Bloggernacle Barmy

Have you discovered the 'Bloggernacle?'

I have just discovered that my fascination with it is shared: http://www.salon.com/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs/

Who'd have thunk it?!

It started inncoently enough with a link to the blog of the subject of an article in one of the Sunday supplements.

Once I had worked my way through that particular blog, in which the writer drooled over her 'cute' husband and posted daily pictures of her many shiny children and I had been instructed how to knit my own car, admired the daily posted pics of 'yummy' home made soup/cake/zucchini with saffron infused home made cheese pie, and effectively managed to dodge the adoring references to the (mostly, I am sorry to report, terrifyingly trite), 'lessons' taught by legions of white middle-aged men who seem to rule the roost in Mormon-Land, I wondered how those who don't 'fit' fitted into this picture.

Amongst the literally thousands of pictures (honestly, I couldn't figure out how she found so much time to bake and breed, when she was at all times weilding a rose tinted camera), there were no scruffy uncles, no single elderly cousins with frizzy hair, no childless friends, disabled seniors, bored looking teenagers and absolutely NO ONE who was anything other than shiny white, so I went searching, and what I found amonst the dozens of other shiny blogs were a few where the writer was trying so hard to 'fit' that it was heart-breaking. Please believe me here when I say with all sincerity that I am not knocking the LDS beliefs and I bow my knee to any society in which kindness, goodness and decency is the expected norm - but why encourage blogging as a method of prothleytising (sp?!) when the vast, vast majority of the readers could only be further alienated by their own obvious lack of 'fit?'

So.... why do I continue to be fascinated by the Bloggernacle? (you may well ask if you've followed me this far!) because - it reminds me every day to be grateful to live in a liberal country, amongst liberal people, where diversity and difference is the norm - and because I really ought to learn to knit my own car and where better to find out?