Re: [-empyre-] the use in girls coming

["Patrick Lichty" <voyd@voyd.com>]

AMazing how cyberfeminism brought me out...

> What I'm interested in discussing, if you like, is the
> lack of necessity for a cyber feminism movement in a
> gender neutral environment like the web.

I would highly disagree, the Internet is hardly a gender-neutral
environment.  To assume this position is to posit that any technology is
neutral, when this is clearly not the case.  Technology assumes the agendas
of the institutions that creat and use it, and also technology assumes the
agendas of its very form and function, as in the classical fable of Thamus.
In the United States, there are many who would posit that firearms are a
'neutral' technology, but when you boil it down, they are all designed for
some form of destuctive mission.  I have yet to meet a person using
artillery to make planting holes for trees.

Same goes for language.  Language structurally reflects the culture that
spawns it, including showing the social codes and taboos within a given
society.  I find it fascinating how each culture deals with the word for
'orgasm'.

Can we assume that distributed network communications technology, which has
evolved from the military/academic, and developed by the
military/private/media, (which I now call the Military-Entertainment
Complex) does not have inscribed agendas of education, access, politics
(much of which are traditionally male-dominant) that

Online gender might be ambiguous, as seen by Turkle, but definitely not
neutral.  As these machines are our creations, we cannot help but bring our
endocrine systems with us. To quote Mitchell, we make our networks, and our
networks make us. Therefore, Ambiguity is not neutrality.

It's not that
> women are being repressed on the web like in the other
> environments.

I would disagree.  The repression of the female online is not active, but
largely passive. There are many areas online where females who wish to
participate would be shunned.  The fact that at least in the US females are
less likely to be encouraged to engage in computation and technology is
clearly only one form of repression.  Perhaps there are many
repressions/oppressions, from elision of opportunity to excusions from
certain conversations, but there are opporessions anywhere humanity is.
Would one call the explosion of online pornography a form of
oppression/exploitation of the female?  I certainly would.  Actually, in
some facets of the conversation, I would posit that women are actually MORE
oppressed online than in the physical.  Many of the apparatus required to
limit these practices (such as distribution of information) is simply not
extant online.

But to say that the Internet is gender-neutral and that the female is not
opporessed online may be one opinion, but I think it is one that looks at
only one form of interaction and ignores the very dense matrix of social
relations that the Net operates within.