Where Are All The Female Bloggers? Part Three: in which I gently & affectionately patronise the boys

In my relentless carping about how people don't pay attention to female bloggers, one thing I neglected to take full account of is that the cycle of the blokosphere not paying attention to women is largely self-perpetuating. There follow a number of gross generalisations:

• Bloggers, when they first start compiling a reading list, look for bloggers who they like instinctively. This is likely to boil down to someone who appears to think like me
• For male bloggers, this regularly involves randomly adding male bloggers to their list, and skipping over the females, regardless of whether or not the blogger's sex is apparent from their name.
• Sometimes they ask for recs. Their largely male circle recs them largely male blogs
• The cycle continues

The reason that a lot of male bloggers have SOME female bloggers on their lists is that there are some women who write like men. I'm one of them. awesomegore is another.

What can be done about this? Well, boys, I'm going to rec you some female blogs. Regardless of my detestment of positive discrimination (see the post I will be making later today on rules versus guidelines for why this absolutely is not ironic at all, honest guv), it strikes me that you poor little lads can't be expected to go and LOOK for female blogs; you need someone to wave them in your face because your male privilege tells you that if anything is really important, it will be handed to you on a plate. Consider this blog post (and hopefully the comments to it) your plate.

There are more recs in the comments, as well as interesting discussions on the nature of blogging, and boys asserting that they actually do read blogs by women in a not-at-all-predictable way ;)

The List

This list is a by-no-means-exhaustive list of fabulous blogs that I know to be written wholly or mostly by women, currently active and not f-locked, and always interesting. I don't always agree with the content of them, but it's always worth reading. Where I know of it, I have given the Dreamwidth syndicated feed link. Most of these also have syndication on LJ. I present them in alphabetical order for your delectation:

• Alix Mortimer (also available at alix_mortimer_feed)
• the Angry Black Woman (also available at theangryblackwoman_feed)
• But you're a girl! (also available at but_youre_a_girl_feed)
• Charlotte Gore (also available at charlotte_gore_feed and sometimes masquerading as awesomegore)
• Feminist Mums (also available at feminist_mums_feed)
• GeekaChicas (also available at geeka_chicas_feed
• the Hathor Legacy (also available at hathorlegacy_feed)
• innerbrat (also available at innerbrat)
• lizw (also available at lizw)
• nanila
• PC Bloggs (also available at pc_bloggs_feed)
• Penny Red (also available at pennyred_feed
• pickwick (also available at pickwick
• Pink Stinks (also available at pink_stinks_feed)
Sara Bedford (also available at sara_bedford_feed)
• Stephanomics (also available at stephanomics_feed)
• strangefrontier

I'm dead set certain I have left off some important ones, even out of the ones I already read, because my method for selection was to go down my reading list and copy and paste the ones that jumped out. Do feel free to berate me if you are one of those left out, and leave a nicely formatted link for the boys to follow.

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This blog is proudly sponsored by

*cough* Sunday *cough * STATPORN!

(am I the only person who, in order to get to google analytics, puts "anal" in the Firefox AwesomeBar and just waits for the right page to appear? I suspect I am...)

This weeks headline figures:

• 2205 absolute unique visitors since 27th April
• 7014 visits
• Busiest day: Tuesday (also the biggest peak on my graph of all time! Yay!)
• Readers' favourite browser: still Firefox, although it's down to 59.5%

( more Google Analytics statporn under here )

Exciting stats not from Google Analytics:

• # of unread emails: 66
• # of websites requiring work: 4
• # of blog posts I am committed to write that I haven't written yet: still 11 *shamefaced*
• # of logos/headers to design: 1 (for Sarah at Same Difference)
• # of Dreamwidth Invite Codes Available for handing out: 0
• # of people added to reading list this week: 17
• # of people removed from reading list this week: 2
• # of times I forgot to take my happy pill this week and ended up taking it late: 1
• # of times eaten today: 2
• # of halves of beer drunk today: 0
• Amount of shit to put up on eBay: approx 1 million metric fucktonnes.
• Amount of shit put up on eBay so far: 0

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This blog is proudly sponsored by

Dreamwidth Wishlist

So, I am fully bedded in here at DW now, and I think it's not TOO awful for those of you who have stayed over on LJ to still read and such... DW is much more suited to the way I do things than LJ, feels much more intuitive, and I am generally much happier with the way they run things. The things that I love are too numerous to list, but the things I would really like?

Things that LJ doesn't have:

• Proper tag management. Seriously, DW folks, Tag Merge would make me want to kiss you all. I have WAY too many tags to be arsed to manage them manually, and some of them need merging and some of them need deleting, and some of them need merging and then renaming... Proper tag management would be a dream come true for me.
• Ability to add feeds to the reading list of a community, so that communities can establish reading lists for their members, and not just show members' posts as a reading list. Which I didn't know you couldn't do until I just tried to do it. Arse.

Things that LJ already has:

• Image hosting. Yes, Scrapbook is rubbish, but any image hosting at all on DW would be lovely
• Reading Filters. I got used to using them on LJ and I can't on here, but I am doing the vast majority of my reading on here, now.

This list may be added to or changed at whim.

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This blog is proudly sponsored by

Liberal Drinks

Poll #412 Liberal Drinks West Yorkshire

Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 9

When should we hold the next Liberal Drinks?

First Thursday of the Month, as usual, and bollocks to the Euros/Council Elections
1 (11.1%)

Second Thursday of the Month because the Euros/Council Elections are important!
3 (33.3%)

It doesn't matter to me, I can make both
1 (11.1%)

It doesn't matter to me, I can't make either.
4 (44.4%)