"We
are a gentle, angry people and we are singing,
Singing for our lives "-- Holly Near
"We can best help you to
prevent war not by repeating your words and
following your methods but by finding new words and
creating new methods. "-- Virginia Woolf
The fall calendar for the
Center
for New Words came in the
mail a few days ago. I noticed that Natalie
Davis will be be teaching a
blogging
workshop for women and girls
in November. The blurb for the workshop claims "Blogging
is emerging as a powerful opinion-making force, but
though the technology is fairly cheap and widely
available, most blogs are still written by men." Shades
of the inverse Todd
Napolitano theory! Are most
online journals written by women? Are most blogs written
by men? Is there a difference? And what's so important
anyway? An awful lot of blogs, at least the ones I've
stumbled upon, are about baseball, pets, cute photos of
the blogger's children, parenting, writing, books, or
things like coding in Python or PHP, not so much
opinion-making on world issues. Of course, my most
virulent opinions are about baseball. Do we really need
more women blogging about how the Yankees are the source
of all evil in the universe when everybody who cares
thinks that already? Whose mind am I going to change?
I've been going on and on in my recently created blog,
stercus,
about the removal of the marbled murrelet from the
endangered species list so that the Bush administration
can allow logging of its (the murrelet's) habitat in
old-growth forest. That's hardly an A-list issue in this
day and age of war against invisible enemies just waiting
for us to let our guard down. It's not like the marbled
murrelet is important to homeland security. But I
digress. Back to the gender divisions in the
blogosphere.
First of all, what is the gender
breakdown of all blogs in the blogosphere? How many by
men? How many by women? How many by men pretending to be
women or women pretending to be men? Does a blog have
gender? I don't know how to find that out quickly. I'd
love to know how Natalie Davis got the stats.
Second, what is the topic breakdown
of the blogosphere? How many are political opinion? How
many are personal? How many are about baseball (seems
like a lot out there)? How many are about cute puppies?
Gardens? What the folks at bookfinder.com are reading
this week? Food?
Third, once you've isolated the
ones that are in fact political opinion, what's the
gender breakdown of those? Are men overrepresented in
political opinion blogs? Similarly, are women
overrepresented in food blogs? I'd venture a guess that
women form the majority of bloggers who write about
dieting, but I have no statistics to back that up.
Anyway, I'm stymied on how to research the blogosphere
demographics in any organized way quicklly enough to blog
about it, were this a blog.
No, I don't regard Journal of a
Sabbatical, for which I desperately need a new name now
that I'm not on sabbatical, as a blog. It's not links and
commentary. The entries are too long. I don't use a
blogging tool. I don't compose on line. I reread and
revise (though you'd never know it by the idiotic typos I
miss). And worst of all, it's about my own life. Granted,
it's my own life as embedded in the world. I think one of
the things that makes blogging hard for me is that it's
hard for me to have binary opinions on some things.
Compassion for all beings requires me to respect the
lives of all people, animals, and plants, not just
American lives, lives of charismatic megafauna popular
with Republicans, and lives of plants Republicans make
into paper. Oh, and to be fair and balanced, I'd have to
point out that in New England, especially Massachusetts
and Rhode Island, some of the politicians who have done
the most for the environment have been Republicans. Frank
Sargent as governor of Massachusetts stopped the bizarre
highway project that would have sliced Boston right down
the middle, and did other good environmental stuff, and
then in Rhode Island we had John Chafee in the US Senate
protecting clean air and safe drinking water and be sure
to thank him the next time a double-hulled oil tanker
runs aground and a huge oil spill is averted as he's the
one who pushed the double hull legislation through
Congress. That was only a semi-digression. Back to the
embedded life.
By embedded in life I mean that I
am part of the action and passion of my times (thank you,
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes) whether I want to be or
not. Looking back over the past two years, I can see
where some of the major news stories intersected with my
life -- and I don't just mean traffic jams, floods, and
snow storms. I mean war. I mean gay marriage. I mean
unemployment -- is it the economy stupid or the stupid
economy. I mean life.
From the moment that
BiB left
for Kuwait (when the war
hadn't even started yet but we all knew it was going to
happen) to the moment that he'd had enough of being a
target in Iraq and moved
to Our Nation's Capital
there were moments like this
one (again before the war even started but wicked
scary) when I was crazy
with fear for his safety. For a long time, every news
story about a civilian contractor killed in Iraq had me
jumping out of my skin. Even now I feel that "ohmigod
that could've been my brother" feeling when I hear news
about employees of the company he works for being killed
or kidnapped. I take a deep breath and remind myself that
it's somebody else's brother. Selfish, but calming.
From the day of the
Goodridge
decision to
the day
equal marriage became law
in Massachusetts to the day
of the Beach Boys' wedding
to the constant "Are you and Nancy going to get married?"
question, equal marriage for same sex couples is a fact
of my life. When you're part of the news, do you see it
as news? Is my overwhelming joy news? And no, Nancy and I
have no plans to get married but it makes me feel more
like a full member of society to know that we can.
From the first loomings of the doom
of InfiniBand to the demise of Starship Startup, about
which the journal is fairly quiet except for
a brief
mention of my being laid off,
to my efforts to find gainful employment in the jobless
recovery when I am perhaps best qualified for the old
tech writers' home or the old programmers' home, the
economy isn't news it's my life.
Even the mention of New Words with
which I began the entry is related to my life. Back in
the early 1970s, a friend of La Madre's was a member of
the original collective that started New Words back when
they were in Somerville, before Cambridge. For my
birthday that year, La Madre gave me a pile of feminist
books from her friend's bookstore. I went to the party
for the first anniversary of New Words. The name, by the
way, came from that Virginia Woolf quote. It seems like
I've been part of the action and passion of our times the
whole darn time. I just haven't been blogging about
it.
We are women and we are blogging,
blogging for our lives.
