who strangled feminism in 2008. You can’t complain or point fingers if you aren’t willing to take some risks.
Sexism, the ultimate NIMBY problem. It’s always someone else’s responsibilty to solve. You ask someone directly what he’s doing to help and he throws his hands in the air: he’s got responsibilities and bills to pay and a reputation to uphold and he can’t jeopardize it with some damned crusade. I mean, don’t get him wrong, he lurvs women, he’s got a sweet li’l wife and a daughter, but , ya know how it goes.
Thanks for clarifying that. I was under the mistaken impression that blog rolls most often resulted from traffic. So, I must have really pissed off some people other than Cons and & Obots. Oh well.
RD, you reingnited my love of all things Hillary. Any thoughts of a presidential run in the next election makes me worry for her sanity and well being. She is a very strong person but I hope she is fully prepared for the test of another campaign, should she consider a run.
I am absolutely not concerned at all for her sanity and well-being. But I don’t think she’s interested. Seriously. It’s like that saying, “If you don’t take the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?” In other words, all of the areas where she might have had the greatest impact, healthcare, financial reform, stimulating the economy, helping homeowners stay in their houses, all those opportunities are gone. Obama did them and he did them in a very sub-standard way. Now, we’ve got to live with it. It will take a very different kind of president to make a significant change and swing the pendulum away from greed for all capitalism. That’s not going to be Hillary. We don’t know who that person is but I suspect that there will have to be a revolutionary fervor to get him or her elected. What we’ve got to look forward to now is a significantly lowered standard of living and that’s locked in for the forseeable future due to Obama. There’s no way she can change it. All she can do is prepare the way for women in the future. I hope that’s the direction she takes.