Margaret Wente needs to get off her high horse – or is that too much of a guy thing to say?

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Steven Hodson

Earlier today Mark Dykeman DM’ed a link to his posted reply to a post at the Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente titled Why are bloggers male?

I have to give Mark a tip of the hat because he managed to pull off a great even-handed response to what has to be one of the most moronic and arsine fourteen paragraphs of ill-informed opinion of the blogosphere that I have ever read. I’d suggest that even Andrew Keen and Nick Carr at the most cynical have a better understanding of the blogosphere except they are men so they probably wouldn’t count as valid references in Wente’s world.

She points to how tilted the blogosphere is towards the male gender and not just your gym change room type of males but rather 12-year-olds having pissing contests in the snow. She doesn’t deny that woman don’t have a place because after all they can do a better job of opinionizing than their male counterparts – they just don’t have any interest in doing so.

Excuse me?

I’m not sure what blogosphere Wente is living in but it is definitely not the same one as the rest of us. Some of the best and smartest bloggers I have read are women. I even wrote a post about some of the best women bloggers that belong in your feed reader and there is my 10 Questions interview series of which three of the four interviewees were incredibly intelligent women.

As for the blogosphere being the realm of men and their pissing contests Wente obviously hasn’t been reading any of the hundreds of mommybloggers or the equally sharp tongued female political bloggers in the US. Anyone of those women could go toe to toe with their mouthy male counterparts and leave you bloody and bruised.

Just as there are women who can piss in the snow as good as the next man there are also incredibly brilliant men who are more interested in sharing thoughts than leaving yellow trails in the snow. Perhaps rather than reading Andrew Sullivan Wenke should spend some time reading men like Doc Searls, Andrew Keen, Adam Singer, or even Jeff Jarvis.

The thing that bothers me the most about Margaret Wenke’s post isn’t the insulting and condescending attitude towards men bloggers but rather the total lack of research she did before mouthing her opinion about something which she obviously has no understanding of. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that she was equally insulting all those women bloggers out there that contribute immensely to the blogosphere as a whole.

Do us all a favor Margaret – don’t start a blog.