Last chapters on Ross

This week, the reading in the last couple of chapters of Gendered Media, the content focused on women and the dynamics of gender on the internet. From reading Ross’ ideas, one might think the internet is a far more misogynistic place than the real world even is.

I did appreciate her initial statement in the chapter acknowledging that the internet is such a vast and changing place of stusy that results and conclusions are just about invalid by the time they are published. She goes into the idea of a generational gap when it comes to equality in women’s and men’s internet usage and empowerment. I think this caveat deserves more attention. She talked about “generation x” women in the 1990’s as getting more used to being on equal internet ease with men. But I would say the next generation after that, the millennial generation if we must name, has progressed even more.

Since we are naming generations, let’s look at the generations outside of the internet as well before we assign the internet inherent qualities. The baby boomer, the Xes, the millennials: these generations have lived through different waves of feminism and social equality, with the older coming from a far more accepted patriarchal power dynamic than the last. I would say, before we jump to conclusions on how masculine or feminine the internet is, not to forget that the “masculine” and “feminine” spheres might just arise from qualities of the users’ socio-cultural environment rather than simply the internet itself is masculine.

Last fall, I presented on technology in the writing center with another student whose paper focused on the femininity of the internet. Her main argument, from what I remember, is that hypertext and the collaborative and non-hierarchical nature of much internet content encourages female voices to make themselves heard. This idea was in contrast to traditional forms of publication which are highly controlled and reviewed.

Since the internet has less (male/patriarchal) control, it is inherently more feminist than older forms of media and publication. This occurred to me while reading Ross’ ideas about how women are mocked or put down by male voices on different websites. While I agree that this is wrong, I might suggest that it is something of a step forward. The voices are being heard, firstly. Before the internet, the voices were not heard at all. Now female voices are facing opposition and contradiction, but in future generations, we can perhaps hope that women’s voices will be heard and judged on their merits in equality with male voices. In “real-time” history, the first-wave feminists, the suffragettes, were mocked and silenced far more than feminists today. This of course, is not to say there is not progress to be made, but to acknowledge a progression, with hope for the future virtual women.