Saturday Food For Thought: Ladyblogging

This article in bitch pretty much sums up all my frustrations when it comes to blogging, specifically in a genre with few women, and whose denizens largely ignore the contributions of those women. When I started blogging about five years ago, I looked for like-minded bloggers -- women my age. Most of them wrote personal blogs. This quote really hit home:

"The idea that the female confessional reigns supreme was recently reinforced by two articles I read in Salon, which follow the salacious anecdote + dose of sober/shameful/regretful hindsight + testament to having changed/grown formula so rampant among female first-person writing online. There's also the anecdote + life lesson learned + explicit refusal to express regret or shame, but that formula is like declaring open season for the haters to question everything from your judgment to your morality to your fitness as a woman/professional/mother/wife/human being. But hey, if that's what brings in the page views, what are you going to do?"

For four years I wrote a personal, diary-type blog. I wasn't good at it. Frankly, I sucked at making the minutiae of my daily life interesting. But that's where the community was -- and still is -- confessional blogging. I faked it. And I got "blog of the week" in a local paper. My traffic increased and I felt as though I was part of something. But soon enough, it got harder and harder to maintain that facade and as my posts dipped more into the political realm, or the fringes of pop culture, my page view began to taper off.

I like writing about music and pop culture. I think I'm good at it. I'm proud to call myself a feminist, and I think I do a decent job of marrying the two. However, it does little for my blog's traffic.

I'm not the type to say, "Oh, I only blog for myself. I don't care about things like stats and traffic logs." I care. I'd like to think I made someone thing, or at least, hipped her to a new artist. Maybe it more women writing "unconventional" blogs found each other and formed communities of our own, we could do more of that.