Traditional media has been very contradictory in its reaction to feminist advances of the last decades. To some degree times have most definitely changed, and the media is now more available to women. At the same time, though, traditional stereotypes linger and act to severely limit equality. Susan Douglas, in a chapter entitled ``I'm Not A Feminist, But...,'' considers the advances and deadlocks of women in the news media. For her, advances in female news presence have been only partial and incomplete. On the one hand female news anchors are now more prevalent than ever before. ``Today,'' she says, ``the norm is for local newscasts to be cohosted by a male-female team, and [newscasts] have made stars out of Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley, Joan Lunden, and Katie Couric'' (Douglas 277). These days it would be considered atypical to turn to the news and not see a woman newscaster. These women, however, are not given all of the same treatments as their male counterparts. Female newscasters ``remain exceptions, and they represent a very small and privileged class of women. More to the point, they are gorgeous'' (278). She claims that women reporting the news are required to be younger and better looking than the males they sit alongside. ``No woman who looks like Andy Rooney, Charles Kuralt, or Walter Cronkite would ever be allowed to report or comment on the news'' (278). Women's voices have cracked hegemony of males in the media, but their influence is still tempered by the perception of their gender. Women in the media who don't fit into traditional roles are ostracized and treated as oddities. Douglas says that Rosanne Barr was successful because she had a message that connected with the women of America. And yet despite her popularity, Rosanne received ``incredibly hostile treatment'' in the press for being ``four things TV women are not supposed to be, working-class, loudmouthed, overweight, and a feminist'' (284). Clearly gender is still a factor in access to traditional media, despite all the advances of the women's movement. This inequality prevents the traditional media from fully engaging the populace.
Other technologies have claimed revolutionary status similar to that of the Internet. The printing press was considered the democratization of publishing, taking the creation of books out of the church abbeys and allowing them greater saturation in the population. Still, though, the flow of information was almost entirely one-way. The printing press didn't make it easier for the populace to dialogue, it merely made more material that it could read. Similarly radio and television, while vastly increasing the flow of information into homes, have done little to enable the public to dialogue and therefore their effects, though large, have not been as great as those the Internet has the potential to have.
The Internet, with its reduced barriers to entry and its seemingly endless capacity, offers anyone the ability to make her voice heard. No other medium offers its users such an opportunity to voice their opinions. Beate Gersh, says that users don't simply comment on Internet text, they help to create it. ``More than any other medium, the Internet provides its audience with opportunities to actively engage in the text by commenting on, adding to, or transforming it in other words, constructing and reconstructing meaning'' (Beate 312). While the Internet is certainly home to traditional media corporations, they are just another presense in a large field of players. Alternative media outlets flurish, offering a wide range of voices the platform to be heard throughout the world. ``Individuals sharing the same feelings, emotions, ideas, and histories can connect without ever meeting face-to-face and still form a community'' (314). Throughout its growing history the Internet has had a core function as a forum for discussion. In the early days this was via email listservs and Usenet. Now, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, online discussion sites have cropped up on a full spectrum of topics, both specialized and general. Plastic.com is one of these sites. With a slogan that reads ``recycling the web in real time,'' Plastic features links and summaries for news stories around the clock. Readers submit the stories, offering their opinions along with the summary write-ups. Once approved by a trusted group of members, the stories are made available for anyone to comment on them. The community of users shares its disparate opinions on topics ranging from music to politics. Users are identified via their online handles, with some users optionally providing additional descriptive information. For the most part, though, the texts of the comments speaks for themselves.
Feminists have embraced the Internet because it offers a medium where traditional gender signs are invisible. The only visible communication online is the explicit message of content. A 1993 cartoon in the New Yorker offered the famous quote: ``On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.'' To a large extent, this is true of online gender. On the Internet there are no physical characteristics to map to pre-existing social stereotypes. Judith Donath, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, says that online identities are far more transitive and insubstantial than identities in the real world. ``In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity'' (Donath 1). In the virtual world identity cues are not only sparse, they're easily able to be deceptive. First impressions help us mentally segment people we meet into social categories. These characterizations are very hard to later undo. Donath says that ``It can take significant evidence to change this initial categorization - we are more likely to reinterpret the events than to re-evaluate the basic classification'' (Donath 17). Early Internet visionaries thought that this unstable sense of gendered identity online would lead to elimination of reliance on it in the interpretation of messages. In an environment where these signals were clearly imprecise and unclear, people would finally be forced to consider all people equal and evaluate them solely on the merits of their words. Beth Kolko, in writing an article on avatars in virtual communities, tells of their utopian fantasies. ``Fictional depictions of electronic discourse in particular described the liberation of going on-line as one discarded the 'meat' of the physical body and wandered placeless nets with cross-dressing abandon'' (Kolko 177). In this world free from physical groupings and social stigmas, surely a discourse would develop free from prejudice and discrimination. ``Without a physical body to mark gender, race, or age, it was argued, speakers would be freed to exist in the realm of ideas'' (177). Gersh echoes this sentiment of freedom. ``On the Internet, people assume boundless identities. They are not restricted to a physical body; thus, in cyberspace, they can reinvent their identities and be whoever or whatever they want to be'' (Gersh 315). This vision was understandably appealing. A Plastic user who uses the handle Goliard says that ``Plastic is a working exercise in withholding judgement (and sarcasm and cynicism- unless you have well placed asterisks) and making conversation that motivates anyone to respond when they don't know who the hell you are and could care less if you drop dead tomorrow. It's just plain fun, isn't it?'' The perception of anonymity and equality can be freeing, causing people to open up more and to be more vocal than they would be otherwise.
