When Business Gets Personal: Is Blogging Any Job For a Woman?
At Forbes, Larissa Faw takes a frank look at the business side of the female blogosphere. What she discovers shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with the old “80/20 rule”:
“You can break it down like this,” says BSM Media’s Maria Bailey and author of Power Moms. “There’s the top 10% who make six figures, who write books, and have deals with the Food Network. Then there’s the bottom 20% who are only doing it for the love and not making anything.”
“This leaves 70% of women bloggers — some 13.2 million — who blog for some modicum of profit. While no two bloggers are alike, they all receive money from similar opportunities. And free merchandise in exchange for a blog review is often considered the gateway towards serious monetization.”
Since Faw’s column is primarily focused on business models and profit, she rightly sidesteps the non-monetary hazards women face when they blog: being insulted and threatened, for instance, or losing jobs for writing about stuff that’s either too personal or too political.
Of course, those hazards dog male bloggers, too. But in my experience, women get judged more harshly for stating their opinions.
Come on: Is Ann Coulter really more heartless and obnoxious than P.J. O’Rourke? Yet who gets attacked on campuses?
Does Glenn Reynolds get rape threats, or is that just Dana Loesch (and me)?
Another Forbes columnist, Susannah Breslin, argues that being frank and female doesn’t have to be a career-ender any longer.
Breslin, whose old sex blog was called “Reverse Cowgirl,” is now, well, writing for Forbes.
In the era of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, is Breslin onto something — or does writing about/participating in sex earn women the kind of “hall pass” that delving into politics never will?
Image courtesy shutterstock and Kletr
I agree with your article very much. I am a female blogger and I blog to voice my opinions,thoughts and ideas also to rant or get the word out about things that are going on in our world today. I do it mostly because I love to write. It becomes more important to me every day, because it is my form of expression. I don’t think that I will ever let any “Man” influence me either way, because they have a right to their opinion just like I do. I do realize that Men still run the world, but; only because we let them think they do. Thanks.
When you comment about your blog, you should put your blog’s URL in the box so we can click on it and read it.
“Is Ann Coulter really more heartless and obnoxious than P.J. O’Rourke?”
Nope. She’s -smarter-. That’s why the idiots hate her so bad.
Women are still more or less expected to shut up and get the coffee. Particularly by Lefties, if how they talk and behave is any indication.
Women that won’t shut up and are smarter than the boys are dangerous at a whole different level than a smart man. No red blooded Leftie guy is going to get schooled by a chick and take it lying down. Lefties seem to skew to the sicko side, therefore that’s what they come up with to hit back. They’re perverts, its all they’ve got.
So for the Grrrrl bloggers out there I recommend a 12 gauge pump with a nice thick recoil pad. Because they’re also cowards.
“But in my experience, women get judged more harshly for stating their opinions.”
Conservative women, sure. The fact that conservative women exist seems to run against the idea that conservatives are anti-woman. People who want to maintain that idea try to run conservative women into the ground in order to discourage other women from being openly conservative.
Is that the only factor? No, but it sure seems like a major one.
Now, Phantom: I KNOW you meant to write _20_ gauge when you’re talking about us ladies!
Indeed, the .20 gauge is an excellent choice for the more… petite… bloggers out there. However the semi-auto .12 gauge, maybe a Benelli (or a Siega!) might also be suitable for the vertically challenged microbeings among us who can’t stop pulling the tiger’s tail.
Man up, Kathy! Learn to LOVE the recoil! ~:D
Besides, you’ll never have to shoot it. The sonsabitches will flee screaming like little girls as soon as you rack the slide.
Yeah, maybe women are judged harsher but…so what? Between men and women, one of them has to be.
In the game of group comparisons, (at least) one group has to be judge better and one group has to be judged worse. So what? Get over it and get the job done. Life’s not fair.
C’mon. What is Kathy trying to be? The Lisa Lampinelli of the blogosphere? Kathy says the most vile things about lots of people but reacts like teenage girl when even the most objective criticism lands in her inbox.
I read Kathy Shaidle, I agree with her on some things and largely take her man-bating with aplomb. She likes to twist men’s nuts. She’s fixated on the alpha-beta meme and “man-up” is one of her favorites phrases. An alternate title for this post could be “Why does the lion bite me when I stick my head in it’s mouth?”.
