Ann Althouse Wants A Feminist and I'm Sort of Available
Last Thursday law prof blogger Ann Althouse posted this:
Can I get a feminist?
"Remember back last February when Kevin Drum wrote about why there are so few women in political blogging? He guessed that "men are more comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing — both writing it and reading it." I had occasion to think about that yesterday. One thing Kevin failed to note is that male attacks on women are not so much of a food fight as a sex fight. Blogosphere-strength fighting with a woman takes on an outrageous sexual tone, aggressively declaring that that this is a boy's game. Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?"
At some point she added this update (among others):
"YET MORE: Enough folks have misread my intention in writing this post that I feel compelled to add that I am not whining about needing someone to help me out of a jam because I'm a victim. I actually am concerned about the larger feminist issues identified in the post.
Echidne had this response, and I can understand where she is coming from, because of course if Althouse had been reading feminist bloggers she would already know that most have had similar issues with misogynist commenters. Rather than criticizing her for being unaware of this, and us, though, maybe we could welcome her a tiny bit into the fold? There are probably a world of things I disagree with her about, but she doesn't seem overtly hostile to feminism from what I can tell from a cursory overview of her blog. Maybe there is some common ground? I'm going to start reading her blog, and she's certainly welcome here, for whatever that is worth.