A recent headline on a blog I used to read regularly left me disappointed and wondering about whether bloggers do sex any better than the mainstream media. The headline read: “Breaking news: Bisexuality exists!” followed by this opening line “Talk about the "no duh" headline of the day: Women's bisexuality an 'identity,' not phase”
The post was commenting on the release of this study on bisexuality, the first longitudinal study of its kind, which tracked a group of women over an eight year period. The study, for anyone who follows social science research on sexual orientation is incredibly interesting, not to mention a long haul for the researcher who managed to follow almost 80 women interviewing them every two years about the way they constructed their sexual identities. I’m still going through the paper and want to write more about it later; but I was so struck by the ease with which the blogger denigrated both the research and by association the researcher, without bothering to read the work or even think more than a few seconds about what a snappy headline they could come up with.
I feel like this kind of blogging, where updates come several times a day and a certain amount of hipness is implied, has become the antithesis of thoughtfulness. It’s thoughtless in its lack of consideration for the real people who are out there producing work that ends up trodden underneath their keyboards, and it’s thoughtless in the sense of there being not much thought put into what is written.
I think this is particularly disappointing for me when it comes to blogging about sex. Blogging, we’re supposed to believe, offers an alternative to mainstream media. Yet by and large, when non-sex bloggers write about sex, they treat it with the same ignorance and lack of context that we’ve come to expect from print journalists and broadcast television.
Thinking about it I realize that I myself have been guilty of summing up years of research by scientists with a resounding “Duh”. But I have tried to do that based on a thorough reading of the work, not a piece in USA Today or a press release issued by an over eager college publicist. I’m careful not to criticize someone’s life’s work without being ready to back it up a bit. I can’t see how all blogs wouldn’t benefit from a bit more thoughtfulness both in their content and their attitude to the people they blog about.
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