An oestrogen pill for the blogosphere, with love from Amaranth

Ah, Mark, so reasonable, so fair-minded in his comments about women and blogging. He's so cute like that. Wrong, but cute nonetheless. Let's be honest, male bloggers are like dinosaurs - they claim to rule the world because they're big. And yet, they don't, and they aren't.

Here in the paradise that is Amaranth, we have taken some meaningful steps to ensure that women bloggers gain their fair share of sunlight. After all, as the only liberal empire in the world, we have standards to maintain. For example, we introduced a television programme called "And who made you God then?" in which bloggers are asked to justify some of their more outrageously hyperbolic postings before a jury made up of senior academics at the University of Feldkirch. In my experience, under withering scrutiny, male bloggers learn to be rather less dogmatic...

However, as merely an occasional drinker at the well of Liberal Democrat blogging, I notice that the top Liberal Democrat blogger is a woman, the top Scottish Liberal Democrat blogger is a woman, and the top Welsh Liberal Democrat is Petra Black (Klaus, can you check that for me?). Indeed, some of the best non-women Liberal Democrats bloggers are animals (gender undefined) and gay men - in some cases both at the same time.

So, perhaps, it isn't that we need more women bloggers, but that we need less men. Now, whilst a cull might be a good thing (and it certainly works wonders with the occasional plague of Conservatives we get here), it is a bit illiberal. So, what could you do to raise the number of women bloggers? Indeed, do you even need to?

In truth, if women want to do something, they almost certainly will. Poison their lover, invade Hungary, suck the blood of a thousand slain enemy warriors, my predecessors as Empress have done all of these things and much more. On the other hand, they might have better things to do, like actually doing things whilst the boys just talk about them...