Mom Blogger Named One of Top 25 Sexiest Dad Bloggers

In a startling coup, Shannon / Mr. Lady of Whiskey In My Sippy Cup (and many other places), was named number 25 in the Top 25 Sexiest Dad Bloggers list published by Shawn Burns, also known as Backpacking Dad.  Burns used only sexiness as his criteria, deeming that more objective than stats, quality of writing, popularity, or number of votes.

Topping the list are Burns himself, Busy Dad, Beta Dad, The Jack B, and DC Urban Dad.   Though she was the last on the list, Shannon was ecstatic, as evidenced by her tweet:  “OHMYGOD I made the top 25 sexiest bloggers list.”

I asked Burns just what he was thinking when he created this list.  To bring you his answers in full, I’m going to break with my normal format and offer you this complete transcript of our Q&A.

She Posts:  Why did you create this list?

Backpacking Dad:  I created the list because if there was going to be a list ranking dad bloggers out there that was annoying, insulting, arbitrary, and funny in its stupidity, I wanted it to be mine, so I could also be #1. Actually, I saw a Top 25 list out there that I was a candidate for, and after amusing myself with spiking my vote total up to take over the lead on what was a meaningless and useless list, I started to get annoyed that this was the kind of thing that people were going to take seriously. As soon as it stopped being funny, as soon as I saw that people were really invested in not only making the top 25, but “winning” the process, I quit. Popularity contests are a useless way to execute a list of great bloggers. A better standard by far is sexiness.

SP:  Everyone knows people are suckers for lists and they get the most traffic.  How is this post faring in terms of traffic?

BD:  The post hasn’t really spiked my traffic much. I think with few exceptions, people knew it was a joke, so it wasn’t the type of thing to breed enough controversy to be worth mentioning to friends, with clenched teeth and can-you-believe-its. Maybe if I had made it a popularity contest, encouraging people to vote etc… it would have been a traffic hog. Or maybe if I’d been less obvious in the irony of it. I don’t know. I didn’t write it for traffic; I wrote it for my own amusement, and to put Mr. Lady at the end of it, because that made me laugh.

SP:  How do you feel about “top blogger” lists?

BD:  I’m actually fine with Top Blogger Lists. But I make fun of a lot of things I’m fine with. What I don’t like are Top Blogger Lists that encourage everyone to get their friends to vote for them repeatedly for an extended period of time. If you’re going to do a List, at least have the nerve to curate the thing yourself. Everything else really is just a traffic stunt.

SP:  Why did a woman get included in your list?

BD:  Totally by accident. I honestly thought Mr. Lady was a dude this whole time. My bad.

SP:  Did your publication of the list bring any previously unknown-to-you bloggers to your attention?  Who, and are they worth a click?

BD:  Now this is kind of funny, because when I was doing the list at first I thought I would just list a bunch of the dad bloggers I read, assign an order to them arbitrarily, and then laugh at my funny joke ha ha. But, as it turns out, I don’t read 25 dad bloggers, and I wanted there to be 25 people on the list, because there was a Top 25 Dad Bloggers list out there that was just starting to gain momentum (a popularity contest list), and I wanted to parallel the name. So I started filling out the list with people I had heard of, but wasn’t reading regularly, or people who showed up consistently on some other Dad Blogger Twitter Lists (much to my own surprise I actually ended up doing research for this damned thing), and included a grab-bag assortment of them, mixed in with other dads who I consider friends, or at least Internet friends. Then, since I had to double-check links to make sure everything was working, I ended up reading posts by these new (to me) bloggers, and have added a few to my own reading list. More important than naming those who have made that cut, however, I’d like to claim credit for bringing Mr. BigDubya out of blog retirement. He wrote his first post in over a year when I teased him about it after putting him on the list.

What do you think?  Is Mr. Lady hotter than those other dads?  Did she get cheated out of the number one spot? Or is there a dad who didn’t show up there that you think should have?