Gender and the Internet: A new experience
By Trina Coates
Gender swapping has been an element of society that has been practiced for many years. In the era of Shakespeare women were not allowed to act, meaning that men played any female roles in plays. Joan of Arc pretended to be male in order to lead her troops into the depths of war. Today transvestites walk our streets on city streets on a day to day basis. Gender swapping, despite its regular use, has been for the most part, regarded as an ill-moral and illegitimate practice. The article "Gender Swapping on the Internet" by Amy S. Bruckman enlightens us to a new twist to the gender swapping phenomena. Her article uses Text Based Multi User Environments (MUD's) to demonstrate that "without makeup, special clothing or risk of social stigma, gender becomes malleable." It presents two main topics; "Gender is fundamental to human relations," and "Gender swapping is one example of how the Internet has the potential to change not just work practice but also culture and values."
The first topic, gender is fundamental to human relations, is first expressed by explaining a Saturday Night Live episode. The TV program presented an audience with an unidentifiable gendered character, Pat; leaving the audience with no clues what so ever. The program presented to us the need for people to know the gender of a person, not knowing seemed absurd to them. The author also goes on to explain her first encounter with an ungendered character, she "felt a profound sense of unease," and wondered, ";why should [she] feel a need to know his or her gender?" She determined that her experience underlined the way in which gender is directly linked to personal interactions. We are presented to the fact that the Internet is often the first place people come into contact with genderless or ungendered characters. Gender in 'real' life affects us in so many subtle and often basic interactions that we rarely even notice them affecting us, that is until we are faced with a contrary situation, such as in MUD's. It is then that these subtleties become obvious.
The second topic expresses the view that the Internet has the ability to potentially change societies' culture and values. The premiere way the author expresses this is by presenting us with situations where people have swapped genders in their characters and discovered something through this. One example being is of a male who "played female characters. [He] found it extraordinarily interesting, It gave [him] a slightly more concrete understanding of why some women say 'Men Suck.' It was both amazing and disturbing." The author directly links the gained knowledge of gender swapping to the changing of society. The man became aware of problems he saw in his gender (at least on the Internet) and is now perhaps more inclined to change his habits. The article is trying to show us that the Internet gives us and opportunity to step back, take a look, and change how we act.
Gender is a characteristic that humans have become so accustomed to that the idea of seeing a genderless person is ridiculous. When faced with conversing with a person whom we don't know the sex of, we become extremely uncomfortable. The truth is that we base much of our interactions on the gender of a person. When initiating a conversation we pick topics that we feel are 'appropriate', such as sports in a group of males. This may be an assumption, but at the very least it is regarded as a safe assumption. It seems as though we "spontaneously and unconsciously create differences in the behavior of others that confirm our gender stereotypes." The Internet is perhaps the first place that people become aware of the 'need' to know a persons gender. For the most part, in day-to-day interactions we know a persons gender, or at the very least we think we do. Conversing involves no guessing, we subconsciously think "that person is male/female so I am going to act like this." However, once faced with being without the knowledge of gender a certain amount of perplexity begins to sink in. MUD rooms suddenly throw us into such an environment, even if the character displays a gender, we can never really be sure if that person is actually that gender.
Gender Swapping has a very added benefit to society. Problems have always occurred in the interaction of genders because of lack of understanding between the two. How could anyone possibly understand what the other person is trying to say without walking in his or her shoes? The Internet can now "help people to understand these phenomena by experiencing them." The use of MUD rooms are going to allow people to become accustomed to not relying on the biases and stereotypes of gender. People will rely more on actual conversation and less on other physical stimuli. As people begin to experience on line more and more, we will come to realize that we must live in the on line world that we create, not in one that is created for us;
"We Americans, like everybody else, must live in the world as we find it - on line and off line. But nothing except the inherited limits of our own cultural vision keep us from improving the social blueprints which guide it, as we go along. On line, as well as off."
The Internet has changed many aspects of our society, as we know it; it is indeed a 'superhighway.' It is with this superhighway that we came to realize how important gender is to our interactions. We became aware of biases, stereotypes and expectations that we didn't realize we were so accustomed to. Through these realizations we are now able to change our behaviors and intuitions. We can now see the world form 'the other' genders' view, a task very difficult to experience before. The Internet has given us the power to eventually interact free from gender restraints and interact based on nothing more than intellectual similarities. It is a change that would adjust culture and values as we know them.