IT"S ALIVE: Our relationship with technology and how men are creating a new bred of women
My Dad and my Brother are car and motorbike crazy. Our garage is full with road bikes dirt bikes and my brother's skyline and our family ute. (My little peugeot 306 is left outside in the cold). Anyway my Dad and my Brother are constantly refering to their machines as if they were alive and not only that, they refer to them as women, "She drove like a smooth single malt wiskey" (how masculine is that sentance!! But I have heard my dad say it before). If you pick up any car magazine and read the articles they are constantly refering to the cars as living things, and mostly they take on the pronoun of "she" (This may be a marketing ploy but it does say something about the relationship we have with technology).. Boats names are always feminine... you get the picture. I was "in the loop" with my dad and my brother until I developed breasts and then the invitations to woodhill to ride dirt bikes stoped and I've been thinking why this is... Is it because they are freaked out about me having a lesbian relationship with thier "girl"?? And I'm sure you've met thoughs guys who are so hesitant to let anyone eles drive thier cars (Of course they lie and say it's for insurance reasons, even if you only want to drive it up the driveway) but i reckon it's becuase it would be like thier girl was cheating on them with another driver. I think we've already started to develop a moral code of conduct for technology which is very semilar to the human moral code of conduct, but it kinda creates a problem for women if we want to have a hetrosexual relationship (like men seem to) with technology becuase technology has been gendered female...
The love for technology is a masculine thing - this can be proved by the ratio of men to women in our class in a ARTS subject never the less ( I've never experienced a higher number of boys in tuts before!) - But as a result, these hetrosexual (It seems) men have created a species of women in the form of technology.
I mean I have been guilty of personifing my little peugeot - some big bully of a car scrated my poor little baby in the parking lot the other day - see? But I think, maybe women view technology, if they have a sentimential attachment to it, as a non-gendered baby - that we have to nurture and protect, and maybe we cannot subsitute technology for men and have some form of sexual realationship with it because men have already substituted technology for women...
Feel free to disagree.
The love for technology is a masculine thing - this can be proved by the ratio of men to women in our class in a ARTS subject never the less ( I've never experienced a higher number of boys in tuts before!) - But as a result, these hetrosexual (It seems) men have created a species of women in the form of technology.
I mean I have been guilty of personifing my little peugeot - some big bully of a car scrated my poor little baby in the parking lot the other day - see? But I think, maybe women view technology, if they have a sentimential attachment to it, as a non-gendered baby - that we have to nurture and protect, and maybe we cannot subsitute technology for men and have some form of sexual realationship with it because men have already substituted technology for women...
Feel free to disagree.
posted by Anonymous at 9:06 am
2 Comments:
Good post, Rose - if that doesn't get people animated, I don't know what will! I have no idea if my own interest in media tech is linked to a gendered socialization, but I suspect so to an extent. As a teenager in the mid-80s, these new-fangled 'computers' (Commodore 64, the ZX81 or the super hi-tech ZX Spectrum) were definitely boy-things, despite the laudable efforts of my schoolteachers to get girls to sign up for 'computer club' (our school invested in a BBC computer which was really exciting). Two observations, though. First, I don't personally feminize technology ("I fired her up and she purred like a kitten" etc.) and don't believe I ever have done, even as an adolescent. And I wonder if that might be more a characteristic of the 'mechanical' than the electronic age - as you point out, it is mostly heard in relation to cars, boats etc. (my first car was called Reginald, by the way - long story). Secondly, I wonder if this gender divide is in decline as girls are less and less discouraged from playing with computers... which is not to say that gendered socialization or stereotypes are disappearing but very possibly shifting. From observing my own primary school-age daughters, and friends with primary-age boys, I would have to say that it's far more common that I see a group of girls huddled round the computer (on the Barbie web site, or emailing silly messages to each other), or 'connecting' their Tamagotchis, or whatever; and far more common to see the boys charging around threatening to decapitate each other with lumps of wood (also known as pirate swords or light sabres).
I got my first laptop at fifteen, and I remember wondering about whether or not I could or would anthropomorphise it, like kids do with toys, or like people do in books. Doing so felt kind of counter-intuitive, though.
A female friend of mine, when she bought her first cellphone and first laptop, came up with names for them - Phoebe the Phone and Lappy the Laptop - and I remember noting that she talked in a maternal way about both items, but only at the beginning. So maybe she liked the idea of having techno-babies but it never stuck?
Of relevance, I think, is the fact that she's a lot more maternal than me. She's baby-obsessed - you should see her playing The Sims - whereas I couldn't even name the cat, back when I had a cat.
As I got used to having a personal computer, I decided that it was less like having a baby or a friend and way more like having another body part. Realising this made me feel a lot more comfortable with spending so much time using it. I wrote a journal entry about this, way back then, but I can't find it.
Anyway, so there's a connection here to the idea that we're all cyborgs. Rose talked about people who're hesitant to let others use their personal technological stuff, implying that the interaction between men and their tools is a little like sex.
I think that for me, though, letting someone else use my phone or computer is a little personal or taboo in the same way that lending out my peg leg or my cybernetic eye would be.
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