‘Mainstream’ lefty blogs and feminism

Earlier this week, me, zohra and Holly trundled down to the Guardian for Blog Nation, arranged by Sunny from Liberal Conspiracy.

You can see Sunny’s photos here.

The second panel focused on women and feminist bloggers, and our interconnections to the rest of the blogosphere (featuring zohra, Cath Elliot, Sadie Smith,and Kate Belgrave).

There’s all sorts that could be drawn from this experience, but I wanted to concentrate on one factor – lack of feminist-inflected posting on lefty/political blogs run by men. My assessment is that most (but not all) left-wingish blogs in the UK ignore gender and feminism, and thus feminist bloggers ignore them in return. Or, if not exactly ignore, the networking bloggers do of exchanging links, comments and emails doesn’t happen, because if we do read those blogs, we’re not inspired to link them up because they’re not relevant. Well, that’s my theory.

Anyway, I was pleased to get quite a few emails following on from the event – Alex at LabourHome posted about Caroline Spelman and lack of childcare provision at Westminster (also see the discussion in the thread, which was just as interesting). Charlie Beckett from Polis had some nice words about The F-Word too (although obviously we don’t actually have a business plan), and more. The you have Lee Griffin’s response, which I will quote from without comment:

It just so happens the most bulshy and disagreeable feminists are the ones that you tend to see more of and remember.

Also check out stoat from Feminist Philosophers’ take here.