At some point, people are going to wake up and realize that narcissism is not one of the cardinal virtues.

Susannah Breslin on "why blogs for women are bad."

The fact of the matter is that blogs for women do more harm than good.


TIP #1: They’re limiting.

Blogs that focus solely on women’s issues are one-trick ponies. They don’t challenge you; they appease you. They don’t ask you to think; they tell you what you want to hear. They are an island, a fantasy; they are not the real world.

Feeling disempowered? Great. There’s a blog for that. They will tell you that it’s not you. It’s the patriarchy. Didn’t get that raise, make less than your male coworkers, can’t figure out how to negotiate your way into the salary you want? Don’t worry. There’s a blog that will explain to you this is due to male sexism, that it has nothing to do with you, that there are other sisters here who have gone through what you’ve gone through, and, (wo)man, do they feel you.

The idea is that this sort of sympathetic, female circle-jerk will make everyone feel better. That if women are told enough times whatever bad thing happened isn’t their fault, from this they will rise from the ashes and overthrow the terrible men who are keeping them down. This is a lie.

And:

TIP #3: They have nothing to do with reality.


If blogs for women existed in the real world, rather than a virtual one, what would they look like? Giant pink bubbles in which women floated through life, peering through the see-through pink walls at the big, bad confusing world out there in which men exist, things are complex, and not everything has to do with whether or not you have a pair of ovaries.

You don’t learn how to live in the world by withdrawing from it. You learn how to deal with the world by living in it. You don’t become empowered by talking about how disempowered you are. You become empowered by getting over whatever gender your parents’ biological sperm-and-egg cocktail gave you and getting on with it already. You don’t become someone new by pretending to be someone else. You reinvent yourself by letting go of who you wish you could be and figuring out who you really are.

What has segregation done for you lately?

There are a lot of single topic blogs that are written for a particular perspective, but only certain kinds of blogs are designed to be "safe havens."  The people who insist on having "safe havens" simply aren't engaging with the world.  They insist on their right to be critics but be safe from criticism in return.  That is just a delusional approach to reality.