This is a book chapter published in (1998) J. Cassell & H. Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Girls and Computer Games, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Fascinating here is the suggestion by Emmerich et al. of an intermediate phase between gender indeterminacy and gender constancy. Emmerich et al. describe the behaviors of five and six year old children as a period suffused with anxiety about the unalterable fact of sex versus the mutable appearance of gender- a phase in which children reportedly demonstrate extraordinary diligence in learning styles of play, toy choices, modes of dress and the like.
Fig. 7 "Dress Sense"
Photo Credit: Celia Haig-Brown
For developmental researchers, the interlacing of sex and gender at about age seven is taken as evidence of a major developmental milestone --- the understanding that no matter what the external attributes, sex is equivalent with gender, and both are basic sites of permanent categorical differentiation.
Some doubt may perhaps be cast on the biological necessity of gender constancy as a developmental milestone, however, when one endeavors to account for the fact that: (1) children's knowledge about sex-role stereotypes has been found to correlate with their degree of gender identity stability (Newman, Cooper, & Ruble, 1995), and (2) children's sex-typed play preferences differ significantly as a function of whether or not they are in the presence of an adult (Rekers , 1975). Gender "constancy", in other words, can as likely be a by-product of socialization and learned social knowledge of gender norms and expectations informed a great deal more by culture than by nature.
Armed with a theory of gender constancy as a major and positive developmental achievement, however, the "differently gendered" (see, for example, Rekers, 1977) can be pathologized under the label "gender identity disorder" or "gender dysphoria"--- sites of being that justify, in the educational context, a range of punishments from name-calling, to physical violence, to referral to a gender identity disorder clinic, of which there are many housed in respectable hospitals across North America, and indeed globally (Sedgwick, 1993).
We think it well worth noticing, in addition, that the emergence of scholarly papers concerning gender identity disorders dovetails the removal of the category of "homosexuality" from DSM IV, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Clearly, there is a relation to be seen here between the imperatives of gender constancy, and the widespread moral panic over children's possible "conversion" to homosexuality (Patton, 1991/1993; Watney, 1991), and it is likely this which drives the antagonism with which gender equity initiatives are most typically met.
Contemporary educational accounts of "women's ways of knowing" (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986) and related models of sex-differentiated pedagogy serve as a far more readily acceptable basis for creating computer-mediated environments for girls than do either critical or postmodern conceptions of gender. Both of these models, the critical and the postmodern, have the same negative value across classroom and marketplace, being as they are both destabilizing and challenging to the normative gender order. Constructivist models of gender-"Vive la Differance!"-have, however, neatly closed the gap between educational prescriptions and market-driven imperatives, cementing the traditional gender-order firmly to the heteronormative investments of an increasingly corporatized public school. Constructivist accounts of girls and tools, providing as they do a "qualitative leveling" model (e.g., Turkle & Papert , 1990) of the two genders-different but equal-offer non-threatening and pleasingly optimistic and relatively conflict-free strategies for equalizing access to and usage of computer-based technologies. The problem of gender equity is then construed as a simple problem of a lack of fit between a masculinized "computer culture" and the epistemologically-different culture of girls and women. Girls and women are, after all, social and verbal and favor altruism and collaboration over competition and the thrill of the kill.
Accordingly, the predominant strategy for creating girl games, both in education and in industry, is to capitalize on girls' purported inclinations for caring and connectedness as a means of making computer games attractive, replacing the apparently ideological prescriptivism of educators with the apparent naturalism of real-world market research findings. But there's a Dark Side to this girlish utopia... Consider, for example, a game specifically created in just this manner, whose explicit motive is to increase girls' participation in math and technology by creating computer games which appeal to girls. "Phoenix Quest" is created by the E-GEMS research group, directed by Dr. Maria Klawe at the University of British Columbia. The development process for this game (see directory of research articles at E-Gems www site) began with a lengthy research initiative aimed at discerning critical differences in the play patterns and preferences of girls and boys. In Phoenix Quest, the player interacts with a fourteen-year old character called Julie through a process of postcard correspondence, the goal of which is to help Julie escape from a deserted island. The lure for girls of corresponding with Julie is that she seems, well, almost real, a lot like them- almost a friend. By drawing on a sophisticated semantic net, Julie appears to be both capable of, and interested in communicating with the player. The AI work involved in the construction of Julie was, in fact, submitted as a strong contender for the 1997 Loebner Prize for the "most human computer"- Julie might be Turing's wonderfully perverse answer to the "is she a real girl" conundrum8. And if you are familiar with the apocryphal story of Turing's own aberrant gender identity, that is no simple question at all!9
You might want a sense of what communicating with Julie looks and feels like, so here are some sample dialogues:
Dear Mary:
Help! I'm trapped in a maze of twisty passages. Please, if there's someone out there reading this, write back and tell me if you will help! The swallow will carry the message.
