Attracting Readers:
Sex and Audience in the Blogosphere
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.
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