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unceremoniously. Retiring to the private women-only conference to miserate and discovering they had company, the women decided to out him publicly as a warning to others. The man in question eventually said he had thought the rules were "different in cyberspace" [17]--a clear case of someone's being unable to find the boundary between cyberspace and real life. He may have met these women in cyberspace, but the rest of the relationships took place in the physical world. It seems to me it ought to be pretty clear that the moment you pick up that telephone to direct-dial, you've changed jurisdictions. Such a case doesn't mean you shouldn't meet people online or give them your home phone number; but it does mean you should exercise the same caution you would with someone you met casually in a bar. The women on the WELL acknowledged this with great disappointment and a sense of betrayal: they had believed online was safe--the other side of expecting the rules to be different in cyberspace.

Spertus discusses technical means for blocking harassment, such as using cryptographic digital signatures to block out unknown correspondents much the way caller ID blocks out unidentified callers. With such things likely to be available soon, she suggests that women could use shared blacklists and killfiles to exclude known offenders and build networks of trust in which each member is known to at least one other member of the network. While this could be extremely valuable, it is an option with many flaws and is suitable only for a few contexts. We tend to assume that online harassment is trivial and that it won't escalate into physical violence, but this won't be true in all cases. Blocking the harasser's email may block out messages that would alert the recipient to genuine, as opposed to virtual, danger. More, it discards the evidence. In a serious case, like the one reported by consultant Stephanie Brail,[18] whose harasser kept changing originating email addresses, much as spammers do, it may make no difference. Further, blocking messages from unknown correspondents is simply not an option if you are, as many people are expected to become, a freelance professional working via modem for the highest bidder. Such tools are also likely to come easiest and be most readily available to the technically literate, the very people who are already best able to defend themselves if they have to.

It seems to me regressive for women to believe their only safe option online is to move through an edited world like the hothouse flowers Victorian women were supposed to be. It may also be dangerous: the worst threats may be the ones you don't know about and so can't counteract. In any case, the whole point of computer networks is that they connect you to people you didn't know existed; using them to huddle means giving up an important chance to participate in the construction of the electronic corridors of power. This is one area of life where the lack of physical presence should allow women to adventure equally. Most of the women I know online realize this and use the many single-sex areas, which have grown up anywhere in cyberspace that has access control, as only one element of their online lives.

I would argue that the more important hindrances to women's full participation online are lack of access to technical expertise and lack of time. As Ellen Balka put it in a paper examining the issue of access, "Perhaps the greatest issue faced by the women's movement with respect to the adoption of computer networking technology is access." She concludes,

A widely accessible computer network could increase the number of voices represented in an organization's decision-making process. To realize these goals, however, feminists will need to apply the insights gained from years of productive organizing, and at the same time investigate the social biases of technological systems that, left unconsidered, threaten to create computer networking systems which reproduce rather than challenge the power relations characteristic of western capitalist societies.[19]

Time may be just as big an issue. Women who are already juggling a job, marriage, and children are less likely to be able to find time to hang out online or randomly browse the Web unless they can imagine some immediate practical advantage. It's