A Man's Perspective on the 2011 BlogHer Conference

August 09, 2011, By Jason Avant 3 comments

Jason Avant

The women were nervous, and I was nervous for them. The music would be starting in just a few minutes—12:18 PM, right in the middle of lunch—at which time they’d get up out of their seats and surprise the hundreds of diners by jumping up out of their seats and performing the choreographed dance routine they’d been practicing for weeks. Most of them had rehearsed alone, watching the routine via YouTube and doing their best to follow. This time it would be for real, in front of a large crowd, most of them strangers. My wife, Beth, was one of the 100 participants, and a few of our friends were also among the dancers scattered throughout the room.

“Stand here and get ready to film us. 12:18,” she instructed me, slightly wide-eyed. The nerves were perhaps justified: this was, after all, BlogHer, the largest conference for female bloggers in the U.S., attended by some 3,000 women (and a handful of men, including myself). All of the attendees were, in some way or another, connected to the world of online writing, and you could guarantee that most of them would be putting up a post—along with videos—of the flashmob that would be kicking off in a matter of seconds.

So what was I doing at BlogHer? A good question, one I’d asked myself a few times over the weekend. I know guys who are regular attendees, including some of my fellow writers at my blog, DadCentric, but I’d never had the urge to go. And yes, I’ll admit it—a conference aimed at women held very little interest for me. To be sure, most of the blogs I read are written by women, and at the risk of sounding skeevy, most of my online interactions—Twitter conversations, blog comments, Facebook updates—are with women. The fact of the matter is this: women dominate the online creative writing space. They’ve defined and re-defined blogging in ways that men (especially dads) haven’t. I’d argue that one cannot be a successful blogger—in whatever way one chooses to measure that success—without reading and understanding women like Heather Armstrong, Ree Drummond and the myriad of strong Internet writers who happen to be female.

Still, I’m a guy. And this was BlogHER, not BlogHIM. None of the content would be directed at men. So I had no interest, until I found out last year that BlogHer 2011 would be held in my hometown of San Diego. And even then, my motivation was more along the lines of “Eh, might as well, I won’t have to buy a plane ticket.”

So I got a BlogHer ’11 pass, and figured I’d tried to make a story out of it. As it turned out, in one way or another I knew most of the men who’d be attending. And that lent itself to the obvious: a piece about why guys attend a conference aimed at female bloggers. I had a list of questions prepared, along with the names of bloggers, both men and women, that I wanted to interview. I figured my professional and personal detachment would serve me well. And I was genuinely curious. I’d been a part of one failed dadblogger conference, and with others being planned, I wanted to see if the BlogHer experience could—or even should—be replicated by men.