Fleishr

Girls Whine About Being Treated Like Girls

The feminist blogosphere erupted this week in a brief but intense conflagration over a New York Times story about BlogHer, the annual conference for female bloggers held this year in San Francisco. “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling” was written by Times staffer Kara Jesella and appeared in the Times’ Sunday Styles section, a week after the conclusion of BlogHer. In it, Jesella reported on the frustrations of some of the assembled writers about the lack of respect they receive in the Wild West of the Internet, a frontier that still whirs away on masculine energy, despite the fact that nearly as many women as men surf it every day.

According to some ticked critics of the Times, a lack of respect for female bloggers was etched into Jesella’s piece itself.

Among Feministe blogger PhysioProf’s complaints was that the story was published in the Styles section, the section of the paper reserved for trend pieces, drink recipes, society photos and wedding announcements. In other words, the girl part of the paper.

… The white-hot fury over the placement of Jesella’s piece was a little overblown. As Carpentier rightly pointed out, the Styles section recently ran a long piece on a gaggle of young male D.C. political bloggers.

… Why did Gore and Pelosi show up for Netroots and not BlogHer when BlogHer was a gathering of women with the power to communicate to millions? Michelle Obama recognized that, which is why she wrote her first blog entry to mark the gathering. So why was the power of the conference ignored by everyone but the prospective first lady, the most marginalized of any political actor? (And P.S. Why is she marginalized, anyway?)