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

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

I am not sure what this says about the questions raised, but here is a very sad--yet hopeful, in
a way--story concerning a woman and the internet.

A woman in Victoria BC Canada was murdered by her husband, who then shot himself to death, also,
after he discovered her email relationship with a man in NY. He had invited her to come live
with him.

She had married her bozo husband in Victoria at the age of 15 (her mother had committed suicide
a year before). She was in her 30s when she was murdered.

She was the sister-in-law of neighbors of ours in Victoria. They became the parents of the three
children. The boy, aged 10 at the time, was in the house at the time of the murders playing
video games.

Our neighbors decided that they wanted to sell the computer of the murdered woman. And asked me
to get it ready for sale, including erasing all email and images, etc.

So I went to the house where they had lived for many years, a suburban home, quiet neighborhood
etc.

The murdered woman had earned her High School diploma a year before she was shot. I'm not sure
whether this was done online or not. She had got her computer two years before she was shot.
There was a picture of her (a looker with hair down to her waist) in a mini-skirt, sitting on
the chair by her computer with her legs up on the table looking at the camera as in 'hey, this
is what i do, this is who i am'. Big smile. She had started a business online. All her email was
password protected.

Getting her High School diploma and starting this business, she was gaining some independence
from her husband. It wasn't hard to see that she was making the right moves to eventually leave
him.

Some years before, she had sent our neighbor, her sister-in-law, a letter saying that she felt
that her husband would eventually kill her.

So the computer, for her, was a way of gaining some independence while being at home. And she
was doing very well at learning what she needed to learn to gain her independence.

If the world is not gender neutral, neither is the internet, perhaps, because most of our
relationships of any type are inflected with who we are and our own life situation and the role
of gender in our life.

ja