Flutterby™! : BlogWho?

Over at Backup Brain, Dori has some words about BlogHer, and my responses in the comments are verging on the flame, so I'll move part of the discussion over here. I said things like:

You see where this is going, right? You have a site that bills itself as "Where the women bloggers are" and in the end boils down to "...of ... relevance to the women who participate in and read BlogHer", ie: whatever we feel like including.

For the most part, I see the site as reinforcing the worst of pre-feminist female stereotypes, and I'm not even a fan of some of what feminism wrought. Maybe I've happened on it at its bad times, but the twice I've loaded the page I've gotten a general vibe that makes the magazines in supermarket checkout lines look positively enlightened.

However, even with a largely tech focus and pretty locker-room atmosphere, I'm amazed every time I go down the right-hand bar at the sites from my bookmarks and see that women are fairly well represented in those links. So maybe it's just that I take a post 1950s view of gender roles, and the prejudices that arise from such expectations, that's making me so sour on their endeavors.