Guest writes: Hey Rachel! I agree with your post about staying up to date with the important feminist blogs, but with so many out there and being fairly new if not to feminism but to the feminist presence on the Internet, I was wondering if you could give your top 5 or so blogs you consider to be the most important, relevant and/or useful. It’s so easy to become swamped by all of this when you’re first getting into it!

Asking me to put my money where my mouth is - I like it!This is a tought question to answer, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, while I think there is a feminist hegemony (that is to say, a group of high profile bloggers who regularly refer to and link to each other’s work - the ‘Big 5’ are probably Feministing, Feministe, Jezebel, Pandagon and Shakesville), there isn’t necessarily a feminist canon (that is to say, a series of “must read” blogs you need to stay up to date with in order to be a “good feminist”).

Secondly - perhaps because we do it for love rather than money - even the best bloggers tend to be a bit hit and miss. One week I might be chowing down everything Amanda Marcotte has to say; the next week I’ll be all about Lena Chen, Phoebe Maltz or Hugo Schwyzer. Keeping up with everything said in the feminist blogosphere - or even just reading everything published on the ‘Big 5’ - would be an exhausting and impossible task, which is why RSS feeds and Google Reader are your friend. You can “add” everything that interests you to your feed, and then skim through it to read only the cherries that most interest you.

If I had to narrow down my feminist blog reading to an absolute bare minimum, though, I’d pick Jezebel, Feministe and Creatrix Tiara. Jezebel, because if it’s in the zeitgeist, you can be pretty sure it will be covered there sooner or later. Feministe because, despite recent criticisms, I think it delves deeper and in more interesting directions than a lot of the other majors. And Tiara, because she is both an incredible curator of other people’s writing and perspectives, and is chock full of challenging perspectives on sex, gender, race and class herself.

But even though those blogs are all great, if they were the only ones I read, I’d be seriously missing out on a lot of the food that feeds my brain and hones my politics.

So, on that note… Other feminism-related blogs I read and enjoy include (in the order they appear in my RSS feed): Racialicious, Howling Clementine, The Beheld, Bitch Blogs, Blue Milk, Eat The Damn Cake, Feministing, Feminists With Disabilities (now defunct, but check out the archives), Girl With A Satchel, Hoyden About Town, Hugo Schwyzer, Jessica Valenti, Laurie Penny, Pandagon, Rabbit Write, Sady Doyle, The American Virgin, The Ch!cktionary, The F-Word, The News With Nipples, The Pursuit of Harpyness, We Mixed Our Drinks and Zero At The Bone. Plus countless others I follow only on Tumblr.

So, that’s me. What about you? Are there any fab feminist blogs I’m missing out on that you think I should be reading?

Got a burning question you’d like me to answer? Leave a comment, or send it to rachel dot hills at gmail dot com, and I’ll answer it here.

Related: How to be a feminist intellectual (or a public thinker of any kind, really)