Yours in desperation,
Julie
Dear Julie:
How can I be sure that you really are a girl?
Mary
Dear Mary:
I didn't understand your last message entirely... I'll just tell you what I've been daydreaming about. I was imagining myself lying on my bed in my room. Sigh. What a comfortable thought. But there's no point in dreaming now, I've got a quest to finish.
See ya around, Julie
Dear Julie:
What is it that you don't understand about my last message?
Mary
Bonjour Mary!:
Oops, I guess that I misunderstood what you said in your last postcard. That happens sometimes. I think that the swallow drools on them and blurs the ink or something like that, because the postcards are frequently hard to read.
Bye for now!
Julie
Julie:
I'll try again to explain my concern: I can't tell if you really ARE a girl. How could you prove to me that you are a girl? And what do swallows have to do with all this? Swallows don't drool.
Mary
Hi Mary:
I'm totally glad that the swallow is here. I'd have real problems without it. I'd be all alone, in the middle of nowhere, with no communication with anyone. At least I can talk to you, Darien, Saffron, and the Keeper. How do you think the swallow is able to carry postcards between the archipelago and the real world?
Take care,
J
Hey Julie,
It's hard to make sense of your answers? Are you trying to find Darien or are you interested in getting to know me?
M
Hi Mary:
I really enjoy hiking. I like being able to explore the wilderness. How often do you go hiking? And where do you usually go? I play tennis and bike quite a bit with my friends during the summer. In the winter, I read quite a bit, and play a lot of chess. Those are my main pastimes. Do you know how to play chess very well?
At least Darien has a sense of humor. That would be the worst, being stuck in this strange world with someone who doesn't have a sense of humor. Darien told me a couple corny jokes. So he seems OK. What do you think it would be like meeting Darien?
Bye for now!
J
Dear Julie:
Are you a girl who likes girls better than boys?
Mary
Hello Mary:
I think that I will get married eventually. But I haven't found anyone who would be an appropriate husband. My friend Nick is cute, but I never know what he thinks.
J
Julie:
What do you think about racism? Are you a woman of colour?
Bonjour Mary:
I've been wondering if there's any point in finishing this stupid quest. I mean, even if I find the feather and save this world from eternal darkness, it doesn't do me any good. I'm still trapped here. Oh! Something just came up, got to go!
See ya around,
Julie
Julie:
How can I help you?
Mary
Hi Mary:
Well, you have to look for power words in the Journal, and click on them. You can tell if a word is a power word because the mouse pointer turns into a feather. Clicking on power words will reveal more of the journal, or maybe puzzles on the map. If you play puzzles multiple times, you might get more pieces of the journal, too!
Talk to you later,
J
A study reporting results from a classroom-based assessment of Phoenix Quest(Klawe, Westrom, Davidson, & Super, 1996) indicates that although most girls and boys love playing Phoenix Quest, female students spend a significant proportion of their time corresponding with Julie and working hard to get her to safety. The authors report that:
There were three choices that girls voted for almost 60% of the time: they said it was fun to help Julie, fun doing the puzzles, and important to help Julie. The males had only one choice selected more than 50% of the time: they voted for "Doing the puzzles" as FUN. It is clear that the boys played many more of the games than the girls ... because the girls did not play as many of the games, they are under-represented in the game achievement data.
Boys, the field-test results showed, play more of the competitive math games- "puzzles" where points are made and lost, and the real-read educational-purpose of the game. So while the girls are captivated by their "caring and sharing" activities writing notes back and forth to Julie, the boys are scooping up the educational goods---no surprises here. This is exactly what has happened to virtually every "gender equity" initiative which has tried to be sensitive to traditional gender norms.
