Watch for regular blog updates (including the Return of 5 years of Archives!) in August, when I am done my qualifying exams and can return to a more regularly scheduled life. In the meantime, you can always check out the smart people on my links list.
If you have a few hours to kill, and a high tolerance for both pain and LULZ, there is no finer way to spend an afternoon than reading the ‘mansplaining‘ thread on Thus Spake Zuska. Be sure to read the comments, and the follow-up posts, including “Let me mansplain that Sports Illustrated Cover for you“ and my personal favourite, which follows up on some clueless commenter’s attempt to coin the term ‘femsplaining‘. Right after ‘anecdata’, ‘mansplaining’ is one of my new favourite words, which probably explains why this Margaret Wente column caught my eye. Male Answer Syndrome, as she terms it, is a form of mansplaining, and its why men blog, and women… well, who knows what broads do, but apparently having well formed opinions and articulating them isn’t it.
Margaret doesn’t have a blog, you see, and here’s why: because blogging is a guy thing. “Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack,” she says, and her proof is that she doesn’t have a blog, and neither does her friend, Sarah. So, extrapolating from that excellent sample, she is able to draw inferences regarding the urge to blog in half of the population of the planet. Frankly, I don’t know why I slogged my way through graduate statistics and survey methodology classes, when I could just be doing this kind of incisive research design and analysis. Women don’t blog, because … well, because Margaret was shy in college and never raised her hand, and therefore women don’t feel the need to voice an opinion. Globe and Mail, I am actually a little ashamed to read you.
