Not About a Book

This isn't about a book, but I have to comment on this Tiger Beatdown post on a study of "Gender and Digital Politics," published by the Hansard Society, no less! Apparently most political blogs are run/commented upon by men, shock of shockers. I must opine because I have seen this nonsense in action.

OK, here's my breakdown:

Politics is a nerd activity--the kind of nerd activity that attracts mostly men. Women who enter this realm are going to be treated as sex objects, especially by older men who don't get that women are not just support systems for titties. This is cool if you go into the nerd community because you want to prove the law of scarcity and be treated like a rare sex pantheress by socially awkward dudes, but not cool if you actually want to play, say, Magic the Gathering or have your opinion on political issues respected. (For further research, see this Babycakes video about being aggressive. B-E AGGRESSIVE. Man, I love Babycakes.)

Most of the time it's not actually unsafe to speak up in the "boys' treehouse," online or in real life, and you're probably not going to be straight-out called "cunt" or "bitch," but you'll definitely be treated like one, which is probably worse. I doubt this has to do much with an aggressive, insulting atmosphere (BABYCAKES!) per se, like Tiger Beatdown claims--women can be just as tenacious in defending their opinions as men are, especially in an online environment--but rather a kind of institutional misogyny. Women can adopt whatever attitude they want, they are still women and therefore suspect.

For posters/writers on political blogs who have vaginas and are willing to identify themselves as possessing such organs, avoiding being ignored or treated like a freakshow usually means giving into what I'm going to call the "Elly Hart" tendency (in honor of this post), in which the writer continuously has to set herself apart from the rest of those nasty, weak-willed women. This is often because the common consensus of the group is that women are nasty and weak-willed, silly at best and fundamentally dishonest at worst. If you're going into this group as a known female, you're going to be facing a group who think that you, because you are female, are--for example--prone to making false rape accusations all the time. (I lurked and occasionally postedon a blog where this went on all the damn time. Whenever any sort of sexual assault issue came up, it automatically turned into rants about how the ladies make this sort of shit up and how damn awful that is.)

Now political blogging is a spare-time activity--it's not like God comes down from the heavens and commands people to spend their time wonking out on the Internet. Very few people are drawn to these blogs in the first place--now how many of these people are going to be female? And how many of those are going to put in the time and effort to establish themselves in a hostile environment? And how many of those people are going to swim against the tide of popular opinion (well, popular opinion in the context of an anorak-y blog) to try to establish a view on any woman's issue that doesn't coincide with the negative opinion of the majority of posters?

And that's why you don't get a lot of women commenting on political blogs.

(Addendum: The most popular blogs in the UK definitely lean right and have this sort of anti-Zardoz "penis good!" thing going on--very heavy on the men's rights and so on. Not the natural environment for the centrist-to-left-leaning woman, or even a right-leaning woman who is not interested in talking about imaginary crazy harpy women tearing off imaginary balls.)

(Further addendum: I'm tempted to comment on my own post with "CUNT" just to get it out of the way.)