Blogging About the Shoes, Redux

With all the discussion going on this weekend about the New York Times piece about BlogHer, and its placement in the Fashion and Style section, I immediately flashed back to a post I wrote two years ago about the BlogHer conference. What I wrote in 2006 actually holds up pretty well, so I'm re-posting it below.

Before going any further, though, I should mention two important points. 1) Although I've been a part of BlogHer and the BlogHer Ad Network since 2006, I have never been to a BlogHer conference. I have followed the conferences closely online for the last three years, and there's a good chance I'll attend the mini-conference in Atlanta this fall. 2) I own nearly 40 pairs of shoes. Someone once said the number of pairs of shoes a woman owns should equal her age, and I've lived up to that pretty well in my adult life.

I also must mention that I had some great conversation about this yesterday (via Twitter) with Elisa Camahort Page, one of the co-founders of BlogHer. She asked me, "Why is it not equally diminishing to one's credibility to talk abt sports? Tim Russert did it every Sunday."

I must admit, this is a great question, and I've been pondering it a lot this weekend. My best answer is this: Men don't lose credibility when they talk sports because their credibility is already (in most cases) firmly established. Because women are still, by our own admission, trying to earn and establish credibility in the blogosphere, we can't yet expect that "shoe talk" won't hurt us. The sad reality is, it will.

In some career fields and other settings, women have achieved a level of credibility to talk shoes or fashion the way men talk sports -- and that's great. But looking at the big picture, we are still living in a patriarchal society. We can stand outside the castle and throw rocks at it, shouting that the people inside should change; or we can work our way inside the castle and make change happen. When it comes to situations like this, my mantra has always been, "You can do more damage from the inside."

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From June 30, 2006

So I've been following BlogHer this weekend -both at the BlogHer site and with some of my favorite bloggers who have posted updates and photos. I've come across a few other bloggers who are blogging about not being at BlogHer. I also found several different run-downs of the session on Mommy Bloggers, including this great one from CityMama. I love that this session was called "Mommy Blogging is a Radical Act" and that there was a lot of discussion about empowerment. I love that there were bloggers live-blogging all the sessions so I could fill my head with all kinds of great new ideas. And I especially love that next year's BlogHer conference is in Chicago. What an amazing city.

One thing I didn't love so much was the BlogHer post I saw Friday night with a Flickr slideshow about what shoes attendees were wearing. That was followed by another photo-essay post about purses, bags and backpacks. Here is an organization and a conference that are supposedly all about empowering women and helping them to find their voices through blogging, and two of their prominent live-from-BlogHer posts are about shoes and handbags.

(So not being at BlogHer has given me too much time to think too hard. Please don't think that this post comes out of some deeply-rooted BlogHer conference envy, or that I've lost my sense of humor and fun in this summer's heat. These are the things I think about when I spend too much time on the computer. Had I been at BlogHer, I very well may have been agreeable to pose for one of those photos - oooohhhh, yes, look at my cool shoes! and my excellent bag! But since I wasn't there, I had the time and the perspective to think too hard. This has bothered me since Friday night, and I have really struggled with how to express this without alienating a whole bunch of people.)

Let me clarify a few things. I am not radically against all things feminine or girly. I wear make-up. I shave my legs. I get my eyebrows waxed. And at the same time, I respect my friends who choose not to do these things. But I do not usually talk openly about makeup or shaving or waxing (or shoes and handbags) in situations where I want to feel empowered, where I'm trying to make an important statement or impression, or where I want to be taken seriously by both women and men.

So it seemed to me that the BlogHer homepage, on the weekend of the BlogHer conference (attended by hundreds and hundreds of mostly women bloggers) was sending a very confusing mixed message, saying, Women are an important force in the blogging world, and people should sit up and take notice of what we have to say and take us seriously, while at the same time squealing, And OMG, look at our cool shoes! And purses!

And then we wonder why, as women (or as moms, or even as bloggers), we are not being taken more seriously.

In fact, while the posts about shoes and handbags sat prominently on the BlogHer site, a huge crowd of women gathered in the Mommy Bloggers session to discuss questions like why aren't people taking us more seriously? or why is "mommy blogger" a disparaging term? Quite possibly, women in other BlogHer sessions were asking similar questions.

There are many bloggers (including some of my favorites, some incredibly smart and hilarious women) who do talk openly about make-up and shaving and waxing, and sometimes I have even joined in such discussions. On those blogs. I would not have been surprised to see a shoe or handbag slideshow on those blogs. I would have found it fun and entertaining. But on the BlogHer site? It was kind of disappointing. Kind of...insulting. I wonder how any of you attendees felt about being portrayed this way.

I see that BlogHer actually has a blog category called Fashion and Shopping. Ironically, it's right above Feminism and Gender in their list of blog categories. I know that BlogHer is trying to blog all kinds of different angles of the conference, and that their base represents a broad range of interests and beliefs. But blogging about shoes and handbags when you're trying to demonstrate what a powerful force women bloggers are isn't really empowering anyone, is it?

The original post with comments can be found here.