Yeah, I am torn as to what we women should do. I mean on one hand it is important to choose a domain name that means something to you and your company or blog, but you don't want to get punished for it right?

I mean look at what one comment said about the company that has WhoRepresents.com which obviously as they say can be seen as WHOREpresents.com! Ouch!

I think that the search engines and email whatchamacallits are just doing their best to filter out the porn crap and there is sooooo much of it. I don't know, if they didn't do it how full would our inboxes be with porn spam?

Tough call, it is a no win situation really.

There was a bit of a back and forth a few weeks ago on TechCrunch about the names of a couple women focused social networking sites. Namely Damsels In Success. Some of the comments were quite insightful, others a little silly. But it was interesting to read.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/22/damsels-in-success-networking-for-professional-women/

This is a hard one. It's a catch-22 for sure, as there's nothing you can really do. Should women be responsible for thinking about the repercussions of their name? Probably. Should women be allowed to choose their own names. Sure, but there will be repercussions in society. It's a tough job being a business owner and coming up with names. I think just further thought into the future would help remedy some frustrations, and just letting snide comments slide are the other option. In the meantime, for your female entrepreneur looking for some help even buying your domain name, let alone coming up with a company name, check out this contest called “Make Your Dreams Come True with Mirassou”. They will be awarding one aspiring business woman $50,000 plus a team of highly professional consultants to help kick start your business. Visit http://www.mirassou.com/women_in_business/dreams.asp for more info and to enter. I work with them so just wanted to give you the inside scoop. They even have advisers to help you think about the right name for your business and all the repercussions. Best of luck. Try not to get too frustrated. It's just another day in business, I guess. :)

We started the Downtown Women's Club in 1998 and at the time we were "all email" and many people said I don't check email. So we never even thought about the ramifications of our name. It's now 10 years later, and if I was founding the company now, I probably would have rethought the name. It's too long and it was too late for me to get DWC (Daniel Webster College had beat me out)by the time I decided to make the DWC a real business. I'm actually going to change my business email to something related to DWC in January, when we do a bit of rebranding. But, I think for anyone starting a business today, they need to think about a lot more things than how the name looks on paper or in a logo.

Diane

Lena, this is merely a fact of life. Our cover designer, Karin, just started a blog on going green - ecologically - and thought she'd be creative by calling it Green Sexy. Well, we don't yet know how much trouble that will get her...but, I can tell you this, my book still attracts a fair amount of insults because "Dick*less" has become synonymous with a certain male body part, when, in the day, it was just a boy's name. And that's what it refers to in my book.

I just let it go. Smart people, like you and Diane and others who read this blog, can laugh it off, as I do. If we band together and refuse to allow the dirty thoughts of others dictate what we do and say, we'll win and they'll lose. IMHO