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Gender and Technology

2009 March 10
by Baibh Cathba

So, being as our class is focused on Gender and technology, I thought I’d post some things of interest. Hopefully shorter than my previous posts… and thus more readable. (:P)

I found this link to Jill (a blogger with the article The Public Woman ) and wondered what others thought about this idea that as women bloggers on the web we are vulnerable. (I thought this especially pertinent as we have had trolls on the blog trying to egg our class on). Also, does this type of thing also apply to the guys in our class? I mean, because these guys are posting with a bunch of women and standing up alongside us (aka, omg we’re equal in this class), are they also targets?


Also, when I looked up “male technology” on google, I found this as the first result back, Washing Machine Fingers Lazy Male what the… ?! I don’t know about you all, but my father is the one who does the laundry, whereas my mother pays the bills. (Kids do dishes because we’re the cheap labor… :P) So, what does it mean when we’re creating sexist washing machines?

2 Responses
  1. Anne Dalke permalink*
    March 11, 2009

    What feels most important to me in this blogpost about being public women is the reminder that women asserting themselves in the public sphere has always provoked negative feedback. Harrassment of female bloggers has a long history, and can be resisted in similar ways. That’s one way, for sure, to take our classroom work into non-academic arenas.

  2. Baibh Cathba permalink
    March 11, 2009

    Hmmm. Good point about taking the idea out of class and applying it to real life.

    Is part of the resistance to saying anything not only about asserting oneself in public (confidence), but also a bit internal (embarrassment factor)? In one of the links that you provided, there is reference to a woman who froze because some pervert on the train tried to “upskirt” her.

    I was also wondering how much the idea of politeness plays into such interactions. As women I know we are trained to handle things “politely”. As such, I often find myself backing away from public confrontations because I might “cause a scene”. But in “causing a scene” maybe we can get our point across. Is it really all that rude to say that as a women I find the rude behavior of others to be offensive? Why is it that my brothers would be publicly “ok’d” if they whistled at a woman or something similar, but if the woman told them off, she is the rude one?

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