Where Are The Good Blogs? And! I Got Called Out!

Ah, my first brush with e-fame.  In the (sigh) third post at Tiger Beatdown on the Sady Vs. Freddie drama, Sady goes into a rant about how she is being perceived as egotistical because women are not supposed to trumpet how awesome they are.  As a woman myself, boy do I get that.  But! She uses a quote from a comment I left on Freddie's blog to illustrate the point: "...self-obsessed even for a blogger..."  Of course, she doesn't attribute the quote to me, and lumps me in with threats of physical violence from male-identified commenters, and fails to mention that I use the quote in the process of telling Freddie that he's acting like a sexist douche.  I guess being somewhat underwhelmed by the degree to which Sady Fuckin' Doyle manages to make both feminism in general but also other people's oppressions All About Her puts me in the same camp as dudes getting annoyed at women having a little bit of self-esteem.

Now it's not my intention to make this about some imaginary, Kathy Griffin-equse feud between me and what I am often told is now one of the best and most popular feminist blogs on the Internet (it's a good hook though, isn't it?) As I said here, on TigerBeatDown, and in Freddie's blog is that I think Sady is funny, and the opinions on the blog more thoughtful than not, but for the aforementioned reasons, I'm not really a fan.  I don't quite get why that bothers Sady, since she has really more than enough fans to outweigh my lonely, bitter old voice.  But this brings me to my point: where are the really good blogs? 

Frankly, I'm not much of a blog reader.  A post on ontd_feminism on LiveJournal discussing the best feminist blogs reminded me of why.  I was generally familiar with the majority of blogs listed, but aside from the ones that we link to her, I have been underwhelmed.  I think the LJ user DraperyFalls puts it well:

"i find blogs that just regurgitate other blog posts or quote liberally from news articles and post predictable thoughts extremely dull. unfortunately, many blogs like feministing, feministe, pandagon, theangryblackwoman, womanist-musings, etc. fall into that category."

I do like some of these blogs (as I link to them, obviously) and I cerintaly don't feel like Womanist Musings falls into that category, as it's chock-full of great content and commentary, but ze's overall point resonates: there are a ton of blogs that relate to the issues we're interested in here at SexOrTelevision that are largely link fiestas, drawing you into a recursive and yeah, boring loop.  Somewhat problematic blogs like TigerBeatDown and I Blame The Patriarchy are exceptions, as in they often provide lots of real, meaty content, which is great. Of course, content means opinions, and some of those are tiresome or in the case of IBTP, difficult to defend, given the history of commenters' transphobia on IBTP and Twisty's ignoring of it, among other issues. 


When it comes to writing about sex, a huge number of sexuality blogs seem to be filled with bad erotica and personal tales of deviancy.  Which is great and there's certainly a place for that, but when that's all you've got, it's yawn time.  Where's the analysis?


So I'm going to ask you, dear readers, all three of you: what are YOUR favorite feminist/trans/queer/gender-examining/sex-obsessed/anti-racist/kinky blogs?  And why do you like them?  I've discovered a few more the other day that I do want to add to our blogroll, but I am open to suggestions.  Alternatively: why do you think this part of the blogosphere is the way it is, and what would you like to see change?  


I'm not trying to be super-critical here (even though that's our nature over at SOT) - but I do think that when you have literally thousands of followers and get brought up of as "the best" in your field, you open yourself up to some nitpicking from the (secretly jealous) peanut gallery.  We can only hope that one day we're widely read enough to have peeps rolling their eyes at us, saying, "I just don't understand why it's so popular," with a derisive snort.


Semi-relatedly, in our ongoing effort to make SexOrTelevision awesome, I am extremely pleased and excited to introduce our newest guest author, GirlAboutChiTown!  My association with Chi goes back many years, as her writings on sex, kink, queerness and culture inspired me to start writing about these things myself.  She's one of those real writers (i.e. published!) and just all-around awesome.  She talked me into attending International Ms. Leather convention with her on Thursday, and I cannot wait to read what she has to write about the event.  In the meantime, I'm going to be trying to figure out what to wear.