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December 02, 2003
Separate but equal?
A site called "Wizbangblog" "Wizbang" is hosting its own 2003 Weblog Awards because the author, "think[s] most awards tend to favor established sites." He hopes to, "create enough of a stratification system that blogs will compete on an equal footing with their peers." Apparently part of this stratification involves separating out Best Female Authored Blog. Of course, there's no "Best Male Authored Blog." I guess that's covered by the "Best Overall Blog" category ;) It seems odd to do mostly category-based nominations, except when it comes to women. Do female-authored sites really require such separate (but I'm sure equal) treatment?
Posted by megnut at 01:23 PM in General | Permalink
Comments
Okay, I'll bite: No.
I can't think of any other writing award that segregates by gender.
Posted by: George at Dec 2, 2003 5:58:22 PM
Some years ago, on a service that no longer caters to individuals, the staff set up a newsgroup exclusively for women. They were very strict about it: no men could read it and no women who shared accounts with their husbands could read it.
When I suggested that we start a similar group for the men, they laughed me off. The women behind it claimed to be feminists. They flat out told me that they were afraid that the men would just use it to talk about women behind their backs, make sexual remarks, and buddy up in schemes that would exclude women.
Several years later, you remind me of this. I would not mind a separate category for men, myself. As well as an "overall best blog" category. But then we run into another question: how far do we go in this dividing and subdividing? And why even have awards? Why try to turn the herd this way or that? So we can achieve an individual sense of power and control over the media?
I'll find my own taste, thank you.
Posted by: Joel at Dec 2, 2003 6:02:42 PM
Ouch.
Posted by: meg at mandarin at Dec 2, 2003 6:42:55 PM
Sorry meg. I didn't mean to hurt anyone!
Another perspective on separate but equal which has nothing to do with the present question, but I thought I'd toss in just to broaden the perspective a bit. When George Fox was helping to organize the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers to most of you), he noticed that when they conducted Meetings for Business the women would let the men do all the talking. This bothered George, so what he did was set up a separate Meeting for Business for the women. The way it worked was that the two groups met separately. When one group came to a decision, they'd pass the message to the other one. The other group would discuss it and send back a response until the two of them were in unity on the question.
I raise this because separation of the sexes here took a decidedly nonsexist turn. Fox's move empowered women in the Society of Friends. There was true separate but equal while the institution lasted. Today, Friends meet in one Meeting for Business in most places that I have seen, but the women have learned to speak up for themselves.
I wonder if this would have been possible had it not been for the intitial separation of the sexes?
Posted by: Joel at Dec 3, 2003 3:36:59 AM
I can't think of any other writing award that segregates by gender.
There's the Orange Prize for Fiction which is exclusively for writing by, and exclusively judged by, women.
Posted by: kirsty at Dec 3, 2003 3:55:01 AM
Joel, you're proposing an 18th century solution for a 21st century issue. And while you may not have intended it (just as you didn't intend to elicit an "ouch" with the previous post), you imply that female bloggers don't speak up enough, hence their voices are lost in the morass of male chatter. Therefore the need for separate categories. Women speak too softly even now? That's a possibility which is being discussed all over the web, and I won't automatically disregard it. But we've already had several thousand years of 'initial separation of the sexes'. Time to move on.
You don't like it when your sex is excluded from a group. But you're willing to support it when your sex gets to do the excluding. Fair enough. The women you talked about who created the newsgroup felt precisely the same way. We all do, if we're honest. It's just that women have been excluded by virtue of their gender for far far too bloody long, and I refuse to whine about a little reasonable freakin' payback if it empowers them. And it empowers women to create their own groups when THEY GET TO MAKE THAT CHOICE. It disempowers them when it's men who are creating the groups FOR them.
Posted by: tonio at Dec 3, 2003 5:03:57 AM
While I completely agree that it's nonsensical to have s separate writing award for women, the setup of misbehaving.net just isn't anti-segrationist, is it?
Posted by: Jesper at Dec 3, 2003 9:22:39 AM
I'm doing no such thing, tonio. I was merely going off on a tangent. Where do you see me seeing "We should do this now"?
Posted by: Joel at Dec 3, 2003 6:57:42 PM
Jesper, in contrast with tonio's critique, the tangential example that I raised regarding George Fox establishing a separate meeting for business for women applies to your concern, I think.
I have no problem with this kind of segregation as long as dialogue remains open between misbehaving.net and the rest of the technical world. The founders want to encourage women to participate in technical issues. They're not keeping us men out of comments, there are no decisions that affect our software and network connectivity being made, there's no suggestion that either sex is inferior, and there's every indication that they are listening to our sincere critiques of what they are doing. (They have the right to ignore the wackos.)
The issue with the award is that it implies that women are inferior. There is no similar award for men. The people running that contest should either drop the "female-only" category or set up one for men-only to parallel it. On that issue, I would prefer the dropping of the "separate but equal" category altogether, though I could accept the good faith of the second approach.
Posted by: Joel at Dec 3, 2003 7:08:23 PM
I'm getting the flack for calling the separate award into question. I find it very telling that the same people who create a separate award for female bloggers are also calling my feminist critical choices into question. You should know now that we are "whining" because women have no more "legitimate causes" to pursue regarding women and technology.
Posted by: Ms Lauren at Dec 3, 2003 7:52:05 PM
I wrote, "I can't think of any other writing award that segregates by gender."
Kirsty wrote, "There's the Orange Prize for Fiction which is exclusively for writing by, and exclusively judged by, women."
I stand corrected.
What I mean to say, as others have already said in this comment thread, is that this award seems patronizing. When "blogs by women" are categorized as fundamentally different than "blogs," the assumption is that the kind of writing women do is marginal at best.
