More Coffee Please

by Dale Spender

I’m not going to link this one. I don’t actually like it. Amazon does carry it, though, if you feel inclined to pick it up.

Dale Spender’s words from this book have been quoted widely in the ten years since its release. It seems to be the go-to resource for anyone looking for a quick paragraph on women’s online experiences — it’s become inescapable. It’s good to be aware of the issues she raises in this book — the usual gender-and-power themes in education, libraries, and similar settings both online and offline — but I do wish people would challenge the content instead of simply echoing it.

The book does contain some useful stuff about online harassment. Overall, though, this book is a prime example of victim feminism. To paraphrase: “This is wrong, that is wrong, everything is bad and wrong, it’s all the fault of the Patriarchy, and someone other than me should fix it!”

Bleh. Come on, Ms. Spender. Quit whining, get out there and do something useful already. Cyberspace has room for everyone.

A much-superior book that covers similar content from a similar time period is Cherny & Werse, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace (1996). It’s thoughtfully edited, with an eye to the substantial ambiguities inherent in online interactions. (It’s also much less heterocentric.)

Another interesting take on the topic is Sadie Plant’s Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997):

Plant’s “cyberfeminist rant,” as William Gibson calls it, attempts to demonstrate that women have always used technology. You won’t find victims here, rather women who were empowered by the technological innovations in their lives. What emerges is a very nontraditional feminist picture, one in which women are neither bystanders nor victims but are in many ways the unsung heroes of technical innovation. The author also points to a future where, within zeros and ones of cyberspace many such dichotomies of life/machine, let alone male/female, may blur in unexpected ways.