Further, I like Susannah Breslin, too. But it occurs to me that if she wanted to be taken seriously perhaps acting like a polished riot grrrl isn’t how one goes about being taken seriously. I could be wrong, so let me know if anyone has any back copies of Peggy Noonan’s first column “She-Bop”. Oh right, it doesn’t exist. Peggy Noonan likes be take seriously and knows how to be taken seriously.
I used to work for a woman who complained that male bosses were allowed to be a**holes and women weren’t. Which isn’t true. You’re not allowed to be an a**hole and a sweet little girl trying to empower herself. You get to be thought of as an a**hole. Men accept it, some women accept it, most women cry about it.
A little self-awareness goes a long way. Think you ladies could muster a smidge?
I think you’ve stumbled across a great opportunity here. There is a huge, huge, huge, huge body of work out there that’s absolutely impossible to avoid no matter how hard you try and it’s ripe for naming, categorizing and sorting. For the sake of convenience, let’s call this new genre of literature Women Who Whine. Categories could include:
For mommies – The House Whine
For the upper east side – A Crisp White Whine
For your proletarian sisters – An Earthy Red Whine
For the California girls – A Fruity Whine With Nutty Notes
For that special complaint about how it’s so hard being me – Whine Of The Day
Before ya know it, you’ll be in the chips!
Oh, this has promise. Start a blog called the Whine Spectator?
How does Kathy Shaidle know exactly how much criticism and insults male bloggers get?
She doesn’t. Lots of men – non-bloggers – have been assassinated and murdered for their opinions, so I assume males bloggers may get some criticism as well.
She starts from the tacit assumption that women always have it worse all the time everywhere. She then concludes that women just be judged more harshly – likely by MEAN MEN – just for trying to state their itty-bitty opinions. That follows in a directly logical way from her basic assumption.
Puh-leeze. I get so sick of reading this kind of tripe.
Given the history of the repression of bloggers in, say, Egypt I’m not sure there are many American bloggers who should be able to don the mantle of victim.
That said I’d wager that the conservative blogger who receives the most hate mail and/or threats is probably Michelle Malkin (an attractive, minority woman-Conservative to the left is like a red flag to an enraged bull). Before his death, Andrew Breitbart would have received as much if not more, and I doubt even Matt Drudge’s email box is suitable reading for children.
The internet gives both anonymity and distance to its denizens and makes tough guys out of wimps.
The main problem isn’t that women are judged more harshly, although that often happens. But I think Shaidle is onto something with her observation that women who talk about sex seem to get a pass. As long as a woman is willing to act like a man in some way, they are acceptable.
Think about it. One of the things feminism did is make the rules of the game the men’s rules. Success meant a lucrative and appreciated career outside the home. Sexual liberation meant being able to have sex like a man–whenever and where ever the urge struck with little need to care for consequences. In pop culture, the admired girl heroes are the ones who can slug it out with the men; we conveniently fail to notice that the writer has to give the girl hero super powers in order to do so. It isn’t women who are judged more harshly, but womanly attitudes that are judged more harshly.
I’m not sure exactly what “womanly attitudes” are, AHLondon, but looking at your examples, they kind of sound like “attitudes that I, and most reasoning people, don’t really want to have”.
In any case, I have seen criticism when a woman is hypocritical about her attitudes (i.e. using all the traditional benefits of being a woman in her own life, but attempting to co-op all of the traditional benefits of being a man).
For example: A housewife who has never worked – who has only been supported by her dad and then her husband – writes an article about how easy it is to find a good job and what losers modern men are because they don’t all have one.
She’s assuming all the modern benefits of being a woman – she could blog or write opinions in any way or do anything a man in society can do – while she simultaneously falls back on the rigid, enforced roles of men to keep her fat butt in luxury. If she wants to be a traditional housewife – well, they shouldn’t really be shooting their mouths off in public. Traditionally.
Or a woman who calls for the return of military conscription (men-only, of course), because it will turn boys into men across the board in society.
Women are going to get criticism if they want to come out and throw stones with the big boys, but then want to hide behind mom’s skirt if a few stones come her way. And they want to simultaneously laugh at the few boys hiding behind THEIR mothers’ skirts as not being real men (while never even seeing that it could also apply to these women).