Introduction: Gender, Blogging, and the "Where-are-the-women" Case

Weblogs are open spaces for writing about any subject, and sexual experience and lust are by no means off-limits. While the references to sex and attractiveness are almost always intended to be playful and harmless, even sincerely complimentary, they can inhibit equal participation by men and women in public discussion. In this essay, I take up sex and its relation to audience in blogging, specifically the common argument that the best way—or even the only way—for women to have their Weblogs read by a wide audience is to use their sexuality by posting titillating photographs of themselves or by writing about sex along with the issues of the day. This argument, along with many others, often arose in the recurrent discussions about gender in the blogosphere that have come to be known collectively by the general shorthand referent "where-are-the-women." These posts, which appeared with some regularity in 2004 and early 2005, addressed the perceived absence of women in the blogosphere. The primary source material for this research comes from the "where-are-the-women" posts, most of which were written by white, middle-class, heterosexual women and men in the United States.[1] While researchers have examined sex and sexuality in computer-mediated discourse for decades,[2] communicative practices on Weblogs are arguably distinct in some ways from those taking place within older technologies, such as e-mail listservs and discussion boards, and continued research about sexuality's manifestations in emerging technologies is warranted. My effort here is a small step toward addressing these issues.

However, before I explore the roles of sex and attraction in blogging, let me first explain how I see Weblogs functioning in political discourse, broadly defined to include anything that the participants in the discussion consider to be political. So far I have used the terms "blogging" and "public discussion" synonymously. Perhaps this is in error; after all, whoever said that blogging is public discussion, with all that that implies? I liken the Weblogs I study here to public forums because, while most Weblogs are personal journals written for an audience of friends and family, the bloggers in the "where-are-the-women" case generally treat their Weblogs as public forums and create that expectation in their audience. Most of the bloggers I quote here identify their Weblogs as "political Weblogs," and they welcome the publicity their Weblogs have garnered. Each has cultivated a public persona, and each seems eager to create a climate of free, open, and civil participation. Thus, I invoke the normative ideal of public sphere as a goal for these Weblogs and others like them.[3]

Nancy Fraser argues that Jürgen Habermas's description of the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere as a normative ideal is inadequate for participatory democracy in contemporary societies that strive to be egalitarian. Specifically, she critiques the assumption that inequalities in social status can be "bracketed" in a public space for the purposes of a discussion.[4] Particularly in a predominantly heterosexual context, social differences exist between men and women. It would be naïve to think that masculinity and femininity could be bracketed for the sake of a discussion; they inevitably intrude, and when this happens, they cannot be ignored. Fraser claims that "[o]ne task for critical theory is to render visible the ways in which societal inequality infects formally inclusive existing public spheres and taints discursive interaction within them."[5] I will now attempt to "render visible" the ways that inequality works in blogging via the mechanism of sex.

Silenced by Sexuality: Sex, Attraction, and Women's Participation

On the Weblog Right Wing News, John Hawkins encapsulates a somewhat extreme version of the argument about women's use of sex in their blogging:

So while women can be successful in the blogosphere without ever showing a pic or mentioning sex, if you're a female blogger and you're attractive, you'll get more traffic if you post your picture on your page. And if you're so inclined to talk about sex, hey why not? It's only going to bring in more visitors . . .

"But John, but John, that's so unfair!"

The reality is that most men enjoy being around &/or being flirted with by pretty women—even in the cyber world—and you need to just accept it. Being surprised that's the case is like being upset that your dog enjoys chasing a ball or chewing on a bone more than going to the opera. That's how it is, was, and will probably always be and if you're shocked or angry about it, you have the problem, not the dog.[6]

While Hawkins by no means represents all male bloggers, his view is shared, and stated, by other men in the "where-are-the-women" threads when the subject of sex is raised. Here, (hetero)sexuality's place in blogging is as natural as a dog with its bone. However, Hawkins' uncritical treatment of the issue of sex and attractiveness, while crudely put, represents another common assumption in the blogosphere: Flirtation and the expression of sexual desire, provided they are unthreatening, are both acceptable; after all, bloggers are human beings with urges, and Weblogs are spaces for the free expression of thought, with nothing off-limits. Men and women are free to write about sex and to respond to others' writing about sex. As a consequence, however, women's full and uninhibited participation in blogging can be lessened. As examples of this inhibition, I turn to examples from the Weblogs of political science professor Daniel Drezner and Washington Monthly professional blogger Kevin Drum.

