From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 00:45:32 -0800 (PST)
To: jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca
Subject: Re: His and Her Anarchies
Message-ID: <32882C2D.4824@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca wrote:
> "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> wrote:
> >Well, I think there clearly _is_ a gender gap on these sorts of issues.

> Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can leverage
> them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a significant way when
> it relieves people of the burden of dealing with the garbage inherent in the
> information flow of everyday life. The net is going to matter when I can rely on
> it to store the information I now keep on disk, and the computer is a completely
> transparent object. All the documents that are important to me are maintained by
> the Net with sufficient reliability that I can unplug my computer and smash it
> with a hammer without affecting anything.
> Under this scenario, strong, reliable crypto becomes similar to electricity. The
> entire infomration infrastructure is built on it, but hardly anyone gives it a
> second thought.
> What kind of people use the Net and what are their activities doing to the
> country, the world, the culture? It may sound like a parochial issue that women
> don't much like computers, but they don't, and the issue is a tremendously
> important one. They're not attracted to this world, certainly not to the extent
> that men are, and that's one of the reasons why it is such a spiritually
> impoverished world. Most reasonable sophisticated men are happier in an
> environment that included women. One of the problems with the computer society
> is that not only is it an almost all-male society, but it's part of a little-boy
> society, part of an ongoing infantilization of the society over the past half
> century.

Most heterosexual men claim to like women, but the claim is dubious on
the part of a large percentage of men, since they really like to mostly
do "boy things", i.e., follow sports, ride motorcycles, listen to "boy
music", etc., rather than hang out with women as just friends.

I think if people were really honest, they'd admit that, by and large,
men like men and women like women.  Simple enough, eh?