Weblog Entry - 12/07/2002: "Body and Soul: A Blog by Jeanne d'arc"

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12/07/2002 "Body and Soul: A Blog by Jeanne d'arc"

I want to read The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xiran and The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell but I have no money to buy it so I was perusing blogs in search of content heavy material and found an interview on Lefty Directory that satisfied me.
It was about a woman sharing power with other women - something you do not see that often. I read an interview this woman did and then went to read her. I was pleasantly surprised which sure has not happened in a long time. I needed this. Go to her blog. Read something that feels like those all night talks we used to have. One of the best things she does is turn you on to THE READER where you can find good old fashioned hard core feminist rant on the return of the Girly Kulture in corpo(rat)e America (Dec. 4th Disposable Women).

Seeing a female hand on the boss's knee under the conference table bodes ill for all the men and women who live by a code of working hard and playng fair.
Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves (Part 2)
Jeanne d'arc http://bodyandsoul.blogspot.com/

I got an amusing e-mail this morning from a reader who was offended by the very idea of a "sexist list" of women bloggers.
Well, as somebody more articulate than me once said (I can't remember who, probably either Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, or Mark Twain -- between the three of them, they seem to have said pretty much everything worth saying): What's the point of writing if you can't offend someone?
The kicker was the remark that men don't make an issue of things like this. You'd never hear a male blogger say that he was putting someone on his blogroll just because he was a man. Men are above that sort of nonsense.
(By the way, does anybody remember Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady," singing the hilarious ode to clueless misogyny, "A Hymn To Him," perhaps better known by its refrain: "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like a Man?" -- I don't know what made that pop into my head.) Men never complain about unfairness.
Honey, give me more than my fair share and I promise I won't complain about it either. Word of honor -- I'll take it like a man.
Now the truth is, I'm not adding a lot of women to my list because they're women. I'm adding them because they're good, interesting writers who I enjoy reading. In fact, a lot of them stayed off my list longer than they should have because even though I started writing this blog thinking I would write about nearly everything that interested me, at some point I realized that I had an audience that was primarily interested in politics, and while some of the women I'm adding are purely or mostly political writers (and some of them pretty gender-neutral in their writing), a lot mix political, personal, spiritual and a lot of other issues together -- as I do, but with a different balance. They didn't seem to quite fit on my blogroll.
There was a element of sexism in my sense that they didn't fit. Sexism isn't just flat out hatred of women. It involves all kinds of subtle ways we devalue women's lives and contributions. We all grow up so immersed in sexism that it effects everyone. Including women. And including women who define themselves as feminists.
And when I thought some styles of women's writing "didn't fit," what I was thinking, I realized, is that because a lot of women tend to approach things from a very different angle than men, there was something not quite right about it.
Different, therefore wrong. Even though I liked it.
But eventually I realized it's my blogroll, I can do whatever I want with it. (I grew up in a time when women -- at least poor, Irish Catholic women -- didn't think, let alone say, "I can do whatever I want" with anything, so sometimes it takes me awhile to find those words -- another little legacy of sexism.)
If my blogroll's got people on it who write about needlepoint and church suppers and decorating and volunteer work and fat and chocolate and two-year-olds' temper tantrums and homeschooling and why John Ashcroft is one of the poorest excuses for a human being God ever made, and that's not what most people (especially male people) expect when they read a political blog, well, that's what it is. That's the way a lot of women write and think -- valuing experience and interesting connections, not argument.
Men just aren't used to it because it's the way we talk to each other, not to them. (Most of them anyway. I do know a few wonderful men who are in on the secret.) Maybe if we start, they'll get used to it. Maybe we'll change the way people think about political discourse. (Believe me, there's a lot of overlap between politics and cleaning up after small children.)
So, diatribe completed, here is my latest batch of first-rate women bloggers. I hope they are especially offensive and blatantly female today. If they're not, I m..........
And she gives a whole list of women bloggers.
And if you want to know more about her, she does an interview about herself here.

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