According to the EGEMs research team, only five percent of Julie's personality deals with the game- the remainder deals with "real-life topics important to teenage girls". However once you get started playing with Julie, you soon discover that she is really not all that interested in you, caring and sharing notwithstanding. What Julie wants-and her basic discursive strategy-is to evade intimacy and get on with the game. Sound familiar? Intimacy is a pretext and a means to an end, both the teachers' and Julie's, of getting girls to engage with math problems in a computer-mediated environment. Seduced into imagining that what Julie wants is a good girlish chat, the user has to resort to figuring out how to get Julie to respond to topics and questions in which Julie's semantic net has no real "interest"-so this proves to be no easy task. In exploring Phoenix Quest, we began to wonder "who were we really talking to" And who, then, were girl Phoenix Quest players being persuaded into trying to help? What was the emotional "reward" for girls playing this game?
It was no surprise to discover then, that in actuality, Julie is not a girl at all- the programmer who created Julie is computer scientist Richard Gibbons. His response to our questions 10 about the possible conflicts with respect to Julie's gender was as follows:
"It is true that I don't have the experiences of a female, and at best can hope to identify with a female. It is most obvious when you talk to her about "female" topics such as makeup and clothes. In creating a personality, just getting it to respond sensibly much of the time is incredibly difficult. Next to this issue, the problem of Julie's femininity is minor. It's like worrying about how your hair looks when you're in the middle of a tornado."11
Julie's cross-dressing identity dilemma has an important historical antecedent in a story undoubtedly familiar to many 12. In 1982, New York psychiatrist Sanford Lewin opened an account with CompuServe under the name Julie Graham. Lewin's stated goal in creating the Julie character was, ostensibly, to help women on-line by gaining their trust --- woman to woman. And Lewin added an additional feature in making Julie a sympathetic character. Julie was both mute and paraplegic as a result of an accident in which she had also lost her boyfriend. Hundreds of women corresponded frequently with Julie, and invested their on-line relationship with depth and candor, letting their guard down and telling all. But this story doesn't have a happy ending. When finally it became obvious that Julie was not a woman, after all, her correspondents reported feelings of betrayal, undermining and violation.
Our own research strategy has been to abandon any pretense of gender-appropriateness (which as we have seen, is in any case just as likely to be won at the cost of sex-based deceptions), and opt for the explicitly gender-dysphoric---a project we fondly refer to as the creation of a "queer pedagogy" (see Bryson & de Castell, 1994).
Helpful to our thinking has been another educational text, this time a rather more contemporary one, entitled The Ignorant Schoolmaster. It is written by Jacques Ranciere(1991), and its central proposition is that a person can teach what they themselves do not in fact know, and Ranciere offers a kind of method for doing this. We regard this as a key text for our current research on gender and technology for two reasons: First, because in setting out a method for teaching what we do not know ourselves, it offers some grounds for optimism in relation to gender equity work---because this, too, is something we do not know ourselves and indeed as a society it is something we have never known, and yet it is what we in our current research hope, by some miracle, to be able to teach. So we draw both reassurance and hope from Ranciere's text with its ambitious claims to what may become possible. The second reason we take this as a central text for our work is that it offers a radical treatise on democratic education: Here is what Ranciere proposes: "Let us imagine", he writes, "that everyone is of equal intelligence".... And we, following Ranciere's astonishing proposition, say this: "Let us imagine...that all students have an equal ability, capacity, interest and disposition for successful work in 'gender-dysphoric' domains like mathematics, science and technology... Our job is not to prove that this is true, but to seek out what would be involved in educating students as if it were, because this is something we have never before tried to do".
What might happen, were Sophie to meet the Ignorant Schoolmaster-not the ignorant schoolmaster she actually has, but the master who truly knows his own ignorance about "what a woman wants", and manages to educate in the face of it, in the full knowledge of it? With such a schoolmaster, what then might Sophie accomplish?
Concluding Thoughts
Maintaining the existing gender order seems to be a central task, and perhaps the primary work of the present public school. For female students to pursue competence at all, but most especially competence in relation to high-status technologies, is to risk violating the unwritten Law of Gender, a "school rule" which has really nothing to do with ones sex, and everything to do with the heteronormative sexual economy (Rubin, 1984) which forms the foundation upon which compulsory public education has been erected, and from which it continues up to the present day to accomplish its work: the systematic authorization, cultivation and legitimation of inequality.
