"I Am Woman, See Me Blog!"

Having done my share to stir up strife and turmoil amongst the distaff side of the Web, I'm now content to let you ladies fight it out:

In this year when a record percentage of people are going online for political coverage, women who want equality on the web — and by that, apparently, they mean getting as many calls from the mainstream media as well as ad revenue from their blogs -- might want to consider whether there’s really a glass ceiling, or whether they themselves have shut out a wider, more profitable audience. The internet’s 50 most influential women have figured out something that you, apparently, have not.
Call yourselves "Mommy Bloggers" if you want, organize conferences and "online communities for women," and attend conferences supposedly about technology but write only about the "hunky" celebrity chef's cooking demonstration or the cocktail
parties. But don’t blame over half of the internet — in other words men, as well as women looking for serious news coverage — if they assume you aren’t going to offer anything they’re interested in.
It’s not because you’re a female. It’s because you bore them.

What Katherine Berry is saying is, write about subjects of general interest. If the daily tedium of your humdrum existence is boring to you, what makes you think anyone else would be interested?

But wait a minute, ladies -- I feel a rant coming on. Because you know what you people remind me of?

"Writers." That is to say, the type of pretentious fakes who enjoy thinking of themselves as "writers," because that's so much more glamorous and prestigious than having an actual job, even if that actual job might involve ... writing.

"Writers" are people who spend more time going to workshops and seminars and conferences than they spend actually ... writing.

"Writers" count themselves a success if their poem or short story gets published in some "little magazine" that only exists because its editors are academics who've managed to get a bunch of college libraries to subscribe to their literary quarterly, so it has a "circulation" that doesn't actually circulate, but just sits gathering dust on college library shelves.

"Writers" dream of getting published in Harper's or something like that, so that their name might one day be listed in the same index as the big-name "writer" who spoke to the break-out session at a "writers conference" they paid $400 to attend in 1997.

"Writers" don't want to get jobs at newspapers or magazines where (God forbid) they might have to take orders from a boss and do unglamorous stuff they don't want to do, like go cover a school-board meeting or compile "community calendar" items or do any of the other dull-as-dirt stuff that I did for years at low pay for long hours under miserable conditions while trying to work my way up the ladder in a business that -- I don't know if you've noticed this or not -- has been in meltdown mode for the past 10 years.

Oh, no -- they're "writers" and they can't be bothered to do any work that a profit-oriented operation might actually pay them to do. They'd rather sit around bitching and moaning because their latest short story got rejected somewhere, and then go chitchat at another seminar or workshop, just so that when someone asks them what they do, they can have the pleasure of answering, "I'm a writer."

No, you're a fraud, is what you are. You're as phony as that dude at the bar trying to tell me he's in the CIA and has a blackbelt in the martial arts. "Writers" are the Nigerian scam artists of the literary world.

And pretty much the same thing can be said for people who maintain blogs purely for the pleasure of telling other people they're "bloggers." It's a status hobby, a faux career, the Internet equivalent of "writers" whose greatest accomplishment is to be included in one of those stupid short-story anthologies that nobody ever reads.

You self-styled "women bloggers" are merely the most annoying subset of this variety of online chaff. You think that a pair of ovaries entitles you to some special distinction: Oh, I am a mighty champion of my gender, a crusader for The Sacred Cause of Womanhood!

Whine your way into the pages of the New York Freaking Times, then bitch because you're not taken seriously enough? It's a scam, a hustle, a racket -- "discrimination" and "inequality" as euphemisms for the "me, my, mine" of a selfishness that refuses to condescend to the fee-for-service arrangements of the workaday world where us mere mortals have to scratch out our livings.

Well, you can't run that crap on me, sister. Just because you're a woman phony doesn't make you any less of a phony, and you cannot compel my respect as if you were entitled to it.