There has been lots of rumbing on about the lack of lady political bloggers and the like. Of course as a minuscule blogger myself I can't exactly help drive traffic to anyone but as you note in the blogroll on the right I don't have much trouble finding lady bloggers to read and most of them are somewhat political. If there was one that I thought was missing from both Michelle Malkin's quick list and the longer list at Iddybud it would be Ginmar, who writes a boatload of stuff that I disagree with, but which makes me think, as well as other stuff which I do agree with or which is just ROLFMAO funny.
Anyway, another lady on my blogroll points out, possibly sarcastically, the attention paid to the protest babes in Beirut ladies in Lebanon. I agree it is almost certainly sexist etc. etc. but I think that it is actually a legitimate angle in the coverage. As one of the commenters points out most Arab protests involve tough men in balaclavas with big menacing penis-substitutes, and in most cases even if women are allowed to wear revealing costumes, the ones at the protests aren't. A protest full of menacing men with machine guns is very different from one with laughing ladies and the difference is bound to resonate throughout the region. That is not the only difference between the Beirut protests and other ones, as Claudia Rosset notes, writing in the NY Sun today and on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, the attendees
... lingered after the protests ended. They lingered for hours, unlike the Hezbollah protests, which as soon as the main event is done, people are gone with speed. They just disperse. This one people were sitting around the curbs talking, they were eating dinner, they were listening to more speeches...
What with the clearly self-organized nature of the protests and their composition I think the tyrants, particularly the mad Mullahs in Tehran, are going to be nervous. After all they have a youth population that yearns to be allowed to wear precisely the clothes the Lebanese are wearing.
Finally, another justification to the protest girl coverage angle, according to Wizbang pretty girl protest movements are destined for success because
they are more likely to woo a large number of male supporters, hoping to impress said pretty girls.