Question of the Day

I keep meaning to mention this and keep forgetting…

There’s an article in SadieMag featuring some familiar bloggrrls (and Ezra) taking about the gender divide in the blogosphere. It’s a pretty good article, although I’ve got a few quibbles (chiefly, that an article attempting to address a gender divide in the blogosphere was seemingly quite careless about including bloggrrls of color).

(For some good critique of the article, see Jill at Feministe and Amanda at Pandagon.)

In any case, one of the points that Ezra makes echoes a point I made in response to one of the author’s questions about female and male bloggers having different voices (though it wasn’t published):

Every good blogger has her or his own voice. I wouldn't say that women generally have a particular voice and men generally have another. That said, I think there is a conceptual divide between blogs which trend to policy and wonkishness, and blogs which tend to be less exclusively focused on the same, instead favoring broader cultural analysis—policy application and social commentary; the personal is political. There are female- and male-authored blogs in both categories, although it seems the big male-authored blogs fall primarily into the former whereas the latter is equally divided between female and male authors. A generalization to be sure, but I think the conceptual differences separate the blogosphere more rigidly than gender specifically.

Maybe I’m just spectacularly tone deaf, because I constantly mistake bloggers for their opposite sex (and more often than the other way around, I think men are women), although people get Paul and me mixed up around here all the time, but maybe that’s just because Paul’s such a girl and still plays with Barbies.

In all seriousness, however, not a few of the emails I’ve received criticizing my insistence on using foul language have also accused me of being a man posing as a woman.

Anyway, what do you think—do female and male bloggers have obvious differences in their voices? Is the wonks vs. writers divide both Ezra and I identified touching on something you’ve noticed, or are we full of shit? Any other thoughts on the topic?