Where did all the women go?

There is something about blogging that seems to repel women.  There are very few blogs written by women.  And the few that I have read over the years have ended up being shut down and abandoned by their authors.

This blog, the Northern Valley Beacon, initially had three women contributors, Ann, Erin, and Val.  It was started as a project of the local Democratic party and was conceived as a way to provide information and discuss issues.  The three women and I posted information about party activities and talking points on political matters.  We signed our names after the posts we wrote and even included phone numbers so readers could contribute information and provide perspectives.  That did not last long, however.

We received contentious and sometimes malicious telephone calls, but the women received more menacing ones than I did.   One day when Val's 8-year-old son answered the phone, he became the object of an abusive and threatening verbal assault.  It was serious enough that Val and her husband reported it to  the police. Val decided not to participate as a contributor anymore if it put her family in jeopardy.  We monitored comments on the blog and did not allow abusive ones to be printed.

Another blog also posted a running commentary on our blog.  It was run by two professors from the political science department at Northern State.  Eventually, we decided not to post the women's names, but to post everything under my name to deflect the comments away from the women and the party. The comments on that opposing blog were seldom about issues.  Rather, it engaged in juvenile taunts and insults, and the women decided that blogging had become so demented that it had no social value.   They decided to disassociate themselves from it.  In fact, they decided that all political activity had become petty and characterized by aggressive malevolence, and it was not worth the effort put into it.  Consequently, the Northern Valley Beacon has evolved away from its original purpose.

Their experience is apparently shared by other women bloggers.  Over the years as many blogs I read have been shut down, I have expressed regrets over their absence and received explanations  that the belligerent climate on the internet dissuades the authors from trying to engage in reasoned, temperate discussion.  Women bloggers are confronted with misogyny in responses to their posts.  As with my former blogging partners, women bloggers find that the internet is the vector that brings misogyny into their lives, and eliminating blogging from their lives is like removing a malignant tumor, as one person explained it to me.

One blog based in South Dakota is ending this month,  It was a food blog, but contained accounts of daily life that provided some insights into how the author coped.  The experience of closing down the blog is like having a neighbor move away.  Life made the blog a very low priority.

Over the years, I have noted the passing of other blogs by women from the state.  Sometimes I disagreed with their observations, but they provided points of view and social contexts that made the world more understandable. 

The women bloggers I know have stepped away from blogging as a measure needed to protect and maintain their families.  That says much about the actual human condition in America.