Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!gatech!mcnc!ecsvax!kylo@uncecs.edu
From: kylo@uncecs.edu (Kylo Ginsberg)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Computers and Women
Message-ID: <5874@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 18 Nov 88 05:14:36 GMT
References: <5846@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Sender: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 49
Approved: skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts)
Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu
Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu


This article was infuriating.  I'll hold my temper here though and
just make a couple points.

Trish asks:
>think the analogy of women and computers is appropriate to this group,
>though.  Is this a common analogy?  (I haven't seen it before.)  Does
>it show up other places?  What sort?

In my experience, this is a common analogy but certainly not mapped
out the way the @*$*@$ writing that article did.  I've heard people
refer to a computer as a she, just as they might a ship or their Mustang.
I can't think of any examples of this analogy going further than the
pronoun, but I can certainly imagine people running with it like this guy.
I've always thought this was strange (Mustang as a she?), but thanks
to this fellow's assholery I have some speculations.

I imagine some (computer?) jock sitting around thinking: a machine (ship,
Vax, Mustang) is this stupid, irrational thing which is often uppity
and a royal pain.  But if its owner/manager babies it just right, it will
run like a charm, (how does an engine "purring" fit into this analogy?)
and give the owner/manager a certain kind of strokes.  There's something
macho about knowing how to handle one of them, keep them in line.
You get the idea.

Let me come at this from another angle.  This guy had a good insight in 
that people feel violated by this worm.  Their space was violated.  So
far, this language need not lead to "computer rape".  It seems to me that
an excellent analogy for this worm is somebody breaking into your home.
In my (limited) experience, people whose homes have been broken into
experience an analogous feeling of having been violated.  But, if you
add violation together with the she-ness of the thing violated, then
this guy's response is perhaps more predictable.  I wonder if he would
react similarly hearing about sugar being poured in the gas tanks of his
cronies' Mustangs?

Here's another vantage point for why this analogy might exist: go listen
to some Beach Boys songs.  I just listened to "This Car of Mine", "Little
Honda," and "409".  The following might be some criteria for the
women-as-machine analogy:
1) possession
2) complexity, these things need to be tuned up, they're unpredictable, etc
3) investedness--I'm not really sure what word to put for this, but this
analogy is only used for very significant machines, ones that deliver some
sort of (ego?) strokes to the owning person.
Anyway, "409" ends: Nothing can catch her, Nothing can touch her, Giddyup
409, Giddyup 409, 409, 409,....

--Kylo