a little backstory

Hello there! Welcome to this cantankerous little corner of the blogosphere. If you are, or happen to know personally, a woman, this site is for you. And if you are perpetually amazed by how perpetually amazed newspaper reporters and editors are that women can do stuff, this site is REALLY for you.

Having begun in medias res, as it were, with a cranky rant about tattooixtresses, I thought it might be proper to give this blog a belated introduction. Far from having sprung fully formed from a fit of pique this afternoon, the Women Do Project has been underway for some years--since at least 2006, when I was toiling in the swamps of the Weekly Dig's Media Farm. There, it came to my attention one day that women go bowling. Amazed by this, I did a little poking around, and discovered that women also shoot guns and DJ. Yea, they even blog. There seemed no end to the stuff Globe reporters would uncover about these preternaturally accomplished she-beings.

In our next Farm column (alas, now lost from the Intertubes), we thrust a skewer of mockery through these nuggets of condescending twaddle, offered $5 worth of free tacos to whoever could put a stop to them, and called it a day. Alas, they kept coming. Soon, women were drinking sake and becoming police officers. (They were even ice fishing, though this is clearly hazardous to their health.) In other, less credulous newspapers, they could frequently be spotted buying electronics. And more electronics. And even more electronics.

I developed a reputation for hurling potted plants across the office whenever a "Women Do ____" story came over the transom. People began to send me particularly egregious exempla of the genre. Adam Reilly over at the Phoenix even got into the game. But to no avail. The Globe just kept right on yammering about women playing football and robbing banks. I left the Dig and went to grad school. Eventually I gave up yelling about "Women Do ____" and found other sources of meaning in life.

Until today. I just couldn't take it anymore.