August 23, 2005

Why women bloggers have been a bust

Awhile back, the topic du jour was how come so few women bloggers have become hits in the marketplace. It's kind of hard to blame the Old Boys Network, when blogging didn't exist until very recently. I suggested then that one obvious reason is that most women are too concerned about their own lives and those of the people they care about to bother broadcasting their opinions on events of only marginal relationship to themselves to the world.

An even more more impolite corollary to that is that women tend to be more emotional than men, so a disembodied text-only medium that puts a high emphasis on rationality is not one in which women will tend to equal men in performance.

Apparently trying to prove my point about women writers caring more about emotion than reason, Slate.com's legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick has published "John Roberts' Woman Problem," a denunciation of the Supreme Court nominee's scattered witticisms at the expense of feminism and feminist sacred cows like "comparable worth" that have been found in his voluminous memos from the 1980s. In a classic example of why women tend to be lousier at opinion journalism than men, she writes:

"A patently bad defense, however, offered by one of Roberts' staunchest supporters, Prof. Douglas Kmiec, is that most of the proposed policies Roberts disparaged eventually "were largely rejected as unwise by policymakers." So what? The issue isn't the policies themselves but the tone. Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women's Forum similarly believes that proving these policies were dumb is enough to turn Roberts [into] a sensitive new-age guy. I'm not buying."

Let me repeat that:

" So what? The issue isn't the policies themselves but the tone."

I guess it's just the testosterone talking in me, but I'd rather have a Supreme Court justice who was right than one who was wrong but possessed sensitive tone. I like a man who calls dumb ideas dumb.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

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