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This week, you might have noticed an interesting trend in our mostly text-based medium: popular women bloggers are now, in the case of Playboy, being offered money to pose nude. Urlesque, slightly less choosy about getting the full monty, just ran an article featuring "Twenty Bloggers We Want to See in Bikinis." Is anyone else nostalgic for the days (oh, about six months ago) when "selling out" meant getting a book deal or deciding to put ads on your site? Yeah, me too.
My favorite Big Feminist sites aren't covering this, and I have seen some discussion about whether or not we should "just ignore this," so maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I think it's worth mentioning.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls the Playboy promotion a "step backward" for women bloggers. Arrington's post spawns the funny-but-plausible comment from Jason at OSM:
And this is one reason why more girls don’t go into the technology
field. Because of a bunch of guys who couldn’t get dates in high school
are overly obsessed with boobies even as adults.
Okay, so Jason may be overgeneralizing for comic effect there, but I had kind of the same reaction to this kerfuffle. Many women bloggers amaze me, and many are as high-profile (or more so) as men in the same fields/genres of blog writing. So, to acknowledge our accomplishments, we get rewarded by being allowed to show you our boobies? WUT.
Jane at Jane's Blog says turnabout's fair play.
And ever the optimist, I do see another upside to Playboy trolling the
‘net for the hottest blogger babes… the opportunity for the ladies to
unite and come up with our list of the Hottest Male Bloggers!
Jane is compiling her own list of male bloggers, but interestingly no one seems interested in actually seeing these men naked. Hmm, funny how that works, eh? Ephemerist chimes in with
I cannot think of many male bloggers I’d want to see in a speedo [sic]. Yoinks. Sullivan? Whoa. Yeah that’s a no. Um…I’m stumped.
Some of the women who have been nominated for the privilege of stripping down have responded on their blogs. I love that having a blog means that if someone posts something about you, hours or minutes later you can bat it right back. Michelle Collins, a nominee who writes at Best Week Ever, posted a hilarious retort, but it still reads to me that she feels uncomfortable about the dubious honor of making the bikini list. Can't she just be funny over there? Let her do her thing--BWE is great.
Do sexy bloggers "deserve" to be singled out because they are attractive or appear in photographs with evidence of having secondary sexual characteristics? GASP. I think Jessica Wakeman sums up my feelings the best:
For those of us trying to earn and hold onto respect, hottie roundups
are more of the same-old bullshit where women with impressive lists of
accomplishments are treated with that much less than their male counterparts.
At the risk of sounding like a total pearl-clutcher, aren't there enough boobies on the internet already? Do you, the people who are interested in seeing lady bloggers au naturel, really feel like you need access to MORE boobies? I mean, there is even a fine and respectable tradition of nude blogging. You are no longer satisfied with the nude bloggers? Well, tough luck. How about looking at our WORDS instead?
SJ is probably "jus jellus" over at I, Asshole.
