This article in the NYTimes is an infuriating example of exactly what to do to discourage women from caring about technology.

Ms. Duarte represents a growing number of women who are embracing consumer electronics just as the technologies are reaching out to embrace them. Behind this quiet revolution are engineers and designers who are bringing a more feminine sensibility to products historically shaped by masculine tastes, habits and requirements.

Only a few years ago, feminizing a consumer electronic product meant little more than creating a pink or pastel version of the same black or silvery item coveted by men. And, some retailers note, that kind of marketing still goes on. But feminizing technology is more about a product’s fundamentals, often expressed in its ease of use.

Where does this persistent belief that technology needs to be “feminized” in order to be successfully marketed to women come from? I’m not entirely familiar with the marketing data that makes manufacturers so obsessed with gender, but surely there’s a little merit to the idea that if you update a product’s features and design so that it’s easier and more efficient to use, the resulting increase in sales has less to do with women preferring “simpler” technology than better product design. Ghettoizing women by making special technology products “for her” will never be the right way to “encourage” women to use computers, if we need encouragement at all.

Luddites abound in both genders. I work in tech support at my college, and see equal numbers of male and female techno-terrified professors. Among students, there are rather fewer who are unfamiliar with the technology in use around them, but an equal number of men and women ask for help formatting their papers and printing out homework assignments. Granted, this is evidence from personal experience, never a statistical source to be trusted absolutely— but what is it that so convinces people that women are afraid of technology?

I do remember hearing from friends— and occasionally teachers— during elementary and high school that it was “weird” for me to be interested in computers, or to play online games.^[1] When I was in fifth grade, we first got a computer powerful enough to connect to the internet (a Mac G3). I excitedly told my teacher all about how neat the new computer was one day while walking with our class to the school buses, only to hear her reply, “I’m really not all that interested in your new computer— I’d rather hear about your craft projects.”

I hope we don’t still so emphatically tell girls that computers aren’t interesting or appropriate for them. Indeed, evidence points to girls being just as interested in technology and the internet as boys— take another article from yesterday’s NYTimes, for example. Some online playgrounds for kids are as much as 96% female now, belying the tired old tripe that girls “just aren’t as interested” in computers.

This may seem trivial to producers of technology products, software, and web apps whose work isn’t directly linked to the “interactive online doll” movement. Yet these programs are creating interest among girls in computers and the web, and ensuring that children who grow up in the middle class in this generation will be technologically literate.^[2] When women are making half of all technology purchases in twenty years, it won’t be because manufacturers have finally hit on the right shade of pink with the perfect glitter-coated single-button interface for every gadget and software app, it’ll be because technology is central to work, play, and every aspect of life for the new generation.

Manufacturers should be making the user interface changes described in the NYTimes’ piece— smart televisions that turn on when a DVD is inserted into an attached player, or gadgets whose size doesn’t overwhelm their usefulness, or consumer electronics that interface easily with everyone’s laptop are wonderful additions to the plethora of technological devices available today. They’re great additions because they’re designed well and appeal to a variety of consumers, though, not because women are any more likely to be the Luddites adopting them than men. Instead of “feminizing” technology by making it “simpler” for women, we should be simplifying technology with the goal of making it easier for everyone to use, and ensuring that girls and boys alike grow up interested in tech.

Edited To Add: Today (6/12/07) I came across an excellent blog post at Shrub.com tangentially related to this article. Go read it, and the rest of the Shrub blog.

[1] I was an avid player of MUDs in middle and high school, particularly the RPI variety. Someday I’ll get around to writing a post about how gender seems to play out in many MUD environments. Back to where you were.

[2] The growing disparity in technological literacy between the “middle” class and those in poverty is a troubling one, and further disadvantages those already held back from full economic success. However, the problems of technology and poverty— and the accompanying issue of technological literacy and race— is a can of worms for a different post. Back to where you were.