In a recent article in ELECTROSPHERE on Girl Games(Beato, 1997), pioneer designer Brenda Laurel is reported to have confessed that: "I agreed that whatever solution the research suggested, I'd go along with it. Even if it meant shipping products in pink boxes." Would you agree? Should you?
We ought not to be surprised that it is in pink boxes that girls have learned in our culture to package their desire. But such desires surely have far more to do with the gender-identity development of adult males than with that of children themselves, since it is masculinity which has ever been the real respondent to the question of what both girls and women want.13 Here it is instructive to know that "Barbie", the paradigmatic "girl-toy" was modeled on a German sex-toy for men, "Lilli", for which Mattel bought the patent in the late 50's , launching "Barbie" in 1959. (in Rand, 1995) Accordingly we suggest that girls' desires have far less to do with what girls want than with what kind of girl adults, whether in education or in the marketplace, want to produce, as in a surely horrific recapitulation of the ancient Greek myth, they eagerly create and then consume their own children as commodities, hungrily introjecting adult fears and desires for their children, in the name of satisfying children's own.
Dystopia...
So our argument is for disenchantment, and for the abandonment of a utopian landscape of desire which has never been anything but entrapment. And the question we urge is simply this: Whose interests will be served in making use of these purportedly "essential" differences as a basis for creating "girl-friendly" computer-mediated environments? Most importantly, are we producing tools for girls, or are we producing girls themselves by, as Althusser (1984) would put it, "interpellating"desire to become the girl by playing with girlish toys, learning thereby to become the kind of women she was always-already destined to become?
Fig. 8 "Baby Think It Over? infant simulators are so realistic they are often mistaken for real babies. Shown l-r are: Hispanic, African-American, Caucasian and Asian." (Carol Lambert, Advertising Coordinator, Baby Think it Over, Inc.)
And our question to educational researchers who, like the developers of Purple Moon, or Phoenix Quest, operate from a constructivist conception of gender is simply this: what is the difference between market-driven research into what girls want and no research at all? Exactly as predicted by Lyotard (1984) in his infamous treatise on "The Postmodern Condition", education today is abandoning its traditional concern with the formation of character in favor of satisfying desires created by and for the market, a marketplace controlled and regulated by patriarchal capitalism, in which technology IS "the name of the Father"-and for his benefit.
If educational research into gender and technology simply mimics the kinds of market research conducted by and for industry, then education has no role to play in the development of technological resources for girls. But if it does have a role to play, it must relinquish its grip on outmoded, essentializing and fundamentally undermining conceptions of gender, conceptions tied so tightly to heteronormativity that girls are literally terrified to step out of its very straight lines. These are postmodern times and its time for a postmodern understanding of gender, an understanding that allows girls to develop that vast range of skills and interests and abilities of which they have always been capable but which have been hitherto denied to them .
Practical strategies for effecting "gender equity" have typically involved adjustments directed at a re-genderment of the relation of female students and technology : whether that be a resocialization of girls and women (the positivist view) in terms of their attitudes towards that technology, a pluralist reorganization of pedagogy and curriculum for girls and women in accordance with "women's ways" (the constructivist paradigm), or repudiation of that technology as pre-gendered (and raced and classed) and therefore inherently undermining goals of women's empowerment (the critical account). Each of these approaches to technology and gender leaves the traditional gendering of technology intact, and operates in different ways on the regenderment of women.
Postmodern theorizing brings about a significantly different set of possibilities, for on this account, "gender" is de-gendered altogether, as dichotomies are exploded, practices are disrupted, roles and rules reversed, positions and directions inverted, and accordingly, technologies assume novel forms and functions with/in reconfigured sets of social relations and practices. In place of a fixed "gender identity" there is a fluid and changing set of "gender effects" (see Butler, 1990) based upon a politics of location; a politics which, moreover, refuses to ignore the always intersecting differences of ethnicity, class, and material conditions, in its acknowledgement of the realities of gendered positionalities. Postmodernism offers, too, a correspondingly novel blueprint for change: construing the skills hitherto the usual preserve of males as themselves only apparently gendered, but in fact merely contingent effects of the privileged positionality of males in institutionally produced relations to technology. Postmodern pedagogies, then, would recognize the tactical insufficiencies of contending approaches to intervention, based as they are on preservationist strategies equating technology with masculinity. A pedagogy of salvage and recycling might accordingly appropriate traditional skills, simultaneously abandoning traditional (gendered) meanings, functions and uses of those skills in a species of mimicry of (thus far usually masculine) competences which, because of its self-conscious playing with positions, thence its parodying of the fixity of position, is at last capable of truly disrupting hegemonic relations between learners and technology. The "inner truth" of gender is by this means enacted as the outward manifestation of position, as the product of particular relations socially constructed between power and knowledge (Foucault, 1980).
