Like you, I don't really care if the blogger is male or female, I'm attuned to the voice.  But I decided I would go to one of the YKos sessions devoted to "women's issues" just to check it out.  I went to "Blogging while Female" and only lasted about 15 minutes before I was bored and left.  

I disagree with one of the facts in this part of the WaPo article:

A panel called "Blogging While Female," held Saturday morning, was an aberration -- an overflow room of about 75, mostly women, a few of them minorities.

"How many of the women in the audience blog?" asked a panelist.

Nearly three-fourths of those present raised their hands.

"How many of you get harassed?"

The hands stayed up. They complain of being harassed online for their views on issues such as abortion rights.

I agree with all of it except the bolded part which leads you to believe that most of the women who said they blogged also said they were harassed.  I didn't see that.   Some hands stayed up. I would estimate that it was less than 25% of the room.

But the panel, looking around, all nodded their heads and said "almost everyone."  Now, I am not minimizing the problem of harassment but that was just false.  And perhaps the WaPo reporter just went along with what the panel said, and not the facts - although I notice that the statement is vague enough that you don't know how many hands stayed up.

Seems people are always trying to start a fight. This is one of those things that they just write off the top of thier heads, using the kind of research where they lean out of the cubical and ask  whoever walks by to name a couple of women bloggers. "Uh, gee, there's uh.. Michell Malkin, and there's uh... that other chick, who does that one thing...you know, she's on CNN sometimes..."

  Hell, all you need is a computer and an opinion to blog, and sometimes you can borrow both. That's not to denigate those who do it well, but nobody is keeping anyone back from speaking out, woman, man, or child.

The issue should be about, among other things, the underlying mechanism that:

a. make some voices more worth listening to than others;
b. more generally accord power and influence to one group over another
c.  provide space for issues that  affect the "discrimination against group" that are proportional  to their number.

See the comment rules and the please use the link button at the top of the comment box.

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, "it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men."

Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed "a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface." Her site takes a "zero tolerance" policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators "24/7" to filter the comments, she said.

Sierra, whose recent case has attracted international attention, has suspended blogging. Other women have censored themselves, turned to private forums or closed comments on blogs. Many use gender-neutral pseudonyms. Some just gut it out. But the effect of repeated harassment, bloggers and experts interviewed said, is to make women reluctant to participate online -- undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum.

To read more click here.