Women are Good at Blogging, Bad at Tech Conferences.

A while ago I stumbled upon a blog post by Susannah Breslin, Instapundit's new defaut link, found it reeking with female chauvinism, and took a big steaming dump on it. Of late, I've found her blog at Forbes.com pretty readable, for the opposite reason. She sticks it to the sisterhood, but recognizes that there's a lot more than what she sees. Most of the time, she focuses on writing and blogging and working in the digital age, and that's all to the good. Her How Not to Be Unemployed post is solid stuff.

Today, she writes a post, Why Women Shouldn't Go To Tech Conferences, which turns the post I first didn't like on its head. Which leads me to believe that I was reading that post, and especially the offending paragraph, wrong. Maybe I was confusing a strawman with an argument.

Or maybe I was just looking for something to piss on. In any case, apologies.

Let's Count the Sexisms, Shall We?

Susannah Breslin sounds off on the supposed digital gender divide, and in a single paragraph managed to raise a host of dubious assertions:

But what of lady bloggers? Blogging goes against their nature, Wente asserts. “Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes.” Blogging is little more than a glorified pissing contest, she says, and women don’t do well at competitive pissing. In fact, the fairer sex is better at listening than shouting, more invested in “relationships” than fighting. Ergo, women suck at blogging.

I guess I'll just indulge my male need to piss on things, mark my territory, and such, and state quite bluntly that this barely qualifies as a mass (such thin gruel it is) of unsupported prejudice. Women aren't interested in "spitting" (note the verb) out an opinion every 20 minutes? Has she met any? Maybe around other women, the fairer sex is reticent to speak up, but ask a man, any man, whether his experience is that women can't "spit" an opinion with regularity.

Then there's the linkage of blogging with pissing, which froths with sour grapes on several levels, sweetened with the widely-shared (among women) belief that the ladies are better at listening than shouting. It's a trifecta of non-thought.

I realize that I have laid myself well open to the charge of misogyny even by saying these things, but I am continually amazed at people who write about the sexes without recognizing the basic fact that there are two of them, and each has an opinion on the other. No man of education ever assumes that his view of his own gender is shared by women. I wonder why I so rarely find women who are aware of it, or who respect it.