Charity and Goodwill

Charity, Women, and New Media:

Susannah Breslin writes a rather biting piece on women at blogging conferences. The most important part of the piece is on a tangent to its main point, so we'll treat that first.

For example, this month Love Drop is helping the Withrow family. Felicity Withrow is four. She was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. She has a brain tumor that is attached to her brain stem. On top of this, Felicity’s mother is pregnant. Love Drop is trying to raise $5,000 to help the Withrow family with Felicity’s radiation treatments. So far, they’ve raised $2,500, but they need to raise $2,500 more. It’s too bad Mountain Dew would rather give who knows how much to have some “young, cute chick” natter on about Mountain Dew than give $2,500 to the Withrow family to help their daughter not be sick.

Is that too bad? Mountain Dew probably helps many children not be sick, by providing jobs and health insurance to their parents; it may be that there is a greater good being worked than is obvious.

Nevertheless, watch the video.



It is a hard year for charity. We recently finished our Project VALOUR-IT fundraiser, and did not reach the goal in spite of strong last minute strides; and we are very tightly tied to those being helped. This charity has raised only half of what it meant to raise for the little girl, with barely a handful of days left in the month devoted to her.

The reasons for this are obvious: the weakness of the economy, the difficulty of predicting how much you will be able to spare from your own duties and needs. That is to say, it is the weakness of Mountain Dew -- of them and others like them -- that makes it so hard to raise these funds. If people could easily get such jobs, or felt secure in the ones they had, charity would not be so hard to find.

Ms. Breslin makes a larger point about the relative shallowness of female bloggers, but I think she may be pointing her weapon in the wrong direction. The problem isn't female bloggers, but panels about female bloggers. The few women who compete on even terms are as good as anyone; there just aren't as many. If you insist on having a panel about "women bloggers," then, you're going to get a lot of folks on that panel who aren't as interesting as the ones who run at the top.

This is akin to Raymond Chandler's point made in his famous essay "The Simple Art of Murder."

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small quantities to rental libraries, and it is read.

We see much the same economy at work in the academy, where men outnumber women among the serious arts and sciences. It is not that the women who do well in those arts and sciences are less serious than the men; there just aren't as many of them. This seems to have to do with the fact that the IQ curve for women is less flat, meaning that there are fewer female idiots and fewer female geniuses. The average woman isn't less intelligent, less interesting or more self-absorbed than the average man; but the average man doesn't get featured on a panel. Because we are interested in showing that we are interested in women, the average (or slightly above average) woman does.

Take heart, then, Ms. Breslin.