Is vlogging a female medium?

Something in an interview with cewebrity Magibon on Know Your Meme got me thinking: are there more female vloggers than male ones, and if this is so, why might that be? Magibon says that in Japan, most males do not go on video and, if they do, they do not show their faces. In my casual perusal of home-made videos from Japan on YouTube, I've found this to be true, and it wouldn't surprise me if this were true in the US as well.

Why might a gender difference exist in online self-expression? First off, a disclaimer: any difference we might observe is as or more likely to be a product of cultural expectations of gender roles than it is to be a product of some inherent difference between the sexes. Having said that, its possible that young females believe they can gain status by gaining attention, and one way to gain attention is to use their looks. Perhaps many males, here and abroad, do not enter this entertainment arena because, traditionally, males do not derive their cultural worth from showcasing their looks to the extent that females do. Perhaps males fear some sort of permanent tarnishing of their professional image. Perhaps they fear that employers won't take them seriously when they find their rather silly video blog. Young females, not having as much to lose in the traditional professional world (or at least not anticipating that they will when they get older) jump right in and start vlogging.

The result is a medium dominated by female producers, but is this media created for a female audience? Probably not as much as, say, the female blogging community. Take the looks out of the picture and, I would imagine, you take away a good sized portion of the young male audience. Its worth re-thinking how we identify authorship for YouTube and vlogging. Are females really empowered when they have to cater to a male audience (a young, hetero male audience fixated on looks)? Then there are those wildly popular make-up tutorial videos created by women for women. Even when both the audience and the creators are women, it seems to be ultimately geared toward pleasing men (albeit indirectly). This just doesn't seem to be true of the female blogosphere, and I think most of it has to do with looks.

Magibon made it seem as though males "can't compete" with females in the user-generated video arena, that it would, in some sense, come to be dominated by women. But how dominant are these young women?