I often agree with Margaret Wente but on women and blogs, she swivels between the opinion that women are either too timid to blog...
Women never held peeing contests. Perhaps that helps explain why women tend to be more restrained and less concerned with public displays of prowess. We are just as interested in listening as in talking, and more interested in relationships than scoring points. We also tend to lack the public confidence that comes so easily to many men.
or condescendingly above the exercise...
Opinionizing in public is a form of mental jousting, where the aim is to out-reason, out-argue or out-yell your opponent. Women are just as good at this as men and, in some ways, better. (No man could do it the way New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd does.) Women are simply not as interested in doing it.
...And it's an assessment that simply rings hollow to me. Not the least of which because I am a woman blogger, as are a number of female friends of mine. In fact, many of the most frequently-trafficked blogs out there are authored by women, at least two of which are right here in Canada.
Narrow attitudes like this make my feminist streak twitch a little. I can't tell if she's trying to say I shouldn't blog or shouldn't want to, but in any case it seems as though to her, women bloggers are akin to slathering, Tourette's-like fratboys, with a risk fetish. Rather than sober, professional edited journalists such as herself.