I came across a very interesting interview with Will Wright in Popular Science today, dealing with his upcoming game Spore. The game, which has gotten quite a bit of press during the development stages, has a fascinating concept— you manipulate an organism from the earliest stages of its evolutionary history to the highest levels of space-based civilization. In the middle of this otherwise-excellent interview, though, the following exchange appears:

The Sims experiences have appealed strongly to a female contingent, more so than pretty much anything else. Do you think this is going to have that same appeal, or is this a more masculine game? It felt that way to me.

When you look at the theme of it it at first might seem kind of science-y. But the approach we’ve taken is to be very playful with the entire universe. A good example of that is the creatures. And in fact we found that with The Sims even, what women especially seemed to enjoy was the creative aspects of it, being able to make things that were theirs, then being able to share them and build stories around them, et cetera. I think the creature editor just by itself is going to have a huge appeal to female players as an aesthetic artistic expression of what they want to do. The fact that they can make something very elaborate in the game and then show it to other people and trade it with everybody, and in fact trading it is like automatic now, whereas before you’d have to put it up on a web site and the other people would come and download it and put it in the right folder and all this, now it will just be totally automatic. And anybody else playing the game might come across the cool creature you made and be able to bookmark you, get more stuff from you and give you positive feedback about what you created. So I think Spore is going to feel like a much more elaborate creative palette than The Sims did, and it’s a matter of making the environment of creatures and evolution and traveling in space not seem off-putting or too science-y but make it feel like a very natural narrative environment, where I naturally want to tell a story in these worlds. Because I think the storytelling is the other important aspect. Once I make stuff in the game, I want to now use that stuff to basically play out a story, and then share that story with other people.

Right. Because we need to gender our video games, lest some poor man be feminized by a girly-game mistakenly chosen off the store shelves, or some woman become too butch from her experience with games meant for real men. And after all, everybody knows women avoid “science-y” stufff like the plague, so we better try to emphasize aesthetics instead and downplay any science content. Men like science and strategy, but women like aesthetics and community-building trading. Duh, kids.

Sarcasm aside, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this kind of thinking emphasized over and over again, even outside of the usual gaming community. Beyond the obvious insult in Wright’s implication that the game might seem too “science-y” for women^[1] and the ridiculous pandering to gender stereotypes, this encourages people to judge games based on their gendered qualities rather than any concrete aspect of gameplay and content.

Wright makes some interesting points— the sharing and storytelling aspects of The Sims were innovative new elements, and probably did draw new players or player demographics to the game, as did the game’s ability to be customized. It sounds like Spore will emphasize those possibilities— as well as the organic, open-ended gameplay that contributed so heavily to The Sims’s popularity— and draw even more players who might have been put off by more common RPG or FPS tropes in the gaming world. The creature-creation engine in Spore (which Wright has called “Maya for 10-year-olds”) sounds like a fantastic leap in in-game character design systems. Why do any of these elements need to be gendered, though?

It’s not just offensive to gender these aspects of games— thus forcing gamers to deal with any attendant stereotypes— it’s also pretty stupid marketing practice. You’re sure to alienate someone by forcing a whole section of your gameplay into a gendered box, whether it’s those who thought they’d enjoy the gameplay but now are worried they’re the wrong gender for it, or those who are just irritated by the whole damn idea.

[1] And could he possibly make it any more insulting than by adding a diminutive “y” to the word? Back to where you were.

The fact that I am interested in feminism in the virtual world, a world that still seems like a sci-fi pipe dream, probably seems a little silly. Until you look at Second Life, or read this article on haptic gloves — gloves that recreate the feel of fabrics that one can only see in the virtual world.

It seems silly to think about it now. But within my generation’s lifetime, the purely representational world will be a reality, and I’m ready to start thinking about the implications of that world now. It doesn’t make any sense to me to wait. Whatever it is possible to make will be made — and that means that someday sci fi is bound to be reality.

I’ve been hanging out on Second Life a lot lately. If you aren’t familiar with it, you should check it out — it’s the closest thing to real virtual reality that we have, in the sense of worlds contained in code, free social interaction, an economy that has nothing to do with physical goods whatsoever. I’m finding myself very interested in the gender dynamics therein.