Instead of being genderless, the Internet is full of gender. On the Internet anyone can be any gender they wish. Studies in the early 1990s were obsessed with MUDs and the fact that participants could choose their online gender. Researchers were thrilled with the potential this had for the study of what it meant to portray one gender or another1. When creating a character in a MUD, the user is asked to pick a gender to associate with their online character. This online gender need have no relation to real life. Liesbet van Zoonen writes that in MUDs, ``Women play as men, men operate as women, others choose multiple identities like Laurel and Hardy, or try what it means to operate as an 'it''' (Zoonen 13). Famously, males often play as female characters, leading to great uncertainty whether the girl a guy is talking to is really who ``she'' says ``she'' is. Females, though, can often play as males in order to get away from the stigma's attached with femininity. A female character in a MUD is offend barraged with unwanted attention or uninvited sexual advances. However by playing the same way, but with a male persona, the user can avoid all of this. The same principles apply to discussion forums as well. bright, a frequent Plastic poster, commented, ``I never correct anyone who assumes I'm male. Seems irrelevant to any good discussion.'' By allowing herself to be viewed as a male, the issues become more important than her gender. Saying the same things as a known female might detract from the effectiveness of her message.
The visionaries' claims that the Internet would be a place free from the constraints of gender are flawed because they fail to take into account the mapping of gender assumptions onto information that provides no indications. These assumptions occur even when there is no information to support the conclusions reached. Simply the lack of any indications to say that a poster is not of the norm is enough to assume that they are. In many cases participants assume that all the other users are of the majority, whatever that may be for a particular forum. For a lot of the Internet, that means assuming that the other users are younger white males. This basic assumption colors readers' perception of the opinions written. A Plastic user named LJ Gould recounts the following story of gender information being assumed based on a normative assumption. ``Back in the days of usenet I confused people by making reference to my boyfriend, resulting in a chorus of 'I thought you were a man' both in posts and e-mails. Hilarity ensued as I watched people argue it out. In a matter of hours, they decided that I was a girl.'' No specific reference to gender was given in the posting, but stereotypes and assumptions caused readers to presume a certain way about the poster's gender identity. Males who might inhabit the majority are not alone in their assumptions. After one poster had assumed that she was one of the only women on Plastic, another female poster, bright, replied saying ``I used to assume that too, SS. But after having been incorrectly assumed to be male in the majority of responses that indicate a gender inference, I began actively seeking to discover other females that I might have miscategorized in my biased social filing system.'' All members of the group naturally assume the rest to be in the majority, regardless of whether on not they themselves personally are.
At this point it might be tempting to argue that perceived homogeneity really is a form of equality, however this viewpoint is dangerous to support. It would be nice to claim that if everyone is perceived to be the same, they are then afforded the same rights and treatment. If women and minorities can gain access to positions of influence by making use of the gender masking qualities of the Internet, haven't we simply reached a position where the image of the majority ceases to represent itself and instead works as a sort of wrapper for all who speak under its guise? While it's true that those with masked gender may be able to achieve influence quicker, in the end the mask limits what they can say and the positions that they can support. This behaviour is not only limiting, it's regressive. It allows women access to influence only when they obtain it via a masculine discourse, and therefore is in no way true equality.
The Internet cannot provide a quick fix for gender issues. It is no
magic bullet, suddenly able to take away problems and resolve huge
differences that have deep rootings in popular culture.
Footnotes
- ... another 1
- In the MUD world gender had to be portrayed in such a non-binary fashion, as MUDs often allowed players to choose from more than just male and female.