Parents and teachers need to understand that gender is as gender does, that it can do a lot more than we as a culture have allowed it to do, and that the necessary relation we have all been taught to see between "gender dysphoria" and "homosexuality" is forged by adult fears and desires, projected onto female children for whom few options exist should they struggle with or resist the straightjacket of gender normativity.
Difference/s...
We argue, then, for a conscientious re-tooling of the games we would create for children, not to consolidate gender, which of course means far more and Other than "sex", but to fracture and fragment and disperse difference/s14, because playing15 today turns out, after all, to be deadly serious business.
Figure 9
Draw-A-Computer-Whizn't Response: Secondary student in GenTech project
References
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EndNotes
1 See, for example: http://cgibinl.erols.com/browndk/art2.htm
2 SZ
3 A considerable number of web pages (e.g., http://www.detritus.net/projects/barbie/ and http://ziris.syr.edu/path/public.html/barbie/main.html) and books (e.g., Erica Rand's (1995) Barbie's Queer Accessories) have been published recently which are dedicated to an exposition of Barbie as a site of intervention in popular culture with the goal of rewriting traditional gender narratives. Representations of differently-gendered Barbie have been extensively and nervously monitored by Mattel Inc., and most are removed from their servers within the first few weeks of a public existence. The plethora of lawsuits between Mattel Inc. and Barbie revisionist auteurs has been chronicled by a group called Pink Anger, see http://members.aol.com/pinkanger/.
4 See, for example: www.aboutme.com (Simon & Schuster Interactive); www.purple-moon.com/ (Interval Research- Purple Moon); or www.mattelmedia.com/barbie/fashiondesigner/index.html (Barbie Fashion Designer)
5 Chart and discussion here draw on a fuller account of gender/technology relations in Bryson & de Castell, 1995, p. 24. Bearing in mind that all such devices as this chart inevitably skew and misrepresent what they are attempting --but of course far too telegraphically--to clarify, what we try to draw attention to by this means is the variety of conceptualizations that lurk beneath references to "gender". And we seek to make evident the incommensurability between and among them, and the fact that they may well work at odds with and in opposition to one another. This makes "gender equity" a very complicated matter in/deed!
The point to be made here is that "gender" can assume at least four main forms, which we can (briefly) characterize thus:
(1) Positivistic accounts of gender are really accounts of "sex". Biological sex, that is to say, is taken as equivalent to gender. (2) Constructivist accounts paint "the two genders" as "different, but equal"--and vive la differance! Biological sex is not seen as determining gender; rather, gender is posited as socially constructed and historically contingent. In relation to technology, the problem, from a constructivist standpoint, is construed as women's lack of access to a computer culture that could accommodate a diversity of "styles" (Turkle & Papert, 1990) or "women's ways of knowing" (Belenky et al., 1984). It is both interesting and troubling how the constructivist strategy of demarcating and reifying "ways" or "styles" peculiar to "women" seeks to promote equity or empowerment by re-entrenching precisely the kinds of essentialist accounts of perceived differences traditionally deployed to justify gender-discrimination. (3) Critical accounts of gender as ideologically and materially produced and sustained sets of differences call for "gender" to be analyzed dynamically in relation to other key sites of inequality such as race and class. Critical discourses concerned with gender and technology focus on technology as material commodity developed, controlled and directed by a "patriarchal" capitalism, and as unequally distributed and hence only differentially accessible. This perspective makes evident how technologies are deployed, invariably, in ways which further disadvantage women. (4) In postmodernist accounts, "being any gender is a drag" and carnival and a dis/continuous shifting amongst and between identities is the order of the day. As Donna Haraway put it, "It's about being in the belly of the monster and looking for another story to tell" (p. 9).