For one thing, people’s avatars are sexed (not gendered) when you create them. One chooses to be male or female. That does not, however, prevent one from creating an avatar which expresses its gender in a non-traditional way: one can “cross-dress,” and in the virtual world it is often very difficult to tell a cross-dressing male avatar from a female one. One’s physical sex or gender does not, of course, determine one’s virtual sex or gender. If one takes a performative view of gender, then Second Life offers the most perfect possible “non-gendered” world. You don’t automatically perform a gender (unlike World of Warcraft, I haven’t noticed male and female sims behaving differently when they’re just walking around) and you can get animations that will make female sims dance, flirt, or talk like men and vice versa. On the whole, it is very easy to persuade someone that you are genuinely gendered male if you are female, or vice versa. (And not just gendered — even sexed. People assume that the two are the same thing, even on second life). You can also select formless avatars which do not betray gender, or animal-like avatars that display gender to a greater or lesser extent.

But Second Life is still a very highly gendered universe. Women are women, as it goes, and men are men. One of Second Life’s biggest industries is the strip club/dance club/casino, which are almost wholly unregulated (there are “PG” areas in which they cannot exist, but those PG areas seem to become fewer and farther between as days go by) and hire real people to use their avatars as dancers. This is the main way of making money in Second Life, at least for the unskilled, who have not learned or don’t want to use skills to create goods or have no capital to start a shop - “camping,” which entails hanging out someplace to make it look busy. Stripping is a higher form of camping: your avatar takes its clothes off for money. Yes, really. You can choose “skins” for your avatar that feature tattoos, piercings, freckles, birthmarks. There’s even a sex shop in the ancient Roman themed part of Second Life, called “Caligula’s Garden.” And the debauchery needn’t stop there — one can purchase animations that will make your sim do anything one can do in real life.

But what, in this Second Life world that is completely created out of performance — of “play” as some theorists would put it, the relations between people but never including the people themselves — are we to think of all this?

I’m honestly not entirely sure what I think of porn in the real world. I know that the porn industry is problematic in a big way, and I don’t know whether that can ever be divorced from the issue of porn. But no one in Second Life is producing porn (or stripping) because they are coerced into it. Second Life is a way of hanging out with your friends, essentially, if you are playing it casually — and if you aren’t playing it casually, you sure aren’t trying to make money by stripping. Rather, you’re doing the good ol’ capitalist thing of starting your own porno empire. Second Life removes many of the barriers to doing this, and more and more barriers have been coming down - for instance, you can now lease land without having a paid Second Life membership, dealing purely in Linden dollars. It’s possible that someday Second Life will be “real” enough that some people are driven to participate in porn for real-life reasons, but it’s not that way now.

And in reality, since people can play characters that are male or female regardless of their “real-life” gender, is there any coercion at all involved? I think not. At least, not within Second Life. It’s possible, no, certain that the outside pressures of our world likely impel more women to seek money in Second Life via stripping-camping jobs than they do men, but nothing within Second Life does so.

What I am worried about, though, is the question of how female sims are viewed. Perhaps real women will not suffer in-game from the ubiquity of porn, prostitution and stripping, because they are able to put on male sims. But that doesn’t change the fact that female sims will continue to be objectified. I’m not opposed to objectification on principle — I do it with men, to a limited degree, as I think we all do. We have to objectify people in order to get on with our lives; if I were concerned with every homeless person I saw, instead of objectifying them, I wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without helping each and every one of them and then I wouldn’t be able to go to school, work, or live my own life. But there is a degree of objectification which I find disturbing — a degree where it is difficult, genuinely difficult, to have the radical notion that “female sims are people.”

It scares me that I can imagine, at some point, a Second Life where there are only scattered pockets of the world where it is safe to wear a female sim — religious groups’ nodes, academic areas, Capitol Hill. I can imagine that I might not want to venture into parts (even most!) of Second Life wearing a female sim.

But then, what if men wear female sims as well, as spectators in these sleazy joints?

I’m not sure what to think. I’m not sure how gender holds up in a world that is entirely performative, like Second Life. I’m going to have to think about this a lot more.