Drum Roll

You’ve heard me say it before, and now I’ll say it once more: Kevin Drum’s at it again.

Except this time, I’m not complaining. Since I last uttered (as it were) those fated words, Kevin has introduced great female guest bloggers at Washington Monthly, and yesterday, he wrote a piece on Sex and Gender that shows he really appears to be taking the issue seriously.

Rox has an interesting critique here, which I recommend as follow-up reading, as it does address a couple of little problems with the post, into none of which I’m going to delve, because that’s not really the point of this post.

The point is this: Kevin, to his credit, did not take my criticisms personally, and treated them, at least in correspondence with me, as the fair critique of an important issue they were intended to be. Never did he accuse me of fishing for links; never did he accuse me of attempting to tell him what to do with his blog. And if his follow-up endeavors are an accurate representation of his attitude toward my (and others’) having raised concerns about gender-related politics being treated as secondary issues, he has regarded raising those concerns as a political disagreement worthy of response.

The truth is, often when things like this happen, the lesser known blogger is inevitably automatically accused of trying to attain some sort of notoriety, of wanting nothing more than a link, traffic, attention of one sort or another. And I weathered the backlash of those who indicted me with being little more than a self-interested opportunist after my last post addressing a post of Kevin’s. I realize there are a lot of people who’ve had enough of the blogosphere navel-gazing, but I believe it’s important to acknowledge the treatment of this issue by Kevin himself, which was to regard is as a legitimate argument, thereby creating a productive discussion. Sure, there are going to be times when lesser known bloggers fish for links, or believe they are pursuing a legitimate issue with a larger blogger when it’s simply not the case, but there are also going to be times when lesser known bloggers raise a pertinent issue that really does need addressing. My intention was to effect change by shifting the nature of the debate about women bloggers and gender politics (which was an existing issue long before I was around), and Kevin’s willingness to take it at face value, instead of throwing up a barricade of self-protection behind accusations of ulterior motives, is commendable.

It is unlikely that anything written here would ever warrant his criticism, by nature of the size of this blog as opposed to its content, but should such a situation ever present itself, I shall endeavor to return the favor.

[UPDATE: Pam’s got a great follow-up post on this, too.]