I never
heard anyone calling a mate 'prick', unless for
dispregiative reasons.
then visit australia. :-) prick is reguarly used as a term of
endearment for a mate "you silly prick" said with a grin, "you dumb
prick" said with a grin, and so on. anglo australian men commonly and
have historically appropriated terms of abuse as code words in
complex forms of personal and intimate acknowledgement.
i haven't read the cyberfeminism debate, but there are oodles of
stuff relevant to feminism and online environments. there is early
work about the tendency to flame in email lists and women's and men's
experience of this (the issue isn't flaming but the agonistic nature
of academic email as gendered conduct). there is work from michael
joyce, barbara page, and wendy morgan about the possible relations
of french feminist theory to hypertext writing. there is also work
that demonstrates the manner in which interfaces embed or embody
ideologies and this i would expect to include (am unfamiliar with
this work) gender and patriarchy. particularly given, say, some old
criticisms from Irigarary et al about boys, philosophy and looking, i
would have thought the gui would at least be amenable to quite an
interesting and powerful feminist critique (in much the same way that
someone like Simon Penny can be quite scathing of the gui as an
inadequate model of interaction for computing).
i'm not sure if this intersects with cyberfeminism but it is clear
that we come here with our bodies pretty much intact, and that there
are probably connections between things like hypertext and feminist
philosophy (including moo space, i think Jane Love has done research
on this), and the interface and ideology that would make gender and
feminism useful.