Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!) Posted under a Creative Commons license.

Megan of Jezebel takes exception to yet another Double-X article, this time dumping on women (but not, evidently, men) for selling DIY stuff they make on Etsy.com.

...what I feel is most problematic is the idea inherent in the work that women should, in some sense, face the reality that their dreams of successful entrepreneurship will never be realized. In truth, most small businesses fail. Many people — men and women — engage in the marketplace with a unique product, idea or service and fail to amass enough profit to stay afloat. The difference between men and women is that men are more often encouraged to do so then women, and encouraged to try again. Mosle’s piece attempts to convince women not to take a relatively risk-free wade into the entrepreneurial waters of the American marketplace because they’ll “fail,” as though economic failure is something with which women cannot or should not be expected to cope.

She said it here.

Yup. I hate to say it but it sounds as though the author at Slate For Ladies Double-X doesn’t get the idea of small business prototyping, test marketing, scaling up, or… well… a lot of stuff about micro-entrepreneurship. If I start selling the belts and other light-fetish leather items I’ve been having enormous fun making lately chances are very good I’ll do it with an Etsy account. Where for a relatively low investment in time and money compared to more conventional alternatives, I expect I’ll learn a great deal about customer likes and dislikes, my own likes and dislikes, price points, and more. And if I discover I only occasionally like to make items in limited runs for limited times then heck, I might stay there.

But more likely, like most people who use Etsy, or any other micro-retail online business incubator, if I don’t find a niche that’s particularly well-suited to selling via Etsy I’ll either quit doing it altogether or else move up to either small-scale distribution or my own Amazon/Yahoo/Google/DYI site online.

Megan adds

I guess I should also add that I find it a little ironic that Mosle’s worries about women artisans being ghettoized on Etsy is printed on double x, where Slate has collected its women writers and separated them and their stories from their site at large.

I’d add that it’s also ironic that Double-X would have published a hit piece like this on-line exploitation of newbie and/or amateur piece-workers. Because what are the odds the mostly-women writers there are making enough to quit their day jobs to write for Double-X?

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One last thing. The article is titled “Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy.” It’s not clear, at all, what’s supposed to be feminist about either Etsy or the article. Or, for that matter, Double-X.

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Dang it all, one more last thing. The big fatal flaw is supposed to be that Etsy, an arts and crafts sales facilitation site, has mostly women sellers. I… I dunno… call me crazy but it seems like there’s been a centuries-long tradition of men working out of the home in farming, manufacturing, or service, and women working in the home making the sort of stuff that… is typically referred to as “arts and crafts.” Again I could be really naive here but lot of people seem to be trying to sell hand-knit sweaters and hand-sewn quilts on Etsy. And (you’ll be shocked I know!) very few of them seem to be men. One area where one traditionally sees men (most often older, retired men) doing sellable home-based crafts would be fishing lures, duck decoys, and woodworking. Aaaannnddd son of a gun, you won’t be surprised either that most of the lures, decoys, and woodworking is done by men. Now a small fraction of the products sold by Etsy fall into those categories, and so, also not surprisingly, only a small fraction of vendors appear to be men. But from the looks of it I’m going to say these imbalances have a lot more to do with broader social imbalances than specific-to-Etsy ones.

Some other items I could consider selling on Etsy even if I didn’t end up selling leather fetish gear…

Clockwise from top right: Hand-knit silk sweater; hand-batiked silk scarf with fig leaf motif; hand-printed nettle-leaf t-shirt; hand-cast decorative brass bells