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Shutting Down Discussion at Catholic Blog Sites and Amanda Hess on Why Women Aren’t Welcome Online: Making the Connections

William D. Lindsey

Some eye-popping statistical data from Amanda Hess’s magisterial essay about why women aren’t welcome on the internet (each bullet point is a direct quote from Hess’s article):

• Pew found that from 2000 to 2005, the percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28 percent to 17 percent, “entirely because of women’s fall off in participation.” …

For me, the advent of online discourse spaces opened places in which I could, for the first time ever, speak out as a gay Catholic theologian, when the Catholic theological academy had decisively slammed its door in my face, and when Catholic journals, all of them dominated primarily by heterosexual men, did not intend to listen seriously to my…