XX in an XY world - Take Back the Blog Day

For Take Back the Blog Day, 28th April 2007. You can visit the host page of this blogswarm here, and my past post on the point of it over here.

In the New Zealand political blogosphere women are few and far between. There's more than there were when I started in 2004, but still as bloggers and commenters we are vastly outnumbered, whether left, right or something else entirely.

Mentioning the prevailing atmosphere, which is often hostile to feminist bloggers and women in other roles, and the frequently misogynistic climates encouraged by other nz pol bloggers (*cough* Kiwiblog *cough*) is unpopular and leads to more trouble than you already bought just by being openly XX in an XY world.

In a way the nz pol blogosphere is a reflection of the real world, although the arseholes are distilled and less avoidable. Often they come to you, and then if you tell them to leave you alone they get all "freedom of speech" on you and sometimes they start publishing your home address, emailing you disgusting things, generally making your life a misery. How do you get a restraining order online? And why should anyone need to anyway?

Kim from Larvatus Prodeo, an Australian pol blogger, nails it for me:

Let me just say that bullying existed before cyber bullying, pron* existed before the intertubes, teenagers were writing angsty poetry before typewriters, and subcultures existed before Myspace. All this technology blaming obscures the fact that technology is an enabler - and what it enables is a mirror of its environment.

After all, in the real world rape is blamed on the victim and rapists are excused, just as it is here in the virtual. Sexism is wrapped up in "satire" and presented shamelessly for giggles, and those who don't laugh must be lacking a sense of humour - here the same as there. In everyday life women's bodies are frequently objectified for commercial purposes and judged by their appearance, just as they are on some Aotearoa pol blogs. Anti-woman agendas are promoted on the interweb just as they are on the street, despite clear evidence that refutes their faux-science or exposure of how their stats are as dodgy as all get out. And don't even start me on the bizarre real and online outcomes when racism and sexism combine.**

Kim has some hope to deliver too, thankfully:

But it also enables the contestation of that society, as the feminist blogosphere for instance tries to do, and the anger and angst and abuse that arises in response is not something new either.

Yes challenge is happening, and yes the response to those challenges is frequently unpleasant. Some seem to be so used to operating in a blogosphere that is almost uniformly white and male (and I would say in the NZ context politically skewed to the right) that any deviation from those viewpoints is not only incomprehensible, it is also only to be countered with dismissive abuse. I tend not to visit blogs where that is the culture encouraged and/or allowed by the host, but I know I should try harder and call them on it there just as I do here.

I've already ranted about this recently - if we want to change things, we need to be involved. We need to not shy away from political blogging because it is hard and nasty at times. It sounds pretentious, and I can't remember who said it, but I guess we need to "be the change we want to see in the world". If we want more diversity*** in our blogosphere then we need to be more welcoming to it - which I guess is why some of the recent discussions about codes of conduct and the like have come up.

Now that we're all "Web 2.0" perhaps folks are starting to realise that actually a lot of people, a lot of different people, have been left out of our online political discourse. Hopefully we are starting to see that this is to the detriment of us all.

* By this she means porn. It's a way to get around people finding your blog by searching for porn terms, which is rather distressing as I've recently discovered. Ultimately though if someone comes here looking for porn they are going to be a) disappointed and b) possibly exposed to some scary feminist views they might not have otherwise seen. That's my naive hope anyway.
** All of the links in this paragraph are to posts disputing the sexist position. This is quite deliberate.
*** And not just more women either, I'm disconcerted by the only very slight increase in non-white nz pol bloggers in the nearly three years I've been blogging here. And even though there are a lot of queer bloggers there is still a very strong heterosexual assumption in comments and posting in these parts. More women, different ethnicities and non-heteros are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the diversity I'd like to see.