On three occasions, Drezner posted photographs of women on his Weblog, DanielDrezner.com: actor Salma Hayek, Miss Afghanistan 2003 Vida Samadzai, and Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Veronica Varekova. He discussed their attractiveness, and other men left comments on the posts agreeing with him. In March 2004, in response, Laura McKenna wrote at her Weblog, Apt. 11D:

After surfing around for a while amongst the big shot bloggers, they did seem to link only to each other a lot. I rarely saw a link to other women. (Allison Kaplan Sommers [sic] recently posted that maybe her latest pregnancy would get her linked by Instapundit, since nothing else she wrote seemed to get her noticed.) The pictures of Salma Hayek or Miss Afghanistan weren't offensive, but it did set up a Maxim atmosphere. There is a fraternity amongst the current events bloggers that does, inadvertently I'm sure, exclude women.[7]

McKenna is not the only woman to use the "fraternity" metaphor to describe the political blogosphere. Another common metaphor for it is "locker room," neither of which is particularly inclusive. I would add that it is significant that McKenna posted these thoughts on her own Weblog—her own space—and not as a comment at Drezner's Weblog. However, a woman calling herself "Cali (girl)" did leave a comment at Drezner's Weblog, which reads:

I think what puts some women off from Dan's blog is the occasional racy pictures or comments about sexy women, or the like. Now, it's not outrageous. In fact, racy is probably too strong a word. But after reading/seeing, in a short time period, the pictures of the Sports Illustrated woman and the Selma (sic) Hayek in red, I just felt that Dan seems to be writing JUST for men at times. Which is fine, I'm not judging. Just saying that it makes me go to other sites for the economics stuff I used to come to this site for, because I'm not sure when he's going to be doing his just for men stuff.[8]

This comment left on Drezner's Weblog by a woman posting under the screen name "adoherty" also suggests that the photographs make some women less inclined to participate in the conversations under his posts:

[Drezner] says "Maybe it's because of posts like this one [which links to the photograph of Varekova]" but then notes that he hasn't received any objections. Well, this particular female lurker wouldn't object, because it's his blog & he can say & post whatever he wants to. "Posts like this one" do, however, create a sort of boys' club-house atmosphere that contributes to my disinclination to speak up.[9]

Taken together, these two comments are very illuminating. Given the nebulous, silent presence of lurkers, it is difficult to claim with any validity that the element of sexual attraction in blogging does or does not deter women's participation, or to specify to what degree. Further, both women here emphasize that it is Drezner's prerogative to say what he wants on his own Weblog; the importance of individual freedom and decreased presence of community norms could be a reason that expressions of sexual attraction are not criticized more strongly in political blogging. Still, while many exceptions exist to the contrary, I would argue that most bloggers want both to have individual freedom and to create multiple forums (their own Weblogs and those at which they comment) of open participation, unconstrained by exclusionary practices, however subtle.

At Drum's Weblog, a reader with the pseudonym "SSJPabs" (2004) writes,

I'm going to be really annoying and chauvinistic and non-liberal about this because I FEEL like it...

...are they hot? Do they have pictures of themselves on the site? Wonkette is INFINITELY more interesting because she's got a decent-to-good rack. That's what I want to know.[10]

True, this comment could easily be read as a joke, but a reader with the pseudonym "Eukabeuk" responds, "basically, it's a sad truth that *most* men don't give a damn what women think unless they have a nice rack. It's the perpetual presence of comments like these that drive women away from this type of forum."[11] Far from being a social difference that can simply be bracketed, the female body is conspicuous in the blogosphere, and its presence can be disruptive. While women can—and sometimes do—obscure their gender by using gender-neutral pseudonyms, women who participate as women can expect, if not harassment, at least some flirtation: agreement with and praise of their words with the added acknowledgement of their physical attractiveness, reminders that they are different.[12]

Subversive, Strategic Appropriation of Femininity (What if I Like Talking about Sex?)

It should be noted that some women participate in this seeming objectification, or, rather, they consciously and purposefully use their sexuality and beauty as a way to attract readers to their Weblogs; after all, it is an extremely effective way to draw traffic to one's site. Hawkins writes:

The reality is that women have a much EASIER time making it in the blogging world than men do. The average male blogger will link a piece written by a female blogger, especially one who's attractive, over an equally well written piece on the same topic by a man, 9 times out of 10.[13]

Assuming Hawkins is to some degree correct, it is understandable that as a rhetorical strategy, even a feminist rhetorical strategy, women might take advantage of their femininity and appropriate it in order to reach a wide audience. Doing so on the Web is nothing new; Blair and Takayoshi discuss this complex play of online representation, pointing out that "images of women on the Web exist along a continuum from objectification to representation." They add that "[a]ll objectifying images cannot be attributed solely to men; it is clear that women grapple with this continuum both consciously and unconsciously in their own production of electronic discourse."[14] They illustrate this continuum between objectification and representation by discussing Jennifer Ringley, who in the late 1990s had a site titled JenniCam, which featured Webcam images that Ringley had set to upload to her site every three minutes. Readers, mostly men, paid a fee to subscribe to the site and view the images, most of which were banal photographs of Ringley as she sat at her desk and went about her daily activities, but some of which contained nudity and sexual activity. Admittedly, JenniCam was never meant to be a public forum for political discourse, but Blair and Takayoshi suggest that Ringley and others like her are "taking control" of their visual representations online, that the JenniCam "represents a complex dialectic between woman as subject and woman as object, woman as both consumer and consumed, and woman as a 'performer' of femininity through her interaction with 'woman' as object of desire, a positioning that privileges the presence of women online as objects first, subjects second."[15] Ringley was able to profit from the fact that men wanted to see her body and peer into her private life, but at the same time, she controlled how the images were created and packaged. We can see a similar dialectic on some women's Weblogs.

