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

["Millie Niss" <men2@columbia.edu>]

Another issue is that a lot of the net "community," especially the
noncommercial, "old" internet we all like to praise is built around
typically male interests or male ways of dealing with them.  For example,
there is a lot of community around hacking unix kernels, working on PHP
source development, discussing future Ethernet standards, etc. etc.  I don't
mean to say that any of these thinsg are male, or that computer science is
male, but there is something masculine about the particular obsessiveness
and detailedness of these pursuits.

I am female and I have studied and read computer science stuff.  I USE PHP
for example.  I am ineterested in making things with it (-- I want to build
a database interface using PHO and Flash that is really intuitive an
graphical, to be used as the front end for a database of mental health
services in NYC for Medicaid benefiuciaries.  If there is something that
that the PHP kanguage can't do that I need for this (which I doubt), I;d
write email to these langauge development people, in the hope that maybe
some future version down the pipeline has what I want.  But I am not
planning on getting involved in a deep discussion about the order of the
arghuments and which ones will be optional in the new function will probably
never exist.

When I say that thesee fol, the language definitioon people , have a
community, I mean it.  They have web sites, email lists, files that they
pass around.  They know each other on a first name basis, across continents.
They consider each other to be friends, and gain social benefit from their
interchanges, nit just the pleasure of technical exchange.

Thare is no such community around the more feminine "big picture" usues of
the same technilogy-- sure there are newsgroups, but nothing focused.  There
is no place to go to discuss my project in its large ideas -0- how to make a
database not look like a database.  I'm thinking of something like Venn
diagrams that you would select from or draw, I'm not sure yet.  Some way of
visually showing intersecting this data set with that one or choosing
certain data from among your data.  Soething which would look fluid, like a
work of art.  I want to discuss this,  It is a feminine concept.  I can only
discuss whether to use an array of objects or an object cointaining an
array, and not even really that as there is not that big a community of
application developers.  All the community aspects are centered around the
tool itself.

This seems typically male--  give me a tool and I want to buil.  They want
to study the tool and improve it...

Of course my whole idea in this post is sexist -- it is a comonplace that
women see the big picture while men see the details -- but I think the kind
of community I have described are af little intereste to many women, and
made early entry to the internet community hard for women: where did they
fit into this world?  Then when the commercial services such as AOL moved
in, they needed to capture female dollars, and you get the weird situation
where more women are using commercial services and belong to artificial,
corporate-organized "communities" whereas men have the old internet and its
descendants.

Some women, such as myself, entered the net early and made do with what
little there was that served femaie interests (I did newsgroups, and spent a
lot of time on rec.arts.books along with some comoputer things and some
support things) while most non techically educated women had no reason to be
online other than email their non electroinic friends, and mostly this
didn't work because these people had trouble logging on and didn't check
email frequently enough and basically got the short shrift.

Millie

-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-admin@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-admin@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au]On Behalf Of Patrick Lichty
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 2:13 PM
To: empyre@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the use in girls coming


> Exactly. But, in cyberspace, whose hegemony is it? A
> male one? How can that be?

Commerce, military, governmental.  The forces that control the Net, all of
which are all largely male

> So, my post was offensive and I'm in the minority of
> offenders,

To make that statement is to therefore assume that you are trying to
conversely assume the place of the 'oppressed', which isn't the case.  I
would not call your comment offensive, but perhaps at issue with some
perspectives.  Also to call yourself an offender assumes that you actually
did commit an offense, which I also disagree with.  You didn't.

while the initiator is entitled to post
> provocative meaningless Manifestos we should all
> worship? Just because it mentions (completely out of
> context) the untouchable FEMINISM?

Feminism is hardly untouchable or immutable.  It has its many threads and
internal conflicts, such as the conflicts between the radical/lesbian
feminist clade and the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" feminists.  Both are in
favor of strong female role models, but many of these clades often sate that
the other aren't 'really feminists' due to their positions.  Saying that
there is only one kind of feminism, and one that is beyond criticism is to
place one's self in a very questionable position, on either side.  The
question of feminism is far more complex than saying that there is a gender
border that is non-porous and non-egotiable, which is to say that humanity
does not find any malleability in terms of gender.  That's defninitely not
the case.




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