In The Aardvark Speaks, Horst Prillinger continues the discussion of blogging and gender prematurely declared over by Instapundit, taking issue with the Cowgirl’s assertion that “the ideal outcome in terms of blogs and bloggers in the blogosphere’s future would be the cultivation of more blogs that wholly transcend the very genders of their authors.”
Nope. We need more interesting people writing interesting things in an interesting way. This has nothing to do with gender. I find that many male blogs are just as boring as many female blogs. Differently boring due to different content, but still boring.
For example, I find Glenn Reynolds, one of the most widely-read weblogs on the net, about as boring as your average cat urine blog — I think it’s repetitive, one-sided, not really original, highly predictable and shows nothing of the man’s personality other than his political convictions. Why he has such a large readership is a complete mystery to me. But the fact that I find his weblog boring has nothing to do with his gender, or his subject matter, or his political convictions. If he transcended his gender and started to write about his cat, it’d be no more interesting. He’d have to undergo a personality change and/or completely change his writing style to achieve that.
(Note the presence of the cat meme.)
To be honest, I’m not sure I get the distinction between “transcending” gender and “having nothing to do with” gender. Horst also takes issue with the Cowgirl’s gratuitous slam at Rebecca Blood’s interests. Read the whole post: it’s thought-provoking.