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amusing to report that a small bit of evidence supporting this idea comes from a poster to alt.transgendered, who commented in 1994 that the only significant difference in her new life as a woman was the lack of free time. More support comes from a CompuServe November 1995 survey, which found that "according to the survey participants, the primary barrier for women spending time online is not enough free time. The answer was by far the leading factor cited and was selected by 55 percent of respondents.[20]

People who want to sell us things point to online grocery shopping as that practical advantage. (I've done it, and it's not so much a time saver as a much less unpleasant way of acquiring food.) And it is, but the more valuable advantage, if more difficult to convey to the unwired, is the potential for undoing some of the damage done by social constructs. Why shouldn't we have, for example, such an exceptionally valuable thing as a (voluntary) maiden names registry database site? One of the reasons women lose track of their old friends over time is that those friends don't always know what their names are any more. More immediately, as several female CIXen at home with children have said, online gives women in that position a chance to talk via electronic conferencing every day with 10,000 other adults for less per month than the cost of a single night out. Or, if you're the only woman at your level in the corporate structure, online may be the only way you can meet and interact regularly with women at your level in other companies. The online world has far greater potential to change most women's lives than it does most men's.

For this reason, the characterization of the Net as a boy's toy makes smoke come out of my ears, whether the assertion is coming from media sources who tell women to hide behind male or gender-neutral IDs (thereby making cyberspace look even more male) or from addled critics of interface design who think there's something inherently masculine about typed computer commands. If the point-and- click functionality of a graphical interface is somehow inherently feminine, then so is the TV remote control.

I've seen otherwise intelligent women get up at artistic conferences and complain that an interface that uses "kill" as the command to delete a file is too masculine. (Clearly these women are not from New York.) Fine--design your own interface. Women who show up online demanding that those already there alter their behavior are going to get a reception similar to those the government did when it passed the CDA and proposed Clipper. No one really gets to make rules for the Net; backbone Cabalist Gene Spafford, who tried for eleven years by writing the rules of Netiquette, eventually gave up, complaining no one was listening to him. And he had seniority and, for a time, real power. That few women have such seniority and technical power is largely a reflection of the make-up of the computer science community.

In a study of gender relations on the Net, Mcgill University researcher Leslie Regan Shade notes: "One of the biggest challenges is widening access to the net for women that aren't institutionally affiliated, whether in industry or academia, where they purportedly have 'ready' access to both the hardware and software, and technical expertise, to successfully learn how to navigate the net.[21]

Speaking of censorship as "an essential condition for democracy," Shade adds,

While it is true that no external censorship was exercised by the moderators or owners of LINGUIST or MBU, women participating in CMC are nevertheless constrained by censorship both external and internal. Externally, they are censored by male participants who dominate and control the discourse through intimidation tactics, and who ignore or undermine women's contributions when they attempt to participate on a more equal basis. To a lesser extent, non-adversarial men suffer the same treatment, and in and of itself, it need not prevent anyone who is determined to participate from doing so. Where adversariality becomes a devastating form of censorship, however, is in conjunction with the internalized cultural expectations that we bring to the formula: that women will talk less, on less