Hawisher and Sullivan support Blair and Takayoshi's read of the JenniCam with their own analysis of women's visual representations on their personal home pages. They conclude that "when others control the Web images, we see women represented commercially in ways that seem familiar to us—as objects to be ogled, objects to stimulate, commodities to be bought or sold." They add, however, that there are also women "writing their own visual representations in cyborg territory. These women begin to forge new social arrangements by creating a visual discourse that startles and disturbs."[16] To give an example of an image that startles and disturbs, in February 2005, Lauren of the Weblog Feministe posted a visual critique of the arguments about sex and attractiveness in the "Where are the women?" discussions in the form of a parody. Titled "On Women and Blogging," the post said simply, "Oh, I get it now," with the image below.[17]

All at once, this image critiques the gender stereotypes of man as consumer of erotic images and woman as object to be consumed, along with the branding quality of many Weblogs and the view of audience as inbound links and hit counts: in other words, a commodity. Many women embody the "complex dialectic between woman as subject and woman as object" described by Blair and Takayoshi, including two prominent bloggers I shall discuss here—Ana Marie Cox and Bitch Ph.D.—who have, wittingly or unwittingly, used their desirability as a way to draw more readers to their sites.

From December 2003 to January 2006, Cox maintained Wonkette, a Weblog that centers on gossip about politicians in Washington, D.C.[18] Unlike most other Weblogs, Wonkette is published by Gawker Media, a company that publishes for-profit Weblogs. Having established a reputation as an intelligent and witty writer in other venues, such as the once popular but now defunct online magazine Suck.com, Cox was recruited by Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton to write for Wonkette. Due in large part to Cox's bawdy jokes about the sex lives of prominent politicians, Wonkette became an immediate sensation, and soon Cox became a token "woman political blogger," often the only woman in the upper tiers of the various Weblog traffic ranking systems. After the 2004 vice-presidential debates, NBC interviewed two bloggers, one Democrat and one Republican, and Cox was the Democratic representative. Cox also covered the 2004 Democratic National Convention for MTV. Due to this high degree of visibility, Cox's Weblog comes up often in the "where-are-the-women" discussions, particularly for her heavy use of sexual innuendo in her posts. In April of 2004, in her Weblog A Small Victory, Michelle Catalano wrote of Cox:

Oh yea, I heard she's hot. Quite a few of the upper echelon male bloggers seem quite smitten with her. In fact, they are fawning all over her. And now she is considered to be on the A list of A listers, if there were such a thing. I don't get it. I just don't get it. Oh wait, I do. Guys will give you all the props you want as long as you are hot and write about sex. But if you aren't hot, or if you don't have a cute little image on your site depicting how adorably cute you are, then just give it up. You think if I start writing about how big John Kerry's dick is and how I am obsessed with anal sex my opinion will mean something to someone? Oh how cute. She's talking about butt fucking again. Let's link her and marvel at how astute and wonderful she is![19]

Most male readers responded to Catalano's anger by assuring her that they would rather read a substantive, thoughtful Weblog than one that consists of gossip and sexual innuendo, but some others made "catfight" jokes. In the same post, Catalano wrote:

This is why guys have an easier time "making it" or being taken seriously than women do. They just have to write. We have to be whores. I give up. Why bother spending hours doing research and writing, re-writing and editing when tiny little items about Bush's daughter are what's making the grade around blogs these days? You want the big boys to link you, girls? Start undressing. Or get a makeover. [20]

It should be said that Cox is well known as a feminist; she has co-authored an essay in Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism and has publicly identified as a feminist. To take her posts in context, one would need to remember that Wonkette is merely a persona, used by Cox to make a living as a professional blogger. Still, the response to Wonkette is telling, and Catalano's frustration is valid—and similar to that of other women in the "where-are-the-women" threads. While I sympathize with Catalano here, I do not intend to make blanket statements about what women "should" or "should not" write about, as they are unproductive and needlessly restrictive. It is not necessarily unethical for an author to call attention to his or her physical attractiveness or sexuality, but it does suggest a problematic socio-rhetorical context if women feel compelled to "be whores" as they write in order to reach an audience. The blogosphere, like any other rhetorical situation, is "situated in a larger societal context that is pervaded by structural relations of dominance and subordination."[21] Sexuality and attraction, while not a problem, are manifestations of social differences, and bloggers' preoccupation with the element of sex in the "where-are-the-women" discussions shows that gender is a difference that cannot be set aside.

Bitch Ph.D. occasionally posts photographs of herself, but the photographs do not reveal her face so as to protect her anonymity. However, she often writes posts about her open marriage, which sometimes contain moderate sexual content, and she is not naïve about the coincidence of her popularity and her sex posts. In a comment at the group Weblog Unfogged, she writes, "let's not kid ourselves: part of the popularity of the bitch blog is the sex, not the politics."[22] However, Bitch Ph.D. shows how sex is politicized; she often uses sex as a starting point to discuss the social purpose of the institution of marriage and gender and power in relationships. At her own Weblog, she adds: