I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for participating online.
I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it.
The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care.
There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female.
So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.
This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating yourself is the only way to be treated differently from everyone else.
I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed from that.
Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, and general hate.
The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.
Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.
It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online.
Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups.
(I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)
Now granted, I have only been online in various forms since 1992 (first on BBSs, then on the Internet occasionally in 1994, and then pretty much continuously since 1996), but I can tell you with a "vaguely feminine" name (Yvan, which is a French name, and any native speaker will tell you it's a male name) and almost 30 years of online activity under my real name, I can tell you that Internet has been a shitty place pretty much since the nerd realized he could stalk a classmate through the university mail system, and probably even before then.
I don't get where Yvan would be confusing either. Weird people out there.
Although I honestly do have fond memories of the late 80's BBS era. But to the point those were local and largely only psudo-anonymous.
The Sysop knew who everyone was if they verified users. And here, at the time, the cost of calls greatly limited connection range. People were locals.
> we.
Whatever group you are magnanimously attempting to represent, utterly fucking failed. You point the finger at the The Eternal September, but how many of those 'Septembers' did you (`we`) preside over before that? Failing one time after another until you give up and realise that, actually, the internet is for everyone.
> we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.
I'm not going to make the obvious reference to a Trilby hat--often tipped-- here, yet through my clever style of writing I actually just did.
> we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time
Different-phobic conveniently excluding your (as in, the group behind your `we`) disappointment at the unwashed masses finding the internet.
--
I appreciate you trying to do this detached 'yet curiously' thing but the fact is that nothing has changed. I dare say it's worse.
This is the problem, isn’t it? The women who state (not “announce” - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online and then dare to request they’re treated the same as their peers. They want to be treated differently than women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon users.
Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral username means people “don’t really care” you’re a woman because they just assume you’re a man. But often the mere mention of the fact you’re a woman, however relevant to the discussion, is viewed as “constantly talking about” your gender.
That sounds right to me, and matches up with my experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want to announce their gender because they didn't want special treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual attention, but the difference between then and now was that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear online.
During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.
Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything beside Linux and Java.
Ah the times of Nickbot.
Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, everyone was suprised about everyone else.
(this was some years before the WWW, and before digital photography etc.)
The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet.
What newsgroups did Chaucer post to?
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he#Middle_English-they [2]: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunciation/gr.html...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender
(Wikipedia sources https://web.archive.org/web/20120530024829/http://www.nytime...)
Of course:
> More recently, this use of he has become less accepted, and singular they is becoming the dominant form
But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody flips a switch and everyone across the world updates their habits, so it takes time.
While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he or she" being the taught solution for a single person of unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is going out of favour.
Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a job, she would be known as female and harassed.
Every single woman had to think about that, every single day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't.
Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes. No, you may not hit on every single person on the Internet just because you think they are female." They object, but to women, that's something they've done every single day of their online lives.
But:
> bragging about your genitalia,
If you’re not doing this ironically, then what the fuck communities are you in?
> talking about your wife
Women can have wives, but sure, this is more valid than the other examples. People do talk about spouses/partners.
> even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer
Women -definitely- can like these things. Seems awfully sexist of you to assume not.
Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if they don't, or if they like other things, speaking up about those things isn't equally easy.
Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap point with an offhand accusation.
It really was a lot more about what you brought to the table than identity.
And even then, everyone's still a dog.
Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really limited to women.
That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting team killed for making callouts.
Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The only area in which women reported significantly worse harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. It really seems like a wash to me.[1]
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-haras...
There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find it.
The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't news; tied to a woman, it was.