Postmodernist discourses (Barthes, 1977; Baudrillard, 1983; Bordo, 1990; Derrida, 1978) displace the fixed subjects of both modernist and critical theorizing; there is a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fixed slots in binary categorization schemes that refer to "natural kind" distinctions, such as: "male and female", "teacher and student", "the natural and the artificial", or "person and machine. Accordingly, in "true" postmodern style, Donna Haraway (1990), in A Manifesto for Cyborgs suggests that: "...the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" (p. 191): We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
6 The website for the GenTech project is at www.educ.sfu.ca/gentech, where a more complete description of the research can be found.
7 The Oxford English Dictionary documents two main senses of "queer": (1) "strange, odd, eccentric...;homosexual"; (2) "spoil, put out of order". These two senses combine to offer us a meaning of "queer" in its adverbial form, "queering" as "putting out of gender order", which is precisely what actively improving girls' access to and competence with "new technologies" threatens to bring into being. We discuss the pedagogical significance of "queer" in Bryson and de Castell, 1993.
8 How Julie fared in the 1997 Loebner competition is instructive in this regard: one of the judges expressed in communication with "Julie" his own response to her artificially intelligent "personality", "You've got a bit of a Daddy fixation, dear." (Judge 03 [11:25:34]) Julie tied for third place out of five entries. We are indebted to GenTech researcher Jennifer Jenson for drawing our attention to the transcripts of discourse between "Julie" and the 1997 Loebner Competition judges.
9 Remarkably enough, the "Turing Test", a test of "artificial intelligence" named for its inventor, gay mathematician Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954), makes successful identification of gender identity a condition for the ascription of "intelligence" to machines. Although a brilliantly successful cryptographer and the co-parent, with John Von Neumann, of the first electronic binary computer, Turing's sexual orientation resulted in his being publicly disgraced, losing his position with the British Government's Cryptanalysis Office, being brought to trial and convicted, and being forced to take injections of female hormones (estrogen) to control his "perversion". Turing was found dead of cyanide poisoning at 43. By his bedside was an apple from which a few bites had been taken-- Apple Computers' logo, a rainbow-colored apple proudly displaying its missing "byte", is today familiar to Mac users worldwide, few of whom have any idea of its significance in associating the gay father of computing with the thorny questions of gender central to Turing's "imitation game". The game, as Turing describes it, "is played with three people, a man (a), a woman (b), and an interrogator (c), who may be of either sex. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which the woman." (Turing, 1950). Next, a computer stands in for one of the two and the interrogator must correctly identify which is the computer. The "intelligence" of the computer, then, is a function of its ability to persuasively "perform" gender identities of either kind. What is most remarkable is the virtual eradication of both the centrality of gender identification to the "imitation game", and the devastating consequences on his life and work of Turing's own "gender dysphoria", from every official version of the Turing test. A brilliant account of Turing's life and work is Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (1983/1992).
10 We are indebted to GenTech research assistant, Diane Hodges, a Doctoral student at the Center for Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, for sharing with us her communications with Richard Gibbons, as indeed we are indebted to Richard Gibbons for his willingness to respond to our questions.
11 E-mail communication between Diane Hodges and Richard Gibbons (April, 1997).
12 Described in a number of books and articles, one of which is Alluquere Roseanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1996) MIT Press.
13 Here it is instructive to know that "Barbie", the paradigmatic "girl-toy" was modeled on "Lilli", originally a cartoon-character which was subsequently developed into a German sex toy designed not for children but for adult men. Mattel bought the patent to Lilli in the late 50's, and launched "Barbie" in 1959 (in Rand, 1995).
14 See also de Castell and Bryson, 1997.
15 Surfing the WWW for sites concerned with "playing with dolls" reveals (12/97) that about 50% of the hits are pages recounting pornographic narratives in which women and girls are the objects of misogynistic fantasy, including a significant number of snuff stories. The "Baby Think It Over" page (http://btio.com/), by contrast, features life-like dolls described as "infant simulators"- which, in the words of the manufacturors (personal communication), "teach teens about the personal responsibilities of parenting. Students are assigned to care for Baby Think It Over for several days. The infant simulator replicates the crying of a real baby at random intervals, requires simulated care by the teenager, and records and reports neglect and abuse." Learning to be "her own doll", to harken back to Rousseau's plan for Sophie, is precisely the normalized trajectory for girls' development gender equity projects like GenTech seek to disrupt. For a more eloquent delineation of a radical agenda for feminist social change, see Valerie Salonas (played by Lili Taytols) reading from the Scum Manifesto: http://filmzone.com/warhol/movs/createamagic.mov