Gah.

I am wavering between being totally infuriated and snickeringly amused by the Age blogs at the moment. Ask Sam, previously Fucking Sam in the City (adjective and emphasis mine), is one of the most socially regressive, sexist, coy, badly-written Cosmo knock-offs out there at the moment, and I cannot tear myself away. It's like a train wreck, were the train carrying three hundred scantily-clad girls heading to the Gold Coast, and had it crashed into a truck carrying five tonnes of margarita mix. Or something.

Occasionally it does throw up some gold, such as this gem from a discussion on Australia's "sexiest profession":

Philosopher Alain de Botton, author of the pioneering book Status Anxiety, reckons it's all got to do with our anxiety over our status.

or this totally naturalistic prose:

That's right gents: move over corporate hot shots because women these days are hankering after someone who can work a power tool, sweats on the job and doesn't wear a suit. Introducing the sexiest male in Australia: the tradie.

The comments are rather adorable, too, with much emoticon winking, poor syntax, and clumsy flirting. And many people trying to come off as self-deprecating about their own line of work, while flagrantly fishing for compliments. As to the actual sexiest profession, nurse, tradie, firefighter and lifeguard were fairly well-represented, with writer/editor noticeably missing... Apparently our tatty cardigans, grammatical pedantry and hypercaffeination do not a fantasy make. Oh well.

I'd be so tempted to just write off the whole blog as the sort of sexist pap that so many relationship columnist seem to indulge in, except for the fact that it's a Fairfax blog. And though there are a few serious writers out there - Barney Zwartz, for example - who seem to put as much effort into their blog posts as their print work, for the most part, the Age blogs are one steaming pile of hot mess.

Ask Sam, with its dubious and retrograde sexual politics and complete disregard for the basic tenets of literacy, is offensive enough, but it also feels symptomatic of the contempt that The Age shows for its non-print audience. For the most part, its blogs are shoddily written, poorly researched, and reek of the kind of smug egocentrism that would be unacceptable in print. What the fuck is wrong when one of our major media institutions so badly misunderstands the nature of blogging?

It's as though they think that if they throw their laziest, most patronizing shit at the kids they'll suddenly be considered hip. As though they're saving all their A material for grown-ups who read the real paper. It makes me feel that even if I churn out some of the wittiest prose here the internet has ever seen (...don't worry, you're not in danger of it actually happening), I'll still be considered a journalistic second-class citizen.

There's little to be gained by treating an online audience as a bunch of LOLing fools - children and idiots who can't discern between quality journalism and poorly-disguised attempts at appearing au courant. If Fairfax want online writing that's representative of the people who actually write online, there are plenty of good, intelligent bloggers who could run rings around Ask Sam and her ilk, people who are slaving away at fairly shitty jobs while lazy writers dash off peons to the hotness of firefighters. For fuck's.

So anyway, Ask Sam. Ask her about lipstick, ask her who should pay on a first date, ask her why she thinks that dashing off three-hundred inane words enforcing gender stereotypes entitles her to unmediated, unedited and utterly unquestioning publication. Come to think of it, maybe vacuous twits like her are the reason people don't fantasize about writers. I wonder if it's too late to become a tradie?