Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

The future of the past looked so much more interesting. Not practical, but certainly interesting.

I'm curious why the author of this piece decided to use the gender neutral pronoun for the women who modelled this odd machine. They wrote:

> The demonstration model would climb into the six-foot-tall machine via ladder, then enter the chamber, with their head sticking out of the top. They'd set the water temperature, then the machine would start spraying them with jets of warm water, like the pre-wash cycle at a car wash.

These models were all women. This was the 1970s, and the photos support the reasonable assumption that this was not a demonstration where male models were used. Using gender neutral pronouns is sensible in many cases — I didn't go as far as to look into the author's biography for example, so I refer to them as they for the nonce — but is doing so when the gender is known (and possibly relevant given the social context of that time) now on the rise, or is this just hypercorrection?

> gender neutral pronoun

I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.

At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)

> the models being women has no impact on the subject

It's part of the context; design doesn't exist in isolation. Was this prototype aimed at women? Was it just sexism or its off-shoot 'sex sells'? Or were there actually male models, but the author isn't mentioning it?

I would also argue that explicitly ignoring the fact that these models were women amounts to erasure, which is probably not intended, but a consequence of doing this.

If we get back to how it was originally presented: https://www.expo70-park.jp/cause/expo/sanyo/

It was part of a world expo, and from the text we can see it was set as a futuristic vision targeted at anyone that could use the apparatus. The official description also has no focus on the models or who it should be used for in any specific detail.

I get your point on the models all being women, but as that has more to do to the period than the machine itself, it isn't remarkable in itself. It would be like commenting on the show guides being sexy women when discussing Mercedes' prototype at 90s cars. Pointing at the sexism and gender gap doesn't help the subject.

The machine was indeed targeted at all people, male or female. But this show was in Japan in 1970, and using attractive female models was absolutely the norm (heck, this was even the norm at computer industry trade shows I attended around ~2000; they called them "booth babes"). They would not have had any male models wearing little clothing to show off this machine.

You're right that this part of this history isn't necessarily that important to the machine being discussed in the article, but I think the other poster has a good point that this was absolutely part of the culture of the time, for good or bad, and I don't think this part of history should be ignored personally. Part of reading about something like this is to bring the reader back in time to what it was like being at this show in 1970 and seeing devices like this. Part of the experience was absolutely seeing pretty women modeling things or otherwise being part of the exhibit, because that's something that's completely different these days.

I think it might also be interesting to point out that while having "booth babes" is now out of vogue in the US, it's still the norm here in Japan. Go to an industrial trade show here and it'll be full of men walking around seeing the demos and talking to (generally male) company representatives, while there's a bunch of attractive well-dressed women standing in front handing out brochures and swag and scanning your QR code to put your email address on a mailing list, but who don't actually know anything about the company or products.

Hypercorrection.

I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.

It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.

I interpreted that sentence as meaning that someone else would set the water temperature?

I don't know if all the models were women, perhaps they had some guys as well? (Or the author just doesn't want to commit, because they don't know?)

We see some pictures of models, but we don't know if those are all the models they had.

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