Isn't It My Turn In The Barrel?

Suburban Guerrilla's guest blogger Maya links to an article about why there aren't enough women bloggers.

The question it seems to be answering, though, is why Wonkette the only one getting phone calls to be part of the Mainstream Media.

Anna Maria Cox. She's prettier, younger and more entertaining than most other writers – male or female – on the web. And she spends most of her time writing about sex. Her male readers – and that's her audience, trust me on this – think that's really cool. It's a cheap trick but it builds an audience. Since she's got an audience, Big Media think of Cox as "the" girl blogger. Since they've got one girl blogger in their Rolodex, they don't think they need any more. Particularly since she's pretty and she talks about sex which makes them all feel better about how bloggers aren't really a serious threat to Big Media.

As someone who's been reading Ana Marie Cox since before she was the Antic Muse, I dislike the insinuation that we're now getting into her because of all the ass-fucking jokes, but I wouldn't deny that has something to do with it.

Anyway, I don't think it's that women Bloggers are being ignored -- the media's found it's token female blogger just like it has it's goto guys for any "niche" area that it doesn't quite understand, like always getting Richard Dawkins for evolution debates -- there are plenty of them out there and there's plenty of them being read by other bloggers. Some of my favourite bloggers are women (there, I've said it and I'm not proud).

As a blogger who's partly doing this so I have something to chat about down the pub I don't mind that the NYT aren't phoning me up for my opinion on anything. It's not about that. Some people are using their blogs to promote themselves and their ideas and they are the ones getting noticed. It helps that they tend to be good writers and that having to come up with an opinion on something, anything, everyday is the sort of thing that works well on TV and Radio.

What I mean is that if you're blogging in order to get noticed by other media, think about finding other ways of getting noticed. Don't complain that your not getting noticed because of your minority status, you might be the "old" media is still still has plenty of it's old faults, but the main reason you're not getting noticed is more probably because those positions that you covet are filled at the moment and there's a whole bunch of other people waiting in line, too.

I don't know, a lot of this reminds me of musicians I've known who have the cover of their third album planned despite having only written 2 and a half songs and can't quite understand why an agent hasn't airlifted them from their dreary bedsit to the awaiting fame that they're so clearly destined for. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that.