Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Lili's thought for the month


NO GENDER DECEMBER
http://www.nogenderdecember.com/



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Lili,

Merry Christmas and a happy new year from a devoted follower of your blog!

As now is a time for presents, I thought I would give you some special free consultancy advice on how to get more readers for your blog.

First problem - at the moment, you have a single blog aimed at both men and women. However, as marketers for toys, magazines, etc recognise, treating men and women as if they are the same just isn't good business. Going forward, I suggest you have two separate blogs, "Incorrect pleasures for him" and "Incorrect pleasures for her".

You should then target your blog posts accordingly. For example, take your post:
"I can't help fantasizing; Tony Abbott's ear and a one-hole hole-punch."
This involves both politics and violence, which are masculine topics, so belongs in "Incorrect pleasures for him".

By contrast, a post complaining about the gender segregation of toys is related to child-rearing, so clearly belongs in "Incorrect pleasures for her".

You might observe that most of your posts are of equal value to both men and women. Don't be tempted to post them to both "for him" and "to her". Instead, you should arbitrarily decide to put the post in one or the other, to keep your gender segregation as strict as possible. My local newsagents are good at this - they put the car magazines in the men's section (just to be clear, I'm not from Saudi Arabia where this would be logical), and the housekeeping magazines go in the women's section.

There are a few more things to do. Nowadays, you should really assume that your readers won't have time for actual thinking and critical analysis. So go for more attention grabbing headlines.

For example, instead of this crusty old fashioned title:
"Referenced list of 175 famous people diagnosed as autistic or subject of published speculation about autism/Asperger syndrome (AS)"
Try instead this modern, up to date internet version:
"OMG! You'll never believe these 10 celebs have autism!"

Oh, and get rid of all those footnotes. All that rational, scholarly stuff doesn't really sell. You should know by now that even esteemed, paid academics like Simon Baron-Cohen just make stuff up without referencing it properly, so it's totally reasonable for a blogger like you to take some license and make up some tasty stories to increase traffic to your blog.

Actually, for that matter, get rid of 90% of the writing - it's unreasonable to expect people to read so much in this day and age. Make sure you have at least 3 huge pictures for each paragraph of text. It doesn't really matter whether the pictures are relevant, just as long as they hold your readers' attention for a few milliseconds. Photos of pretty young women, fluffy kittens, or famous people in embarrassing situations will usually do the job.

I hope you find this useful, and I think if you follow my advice you will increase your readership dramatically.

On the other hand, I would really prefer you don't follow my advice and keep up with your excellent blog just as it is.

All the best for Christmas and the New Year,

Tomas

Lili Marlene said...

Ha ha ha! I was just about to dismiss this as a particularly egregious piece of spam or some kind of Christmas troll come out from under a bridge... Great to hear from you again Tomas! I hope you have a great day and new year 2015. I'm hoping to find more time to create more crusty old-fashioned content next year, but for now I've got a hunk of pork to roast and a nice clean oven to ruin.