Attracting Readers:
Sex and Audience in the Blogosphere

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 10.¹

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.”² 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.”³ 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.”⁴ 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.⁵

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.⁶ 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!⁷

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.⁸

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.”⁹ 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.”¹⁰ 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:

I have to point out that surely part of my own hit count has to do with the open marriage/sex-related content. Basically I think it’s a good thing to talk openly about women’s desire and sexual behavior; at the same time, like everything else under the sun, doing so can certainly be mistaken by dumbasses as “raunching it up” for the sake of garnering attention.¹¹

In other words, Bitch Ph.D. locates sex in a social and political context. She acknowledges that some readers may visit her Weblog solely for her writing about sex, but her representation of her sexuality corresponds to the “complex dialectic” noted by Blair and Takayoshi between “subject and object” and “consumer and consumed.” Sex and attraction, then, are not easily dismissed as mere manipulation by women and objectification by men, but their presence in Weblog discourse does lend credence to Fraser’s point that, in a public forum, while the argument that the identity of the speaker does not matter and an argument should prevail or fall flat solely on its own merits is a laudable ideal, public discourse usually does not bear it out.

1. J. Hawkins, “There Is No Such Thing as a Glass Ceiling in the Blogosphere,” posted to Right Wing News, April 12, 2004, http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2004_04_11.PHP#001939 (accessed November 5, 2005). [↩]
2. K. Blair and P. Takayoshi, “Introduction: Mapping the Terrain of Feminist Cyberscapes,” in Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces, ed. K. Blair and P. Takayoshi, 1-18 (Stanford, CT: Ablex: 1999), 7. [↩]
3. Ibid., 8. [↩]
4. G. E. Hawisher and P. A. Sullivan, “Fleeting Images: Women Visually Writing the Web,” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, ed. G. E. Hawisher and C. L. Selfe, 268-291, (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1999), 287. The term “cyborg” as it is used here comes from Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” [↩]
5. Reproduced with permission. The content at Feministe is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Available at http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2005/02/22/on-women-and-blogging/. [↩]
6. Wonkette is now maintained by two editors, both of whom are men. [↩]
7. M. Catalano, comment at “Attention Whores Get All the Attention,” posted to A Small Victory, April 12, 2004, http://asmallvictory.net/archives/006461.html (accessed November 5, 2005). [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩]
9. Fraser, 120. The idea that societal inequities are reproduced on the Internet is far from a new observation. Much research has been done about identity online; see S. C. Herring, “Two Variants of an Electronic Message Schema,” in Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. S. C. Herring, 81-108 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996); Hall, “Cyberfeminism”; L. J. Gurak, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997) and Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); L. Gerrard, ed., “Computers, Composition, and Gender,” special issue, Computers and Composition 16 (1999): 1-207; C. L. Selfe, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). [↩]
10. Bitch Ph.D., comment at “I Admit It, There Are Women,” posted to Unfogged, February 22, 2005, http://www.unfogged.com/cgi-bin /mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3039#013552 (accessed November 5, 2005). [↩]
11. Bitch Ph.D. [↩]