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spectrum.

Anecdotally, my own experience seems to support the research Tavris quotes. I have twice been startled to find out that a correspondent was female instead of (as I had thought) male. The second time was online; the person in question was someone I had encountered frequently for over a year in a WELL conference. This user had an unusual ID that I couldn't assign to either gender and an even more unusual real name that I couldn't parse. Rather than ask, I just figured eventually cues would appear; they did, when one night, startled, I recognized her on TV commenting on the 1996 election.

Online it didn't matter. What was a shock was the first incident, which concerned a deep-voiced PR person named Chris with whom I'd had several phone conversations but whom I had never met. The day I called and was told "She's in the ladies' room," I got off the phone, stunned, and found myself worrying over all the conversations we'd had and wondering what, if anything, I might have said differently had I known she was female. Although I eventually concluded there wasn't anything, my reaction taught me something I didn't know about how much attention we pay to these things unconsciously, even in situations where the important question isn't gender but whether the review software is going to arrive on time. Online, on the other hand, I am so notoriously poor at noticing the IDs of people I haven't met and connecting those strangers' names to messages that I feel I can safely say that gender really doesn't matter.

Tavris's answer to a source for male-female differences is equally interesting: "whenever social scientists have looked beneath (or around) many of the apparent linguistic differences between women and men, they often find that qualities thought to be typical of women are, instead, artifacts of a power imbalance.[14] If it can be extended to online communication, this observation suggests two things. First, both women and men may benefit from having the Net as a safe place to explore new styles of communicating with others and to experiment with interacting in ways that make them feel too vulnerable offline. Second, it would be useful to examine the differences in interactions between men and women in recreational areas where the posters are largely unknown to each other versus professionally oriented areas where those present know each other from working together in the real world and where there are real, professional stakes.

Those stakes are quite different from the kind of problem media reports often focus on--sexual harassment by strangers. This seems to me a huge red herring. W o m e n are likely to be immeasurably safer working online at home late at night than they are traveling across a campus or city. However invasive it feels to have some bozo spewing sexually charged abuse into your email box and out of your computer screen, there's a lot to be said for danger that isn't physical. You have so many more choices online: you can stop and think for a day or two to concoct a choice reply; you can use technical means to remove the harasser from your world; you can complain to the boor's system administrators; you can even, as Ellen Spertus, a researcher in artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out, use the messages to embarrass the perpetrator.[15] (Always bearing in mind the well-known Net saying, "Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.")

Two stories illustrate how this can work--both from the WELL, one accidental, one deliberate. The first was a poster who showed up in the sexuality conference and, figuring that women who were willing to talk about sex openly might be willing to do it, with him, emailed a number of female conference participants with a come-on. Unfortunately, the WELL's interface tripped him up, as it has so many, and dumped what he thought were private email messages into the public, open conference for everyone to hoot at. As my father used to say when I missed a smash in ping-pong, "Evil to him who evil thinks."

The second, written up at the time (the summer of 1993) in Time magazine,[16] concerned a "cybercad" who ardently pursued several women on the WELL, apparently at the same time, into face-to-face (or, as the WELL likes to call them, F2F) encounters of the most intimate kind, then dumped them