(SHIRLEY)
Theoretically, I can go online, and nobody knows who I am - I have the world at my feet and don’t have my gender to hinder me. I do not have to tell anybody that I am a woman. However, the situation appears to be much more complicated than we might assume.
As the hegemonic norm is discursively constructed as male, so the textual voice unless otherwise specified is also presumed to be male (this has been suggested with reference to the voice of much of artist Jenny Holzer's work (shown below). And so in the context of text, no mention of gender actually denotes unmarked masculinity. As Ann Oakley writes, ‘gender was invented to help explain women’s position: men neither wonder about theirs nor need to explain it. This means that "Women alone appear to have gender...’" (p.30)
However, with regards online identities, things may be very different. Theorists have noted that users with female names will often be the targets of 'wanna fucks' when they enter a mainstream chatroom (wanna fucks being the on-line equivalent of chat up lines, varying in explicitness). To signify their disinterest in these approaches, many women adopt gender-neutral monikers; so in this instance, gender-neutrality denotes sexually-unavailable femaleness. It used to be that if a woman wore a short skirt she may be accused of ‘asking for it’, online it may be the case that if you appear female you are asking for it.
Jenny Holzer, from The Survival Series (1991)
In Michelle White’s study of the on-line games called MOOs, (where different modes of ‘looking’ are intrinsic part of the role play) she observed that perhaps unsurprisingly female characters received the most amount of 'looks', but inter-gender characters received more looks than male characters. White argues that this is because they are assumed to be female. Genders may be swapped online without being detected, but women may be more inclined to assume gender-neutrality (or they are thought to find it more desirable) and so, again, gender-neutrality may itself become gender-specific.
It has wholly different implications for a woman to assume gender-neutrality on-line in order to be taken seriously, allowed into discussions, or avoid unwanted sexual attentio, than for a man to do so from a point of interest. As ‘gender-neutrality’ may not mean ‘gender-neutrality’ neither does ‘girls’ mean ‘girls’. On-line, the term ‘girls’ is becoming metonymic with porn. Google ‘girls’ and the top four results are porn sites; Google ‘boys’ it’s not until the 50th entry that you get even a sniff of ‘adult content’. Nina Wakeford, feminist writer on on-line communities notes that ‘Women who want to talk to ‘real’ women learn that they must seek chat rooms on commercial services with names such as ‘sensible footwear’ not ‘girlchat’’ (p.187)
