Women and the Internet

Chaff, 02 October 1995

"PORN ON INTERNET WORRIES WOMEN" screamed the Sunday Star-Times last weekend, making yet another useless contribution to the hysterical squabbling currently going on about the net corrupting people's minds and hastening the breakdown of society. "Rampant sexual harassment, abuse, and pornography is threatening to turn the Internet into a cyber pervert's playground," said the opening sentence. Far be it from me to accuse a major media publication of talking shit, but, well, I've read more intelligent discussion on primary school toilet walls.

Sex in cyberspace is a big issue at the moment. As the Internet and its possibilities gradually lurch into public awareness, the potential for sexual titillation and the related dangers for innocent minds therein are attracting more and more attention. Parents want to protect their children and employers want to prohibit their workers from the evils of carnal adventures via phone lines. Unfortunately, due to the human race's tendency to take any issue and reduce it to sex, the vast majority of interesting things about the Internet are being ignored as sexual cyberpanic grows.

The SS-T article cites Dale Spender, esteemed feminist elder, on the dangers of the Internet for women and the prevalence of "male swaggering" in cyberspace. Completely ignoring the main idea of Spender's new book - urging women to hurl themselves into the net and learn everything about it - the dominant theme of the story is that the Internet is a dangerous and intimidating place for women, full of sleazy computer cowboys who just want to take virtual advantage of vulnerable female newbies. The net, according to this article, is a haven for smutty perverts who do nothing else with their brains than leer at digitally-enhanced porn and harass poor girlies who just don't have the defences to cope with it.

This is exactly the kind of sensational uninformed scare-mongering that will lead to regulation and restriction of the Internet's revolutionary potential for global information-sharing. There is a lot more to the net, need I say it, than this kind of sordid carrying on, but if we're not aware of it the whole thing could be brought down in a screaming heap by the hysterical screechings of a few frustrated moralists. Virtual harassment is certainly entirely possible: in one wellknown case, a participant ('Mr. Bungle') in a database that took the form of a large house where 'residents' would meet to chat, used a tool known as a 'voodoo doll' to attribute certain actions to other participants, involving steak knives, the consumption of pubic hair and other sordid activities. Although no 'actual' physical violence took place, it can hardly be doubted that this was a violation of the communal trust that goes into such a forum and generally cruel, exploitative and unnecessarily fucked up behaviour. The characters affected felt understandably degraded and outraged. And of course there's going to be sexually explicit material on the net - people are fascinated by sex and take any possible opportunity to snigger about it - but a) it's crucial to differentiate between sex and sexism, between harmless stimulation and harassment, and b) in any case, the idea is not to run away from it, the idea is to deal with it.

This is a point that especially needs to be made in relation to women's participation in cyberinteraction. If the net is full of harassing sleazesters who just want to give women a hard time, it's also an ideal place for women to give them shit back. It's the best possible forum for working out issues of gender politics because it enables the sexes to engage in full mental combat without the added complication of physical intimidation. Of course physical harm isn't all there is to sexual violence; the Mr Bungle incident is a case in point. But harassment in any form is an issue that needs to be dealt with; it won't go away on its own. The only way to solve it is for harassers to spontaneously come to their senses and stop doing it, or for harassees to make it not worth their while. Although sexual exploitation is generally recognized in legal terms now as being a Bad Thing, the attitudes that foster it can't be legislatively banished. To a large extent it's up to women now to simply not let ourselves be vulnerable to it.

This is the amazing thing about the Internet: your personality, as constituted by your net interactions, is purely your mind and what you make of it. You pretty much construct your own identity, independent of your physical circumstances. You can hold a conversation with people from the remotest parts of the world, strillions of miles away, who you don't know, will never meet, and who are unable to affect any aspect of your life except the parts of your mind you let them into. However, this isn't to say you're not vulnerable to them - those particular parts of your mind can be pretty sensitive. As technology progresses and more and more of our daily lives come to be conducted via digital communication, i.e. independently of our material circumstances, we will need to be able to understand the differences (and similarities) between physical and mental vulnerability.

The net has revolutionary implications for gender politics (as well as everything else) in this sense. In Western culture at least, most of the legal battles for gender equality have been won; the system has undergone radical change in the last twenty years and women now have a dizzying range of opportunities compared to what was previously open to us. The real change that has to happen now is in our own minds, our own strength; what we let ourselves do. And I think having constant vociferous battles with others in the metaphysical dimension of telecommunication is a completely excellent way of building up the resources we need.

Women make up only 5% of Internet users, according to Dale Spender. This figure probably doesn't take into account the numbers of women posters who disguise their gender, that is, pretend they're male in order to have their posts taken seriously. It's pretty shocking that women, in this supposedly enlightened age, still have to do this, but my point is that the more women there are on the net going "here we are, we're women, we've got our own ideas and we know they're just as worthwhile as anyone else's", the less necessary such electronic gender-bending will become and the more free, constructive and open-minded exchange of ideas will follow. The reason I find the Internet so exciting and full of potential is that I believe the way to solve problems is simply for conflicting ideas to go head to head and fight out their differences, so everyone learns, and a forum in which you can do this instantaneously with anyone on-line anywhere in the world has to be pretty cool.

So, in conclusion: disregard all the hysterical bullshit you hear about the perverted nature of cyberspace and the dangers of females roaming alone therein. Women are not innocent vulnerable little creatures who need to be protected from nasty sleazy men who can tear us apart with one salacious suggestion; and if we are, then it's way past time we got our shit together. Censorship and avoidance are solutions to nothing.