Female Bloggers
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by northin
A few Saturdays ago, I found my mother cooking dainty French macarons. With her laptop sprawled across the kitchen counter, and every surface covered with a fine dusting of icing sugar and almond flour, I wondered where this newfound panache had come from. A quick scan of her computer confirmed my suspicions: it was a blog.
The blog in question was called Tongue in Cheek, following the travels and life of an American female living in the south of France. I queried my mother as to what she found appealing about the website, and it seems that the vicarious nature of being able to live the French dream, albeit electronically, means that the geographic isolation in New Zealand is no longer remedied by a 20 hour flight to Europe.
On closer inspection of the blog, a pattern emerged that relayed a set of gender norms. The blogger consistently reasserts traditional values of what it means to be a wife and female, with the inclusion of tips on cooking, decorating and fashion. Her glorification of the domestic sphere seems to illustrate that new media, such as blogs are not gender neutral – it also seems that gender expectations and stereotypes can be transferred to the digital.
I was quite interested in one of her posts, entitled ‘The Depth of Feeling while Washing the Dinner Dishes’. It describes how she started crying over the evening dishes, not out of sadness, but out of the joy of domestic servitude. I’m quite astounded that women are willing to be placed into certain gender roles, and that the fixed notions of the women as home-maker and the man as bread-winner are still a facet of modern (perhaps digital?) society. I guess we can thank Sex in the City for the legions of faux-cyberfeminists, which seem content in gaining empowerment through baking and high-heels. It seems that the structure of a patriarchal society is easily transferable from the real world, to the online. As cliché as it sounds, the comments that followed the post also carried a sense of Desperate Housewives isolation, a collective forum whereby others can express their gratitude for being placed into domestic servitude.
What do people think?
- Matt