Blogswarm: Take Back the Blog

Earlier, I linked to Take Back the Blog! March, a My Left Wing essay by Bruce Godfrey of Crablaw's Maryland Weekly. He has now crossposted at Booman Tribune as well. An excerpt... As noted above, April is a traditional month for the Take Back the Night marches. The four TBTN marches I attended at Princeton over 15 years ago were very important events in my life and who I became as a person. In a previous diary I blogged about the impact of those marches on my personal and professional life. I learned more from those experiences than from all except perhaps two of the 30 courses I took while I was there. So I am announcing the first annual Take Back The Blog March, a blogswarm in defense of women's right to be left alone in peace at night, including in the night of cyberspace, to be published on April 28, 2007. If you care about women's dignity as people and as FULL participants in this community - not the Daily Kos community but rather the community of all liberal and progressive bloggers - I hope you will consider contributing. I will maintain the swarm list of links for Take Back the Blog March at my own site, Crablaw Maryland Weekly, and will prepare a link logo in the next few days for that purpose (or if you have a good logo, please contribute.) Contributions will be welcomed that stand up for the dignity, privacy, sovereignty, self-determination and freedom of women against all forms of predation - in the blogosphere, in cyberspace generally, and in regular life. I mentioned the need for a link logo to Demetrius, and he created the following. People are more than welcome to download and use them to promote this blog event. For my part, I plan to keep adding posts here as I find them (and as the feeds become available.)

Blogging while female

I first learned about the crass, insensitive remarks of Markos Moulitsas in this post by skippy, and later found a post by Steven D at Booman Tribune. In a later diary, Steven included what Markos actually said: Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats". [...] But so what? It's not as if those cowards will actually act on their threats. For better or for worse, this isn't a country in which media figures -- even hugely controversial ones -- are routinely attacked by anything more dangerous than a cream pie. Since last night, I saw that skippy had updated his post with the following: addendum: feminazi, commenting over at echidne's blog, asks this question: i sent a email to http://www.mothertalkers.com/contactus asking them why they support misogynists through advertising. why don't you do the same? good idea! Except, I don't know how much choice they have, given that you see *this* at the bottom of the home page on that blog: © 2005, Kos Media, LLC I may be only a C-rate blogger (on a good day), but what do we *usually* do when we want to hold a public figure accountable for something they've said? Isn't it usually *their* advertisers that we write to? Or how about writing to some of the politicians and public figures who post diaries at Daily Kos. This Wikipedia article has a list. I wouldn't recommend this if Markos' remarks were a one time thing, but as shirlstars' comment here indicates, this is part of a pattern of behavior. See also: How not to be an asshole: a guide for men Why the lack of concern for Kathy Sierra ? Take Back the Blog! March, a My Left Wing essay by Bruce Godfrey of Crablaw's Maryland Weekly. Finally, as I noted here, I really haven't had it in me to do much blogging lately, and I'm still not feeling all that verbose at this point. But I do consider this to be an important issue, and, even if I don't manage to blog more about it, I'm going to make a point of adding relevant entries to my page of Google shared items, which you can find here.