The backstory: Some Townhall columnist wrote a piece mocking political blogs by observing that:

Some bloggers also offer superb commentary, but most babble, buzz and blurt like caffeinated adolescents competing for the Ritalin generation's inevitable senior superlative: Most Obsessive-Compulsive.

Obsessive-compulsive? I don't know where she's getting that. It isn't as though I ever had a furious little fellow link the same blog post of mine every day for a week, just to emphasize how much he disagreed with it.

Anyway, Q & O says she's kind of right, kind of wrong--something about a broad brush and not all blogs being political, blah blah, and hey, what about all those other blogs that make up the 14,000,000 estimated blogs out there:

If, as comScore Media Metrix reports in their August 2005 study, the blogosphere is broken into 7 nonexclusive blog groups (political, hipster lifestyle, tech, blogs authored by women, media, personal and business are the categories in order of descending popularity) then the portion of blogs which give Parker heartburn are very small indeed.

Who are these comScore Media Metrices, and how do I hit them? I never realized my sex autocategorized me into a group that could be listed with "political, hipster lifestyle, tech . . . ." in, apparently, all seriousness. You can go into market research now even if you failed beginning Sesame Street, I guess, because one of these things is definitely not like the others.

I suppose their asses are partially covered by the "nonexclusive" modifier, i.e., a weblog could be dedicated to the hipster lifestyle (is this really a sizeable genre? Please kill me) and authored by a woman; but a weblog could also be a chronicle of tech industry trends and authored by a man, yet I am not seeing "blogs authored by men" listed in comScore's seven nonexclusive blog groups.

And why would it be? Blogs authored by men are the default, the norm, right? Any deviation from the norm must necessarily be noted and labeled appropriately.

So you can be famous and on teevee like Ariana Huffington and Michelle Malkin--two examples of "blogs authored by women" that comScore provides--but, having been found guilty of the offense of vagina possession, it's into the women-authored category they both go--together. Hope you like sharing a cell, girls. Next time, try to pee standing up.

I wonder if what we're going to see in the next few years is a clash between women who enjoy this distinction because it means they get to have fabulous conferences about it, and women like me who'd rather we just dispensed with the distinction entirely. So you got a pussy! And you write a blog. How very wonderful for you. I really do not know how you do it, what with all that menstruation to get done every month.

You can go share a category with this, this, and this. They all have so much in common--like, you know, girl parts and stuff.

And that trumps everything. It's what you get for deviating from the norm.