DR. JIM'S THINKING SHOP & TEA ROOM

A bit of a hullabaloo is stirring over whether the bible blogging sphere is run by a bunch of male chauvanistic pigs. April DeConick at Forbidden Gospels expressed her concerns about the relatively few women listed as Bibliobloggers, something noticed in a post on August’s Top 50 biblioblogs (and see the later posts here and here), and there is much hand wringing over why that might be the case. DeConick writes:

So this is my hypothesis. I think there are as many women bibliobloggers out there as men, but they are not visible. Why? Because many of us women post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible. Our blogs are easily justified as unimportant. They remain unknown or unread because they haven’t been linked to by the male bibliobloggers who dominate this blog niche and the field in general, a point that Julia wisely raised in the comments to my last post on this subject. Julia wrote: “But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other’s success, make sure that others find the good work that’s out there?”

Umm, could the problem be that the typewriter
needs to be plugged into the microwave?

Needless to say, this started a bit of a shit storm (editor’s note: “shitstorm” is not an official Bibliobloggers term). Jim West, the top Bible blogger for 6 months and apparently a self-professed male, commented here and here and here and here and here.

This is probably NOT Jim West’s phone number.
I have been wrong before.

Dr. West thinks it is hardly the fault of the men that women’s blogs don’t get noticed. You can read a bit more by other folk here and here and here and here and probably lots more places if you care to look.

Now, I do not know why there seem to be far fewer women than men that blog on the bible and biblical scholarship. It isn’t that computers are too difficult for women.

At least not lately…

My own list of biblical and religious studies blogs doesn’t include Ms. DeConick’s. I had thought of linking to her blog, but I usually make my mind up about what blogs to include fairly quickly and when I looked at her top few posts they didn’t seem all that relevant to my interests. Of the women’s Bible blogs I’ve looked at, most seem to be on New Testament/Christianity (just like men’s blogs).

This is NOT to say DeConick has nothing worth reading by anyone else. I’ve probably gone through 80-90% of the more than 200 Bible blogs listed on the Bible blog site and linked to those I felt were most interesting. I’ve also followed up on interesting comments made to other blogs and uncovered some interesting authors that way.

As far as I can tell, the comments made on this blog are predominantly made by men (although at times it is hard to tell given the names people pick for themselves). There are, of course, some feminine exception, Mary and Steph come to mind. I don’t remember blocking a single comment with content in the year this blog has been operating. There have been a few times I sent something to the Spam hole that should not have gotten through the filters, but that is about it.

One of the links above says that Ms. DeConick’s own blogroll has only a small percentage of blogs written by women, so if she can come up with a list of ignored bloggerettes, I would be happy to go through those too, but I’m not going to go looking for blogs by women.

I don’t think there is any evidence of a conspiracy against women bloggers. I don’t know the statistics on how many women blog as opposed to men, so it is hard to evaluate the imbalance in the field of Bible studies. Could it be that many women just want nothing to do with the “trash the other as you fear they will trash you” nature of the blogosphere? Or are there fewer female losers than men?

http://frankowenspaintbrush.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/labourlist-what-would-jesus-do/

Now, I can see some female Bible scholars not wanting to bother with blogs, especially given that women expressing opinions are often considered bitches whereas men expressing similar opinions in similar ways are regarded as assertive, and the blogosphere thrives on opinion and over-reaction. The social risks in blogging are noted here and here

It is certainly unfair to say that few women’s blogs are well known because the most popular Bible bloggers refuse to link to women’s sites. Jim West’s site, for example, has a relatively short blogroll and a lot of successful blogs written by men are not included.  Far more people link to J. W. (is that a denominational affiliation?) than vice versa.

Now, what about Dr. Jim’s list of atheist bloggers? I have 22 blogs listed. Only two are written exclusively by women, one mostly by women, one is at 50% and another around 25% (in terms of listed contributors, not actual contributions that I never counted). I deleted two blogs by women just a little while ago because there were no longer active. Some of the blogs are communal projects without available demographics and for others I simply do not know if the authors of others are male or female and haven’t really spent time trying to figure it out. The issue extends beyond the field of biblical studies.

Now, Dr. Jim’s can be a pretty objectifying place, what with the Slinky Jazz Babe posts, the movie stills of barely dressed cave girls shrieking at approching dinosaurs, assorted actresses, TV stars and so forth.

http://www.mybadthoughts.com/bloggers-women/

But I don’t ignore women’s blogs as a matter of course. I think before cries of conspiracy, there needs to be a lot more information presented into the numbers of women blogging, how many of them are biblical scholars and so forth.

There probably are a number of reasons for the gender imbalance that have to do with basic cultural stereotypes and pattern of behaviour and expectations. But should people go looking for female bloggers and link to them if their material is of little interest? The last thing we need is a sense in the guild that women’s materials are included only to silence claims of sexism.

So, if there are female Bible bloggers out there reading this (whatever it is), make a comment to something and I will follow up and give your blog read, but no guarantees that I will link to it. For reasons that are not at all clear even to myself I do not subscribe to blogs via RSS feeds. Every morning over my morning coffees (note plural) go through virtually my entire blog roll one click at a time to see if there is anything new, or even anything old that might be kind of fun. It is kind of therapeutic.

The same goes for female atheist bloggers, too (not that being an atheist and being a biblical commentator are mutually exclusive!) let me know you are out there!

Now, even given that I’m a sexist jerk, I thought it would be good to get a bit pro-active in search of a solution that will address the imbalance…

This probably isn’t it. Well, it might work on the weekends…

(and yes, my bum looked big in it)

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