"blog" and "her" part I.

Are blogs for and by Women bad for Women?

Here is what has been in my head floating around of late.

If you are a women and you want to write about cupcakes on your blog where would you sign up and start going all cupcake crazy? Wordpress? Google? Blog her? Do you aim to reach the largest audience by going with the biggest, easiest and most user friendly site or do you put yourself with other foodies who want to live and breathe cupcakes? Should you be investigating how many men have ever sought out a blog written about cupcakes? What about a forum specifically for Moms, Moms like cupcakes and I'm sure some of them are looking for recipe blogs.

At this point I should probably inform my readers that there are so many existing blogs about cupcakes out there that if you were actually planning on blogging about cupcakes you may want to reconsider and go in another direction. Overall, my point is that choosing your blogging associations have a lot to do with what you want to get out of it.

In my brief research about women blogging for women, the general consensus of what I've found is clearly not supportive of women only blogging communities. In fact, most of the pro-women blogosphere comments are really anti-anti women blog sentiments. One women will sound off about how uncool and irrelevant women geared blogs are and some women will agree wholeheartedly, others will jump on the author and those who support her as women hating women. Confused? It's okay, the main division here seems to be about why women would write about anything of value specifically as a women.

I think it's pretty obvious when a site is trying to sell you on some product or advertisement by focusing on a specific demographic. Mom blogs are a different issue for me so I will go there another day. However, women who express Feminist views by any definition, seem to be a downer to some other women. Some criticism asks if the goal of Feminism is equality, why do Feminists segregate themselves from "mainstream male/co-ed" blogging sites by creating separate ones? Is that what the goal is? Preaching to the choir? Women and Feminists are not one in the same and not all blogs are created equal. How far can the argument go?

Until we revisit this topic, I leave you with a recent piece from the blog by Susannah Breslin. The article and the comments following are definitely worth a read through.