On the other hand, it is not the same thing to recognize that women's writing (or women's involvement in technology) has been or is being marginalized and to take steps to try to correct that marginalization.
Posted by: George at Dec 3, 2003 9:17:57 PM
What's this with allowing your contributors to turn off comments to their posts? That seems quite counter-productive to the dialog you said you want to create here. Halley turned off comments on her post on sexual globalization. That sucks. I thought I'd leave a comment here saying so since I can't leave it on the fleshbot post itself. When bloggers demand that anyone who wants to discuss a post should link to them in order to do it, well then why have comments at all, anywhere? And if you have to email someone to comment, then that's not blogging...
bad policy IMNSHO.
Posted by: jeneane at Dec 3, 2003 10:45:32 PM
Women can have their own award, and that's not sexist, but if men also do, it's sexist.
Women can have their women-only spaces, and that's not sexist, but if men also do, it's sexist.
Women want to be treated as equals, and that's not sexist, but when they're expected to perform just as well as men under equally challenging conditions, it's sexist.
The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.
Posted by: Julius at Dec 4, 2003 7:00:34 AM
My proudest achievement in traditional archery competition was winning third place in a non-segregated by gender event, rather than taking firsts in the women's division. To me, "women's only" confirms that there is a difference, and destroys the very idea of equality. Just as diversity stresses difference and can achieve the opposite effect of its intention. However, the original fights to assure equality and the resulting legislation involved had probably been necessary to bring it all about.
Posted by: susan at Dec 4, 2003 8:37:58 AM
Jeneane,
You ask, "What's this with allowing your contributors to turn off comments to their posts?" Though it's off-topic, I'm going to answer you. Whenever someone writes something on Misbehaving, it's up to the author to decide whether she wants to turn on comments for her thread. Sometimes people want to post something simply to share a thought or communicate a feeling. Not every post needs to host a discussion, and Halley's post had Trackback enabled so that it could point to any distributed conversation that it enabled. If allowing comments is a requirement for blogging, than I guess I haven't been blogging for 4.5 years. ;)
In the future if you, or anyone, would like to respond to a post without comments, please email the author directly. It's not appropriate to post unrelated comments and future off-topic comments will be deleted.
Posted by: megnut at Dec 4, 2003 9:58:49 AM
The site is called Wizbang, as anyone actually visiting the site would immediately notice.
Posted by: Kevin at Dec 4, 2003 10:13:45 AM
Corrected.
Posted by: megnut at Dec 4, 2003 10:18:20 AM
I can see how having a separate award just for women can be seen as sexist. On the other hand, one quick look at the blogrolls of most of the "top blogs" (per technorati, blogdex, etc.) would show you that an equal number of sidebar links to women's blogs are not the norm but the exception. Almost as if subconsciously, people are going along with the old stereotypical marginalization that's been prevalent for a couple of thousand years.
Posted by: Aine at Dec 4, 2003 2:46:20 PM
Although I would consider myself a fierce defender of the right to administer your own weblog, I, too, find the "I will be turning off the comments for this blog" remark quite extraordinary. A group blog in particular I would think is aiming for a discussion of the topic(s) at hand.
I say: Deal with the trolls, and get on with it. You are getting some commentary here that is at least as interesting as the original posts, so why on earth suppress these comments because some silly individuals can't be bothered to stick to the point? I'm sorry to say it as I am all for the aims of this blog, but I find these practices weird - at best. Oh, and I guess this remark might be suppressed because of its topic being "off-topic". So be it.
Posted by: Jorunn at Dec 4, 2003 3:10:05 PM
Jorunn, it's pretty common practice to delete comments that are off-topic in discussion forums, boards, comment threads, etc. It's called moderation. Otherwise discussions get derailed, just like this one has once again.
Posted by: megnut at Dec 4, 2003 3:17:57 PM
Actually, I'm all for moderation. And I wouldn't even object to a complete deletion of trolls' comments, I think. I just find it sad that some trolling would lead to you suppressing any comment on a given posting, which seems to be the reason for this whole derailed discussion. I have my own weblog, and I could of course comment there, but I blog in Norwegian, which is more than likely incomprehensible to 6/7 of the bloggers here and probably most of the Misbehaving readers. That's all.
Oh, and on-topic: Yes, I do find it ridiculous to have a "pretty good blog for a girl" category and no "best blog accidentally written by a guy"-cat. I also strongly support Burningbird's nominations
:)
Posted by: Jorunn at Dec 4, 2003 3:51:03 PM
Aine, I think the difference between a competition with a seperated section for women and an individuals choice to have what they desire on their blogrolls is the defining thing here.
I certainly wouldn't want to dictate to people who they link to on their blogroll, but a competition (even if just a little private thing done for fun) lends a greater legitimacy to separatism. I personally think that a separate women's category is a bad idea, but if some of the posts and comments on this site over the last couple of weeks regarding the invisibility of female blogs, maybe a device to highlight them isn't as bad as I had first thought.
I guess the trick is to highlight without marginalising...
Posted by: scottbp at Dec 4, 2003 6:36:42 PM
I think it would be very funny if a recently started female blog that wasn't so good but wasn't so bad either ended up getting first place in the women's category, and it later turned out that its author was a guy writing under a female pseudonym.
It could be achieved pitifully easily and would really make a point that needs to be made.
Posted by: Julius at Dec 4, 2003 6:53:16 PM
I demand a separate category 'Best Weblog Authored By A Miraculous Fowl'.
No, no wait, I don't.
I get so confused about these things.
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at Dec 6, 2003 3:12:16 AM
Sorry for the tone Meg, it had been a long day.
Posted by: Kevin at Dec 7, 2003 9:44:32 PM
