The gender of the Blogosphere -- an Unscientific Survey

Long Suffering Spouse teaches Spanish to junior high students and one of the most difficult concepts they struggle with -- year after year -- is that every noun in Spanish has a gender.

*WARNING* I am about to attempt an illustration of this point. Native Spanish speakers in particular, be ready to cringe. *YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED* Thus, it is el gato, the cat, male in gender, even when the cat is female.

I didn't understand it either when I took Spanish.

But thinking about that led me to think about the 'gender' of the Blogosphere. Saturday I joked in my bloghopping post about experiencing a sex change operation... because the person who bloghopped me referred to me as a "she" (is that too many pronouns?) in her blog. On the other hand, at first blush, it seemed a safe assumption.

Women write most of the blogs I visit regularly. Not all of them, of course. There's Captain Picard and Dr. A, Chris from Thermal,and Ben and Bennie. And of course Sarge -- but he fell into the habit because of his blogging bride Bee. I believe that to be true of Barb of the blockbuster blog (say that 10 times fast -- g'wan now, I dare you!) Skittles and her husband Mike. And then there's professional comedy writer and sometime baseball announcer Ken Levine. Or Josh, "The Comics Curmudgeon".

I've lost you now among the exceptions, haven't I? We lawyers tend to do that.

But most of the blogs on my blogroll are written by women. And there's a huge community of popular "mommy blogs" such as Suburban Turmoil.

Indeed, I was prepared to state this morning unequivocally that the gender of the Blogosphere should be feminine... I was going to argue that the women are so dominant here that our miniscule male presence can be ignored entirely which is why the women feel so free to speak their minds... on any and every topic... and using any words they feel like using. I was going to cite some of the comments I've been reading... anything by Mist1... oh, I had a dandy post taking shape as I was coming to work this morning on the train.

And then I opened my email. And saw my Sitemeter stats for the week.

I had 531 hits this week -- 76 a day.

Paltry figures, to be sure, next to Barb's 442 -- but, put it this way -- since I first started tracking with Sitemeter, I've had about 3,900 hits total. This week represents over 13.6% of that entire total.

This latest upsurge in traffic is due, without question, to Sgt. Michelle Manhart, USAF. My post about her appeared January 12. Traffic shot up on January 13. And I had only one AP photo with my post... not the pictures that ran in Playboy.

Now, none of these new visitors left comments. They presumably were disappointed quickly and left. But my suspicion is that all (nearly all?) the Google searches for Sgt. Manhart were from males.

And I realize there are a lot more male bloggers out there doing political blogs.

I've mostly shied away from politics here. It's not that I don't have opinions. I have lots of them... but here I'm trying to attract readers. I'd accept acolytes, of course, but my wife would not allow me to have any groupies. So I want readers -- and political opinions tend to put off potential readers.

Besides, my red meat conservative acquaintances think I'm a Commie Pinko hippie radical freak. My true believer liberal acquaintances think I'm a heartless souless running dog reactionary. I'm afraid that may make me... middle of the road.

And you know what you're most likely to find in the middle of the road, don't you?

Road kill.

No, I'll continue to steer clear of politics.

But there are men are out there in the Blogosphere. And they're certainly running Google searches. (On the topic of searches, Ken Levine's Sunday linkbaiting post is more shameless than anything I've ever done. And funnier, of course. Although he left out Sgt. Manhart. And Chrissy Popadics. I'll have to leave him a comment on that....)

But in the meantime, I'll leave you with my irregular feature, the Unscientific Survey: What gender do you assign to the Blogosphere? Feel free to explain your answers.