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.

1. Clancy Ratliff, “*The* Link Portal on Gender in the Blogosphere,” posted to CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism, December 21, 2004, http://culturecat.net/node/637 (accessed November 5, 2005). I had no predetermined set of criteria for how I selected the posts I was going to analyze for this project. Rather, I kept a running list of the links to these posts as the bloggers posted them, and when they linked out to other bloggers who were responding to the “where-are-the-women” question, or when other bloggers sent trackbacks to their posts, I added those links to the list as well. In other words, I began with the feminist Weblogs I read regularly and tracked the conversation network as widely as possible by looking at posts that the bloggers linked to. While this group is admittedly homogenous in terms of sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and cultural background, I argue that their remarks about the issues of sex and attraction have much to reveal about the place of sexuality in blogging communities and its influence on the discourse in these communities. The complex issues surrounding sex and attraction are undoubtedly multiracial and present among gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender bloggers as well as heterosexual bloggers, but even among nonwhite and GLBT blogging communities, the discourse takes place in a majority white, heterosexual social context and does not exist outside of the influence of that context. An intersectional analysis of sex and attraction as they reveal themselves in blogging practices is much needed and would be a valuable contribution to the existing work in computer-mediated communication. The heteronormativity throughout the discourse will be clear, and I hope simultaneously to describe this norm at work and critique it. [↩]
2. A. S. Bruckman, “Gender Swapping on the Internet,” Proceedings of INET’93 (San Francisco: The Internet Society, 1993); S. Correll, “The Ethnography of an Electronic Bar: The Lesbian Café,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24 (1995): 270-298; S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); K. Hall, “Cyberfeminism,” in Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. S. C. Herring, 147-170 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996). [↩]
3. Several researchers have compared the blogosphere to a public sphere. O’Baoill, 2004; T. Roberts-Miller, “Parody Blogging and the Call of the Real,” in Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, ed. L. Gurak et al. (University of Minnesota: 2004), http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/parody_blogging.html (accessed August 1, 2005); Ratliff, “*The* Link Portal”; M. Barton, “The Future of Rational-Critical Debate in Online Public Spheres,” Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 177-190. [↩]
4. N. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun, 109-142 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). [↩]
5. Ibid., 121. [↩]