Recently in Technology Category

I'm not an online gamer but my male partner who reads up on all things electronic and gamey sent me two links to Gizmodo.com about incidents he thought described virtual street harassment.

Number five on Gizmodo.com’s “10 Things You Need to Know About PlayStation Home ” says “There are lots of dudes. Lots of them.” And it includes this screenshot of a male avatar saying “nice rack” to the only female avatar in the shot, who says, “thanks.”

Again, I'm not a gamer, but I think it's really odd that a random guy is going to comment on a random woman’s virtual breasts (that are not real - they are virtual!) and by doing so reduces even a female avatar to (fake) body parts.

Also on Gizmodo , I watched two youtube video clips filmed by males playing  the recently released Sony “Home.” The site says, “In it, we see two female avatars being surrounded by male avatars doing little dances. Apparently this is happening all over the service. A lot.”

And indeed, in the video clips there are two or three female avatars surrounded by about five to seven male avatars. Some of the time the women in the first clip (i’m only going to talk about the first one for brevity’s sake) are dancing too and I think they could leave if they were uncomfortable so I don’t want to say they are being victimized, but the whole situation is quite odd. And it’s all the more disturbing/odd if this is happening "a lot."

What I especially think is striking about the dancing is how it is groups of men versus one or two women. Just like a lot of real world street harassment, the online dancing seems to be a form of male bonding or a way to prove one’s masculinity to one’s male peers. In fact, in one of the videos showing the male avatars dancing around the women, the male who was videotaping the incident at first voiced reservations about what he was seeing and passed by, but then he said, “I’m not gay,” and went back and joined the other male avatars in dancing around the female avatars.

Thoughts on any of this? Would you consider these incidents to be virtual street harassment? Gamers, what are your experiences, especially if you present yourself as a female avatar? Also, while I've read plenty about the sexism apparent in blogs, comment sections, and discussion boards, I haven't come across any studies about sexism in the virtual game world - have you?

(Partially cross-posted )

I was just looking through Facebook and went to "thumbs-down" an ad (about a celebrity diet) and instead of it bringing up the menu where you get to chose why you didn't like the ad, it just took me back to my home page.

Is this just a glitch, or is Facebook trying to tell me it wishes I would just stop complaining about ads I find offensive and just let them drag down my body image already?

Oh, and I always, ALWAYS mark "offensive" for the weight loss ads that I see all over my male friends profiles.

I'm using this post to share my favorite search engine with all you Feministing folks. Goodsearch.com allows you to donate to a charity of your choice every time you type in a search. Each search donates a cent to your charity. It's pretty awesome, so I suggest you try it!

My roommate, who trolls tech blogs a probably unhealthy amount, sent me this creep-tastic story:

"Ultimate Perv Tech Creates Model of Your Naked Body Using Photo of You Fully Clothed"

Really, just why? Why does this have to exist? Of course the model is woman, clearly, because who is going to take pictures of men and strip them technologically. It's not a crisis-level crime on the feminist scale, but it's tasteless at least.

I'm pissed.

Earlier in the month, a pregnancy scare by a very good friend of mine had us looking up the closest Planned Parenthood sites to us. (It was only a scare, fortunately.) So of course, we turned to the ever resourceful Google to aid us.

Unfortunately, we had to sift through a ton of garbage to get to any helpful information.

Take teenbreaks.com, for instance, a disgustedly blatant example of conservative Christian propaganda. Complete with bloody pictures of baby gore and helpful "facts" about complications during abortion (did you know that abortion could deteriorate women's self-concept? I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, and I'm scared.), it is a prime copy of every other femaphobic site on the web.

So what's so scary about this one?

Well, there's the obvious. It's targeted towards teenagers, who may be hesitant to turn to adults for guidance, and so look to the internet to give them accurate abortion information. Photographs of "mini humans" covered in gore are more likely to dissuade younger minds, who are already uncertain about the moral and physical implications of abortion. And Teenbreaks knows this.

The site is funded by an aggressively pro-life foundation called the Rosetta Foundation. Rosetta Foundation President, Sandra Faucher states, "Science has now confirmed that pro-life and pro-abortion values, like other values are established between the ages of 10 and 20. As one researcher states, 'the brain you get as an adult is the brain you "wire" as a teen.' Since Generation Y is 60 million strong, compared to the 17 million in Generation X, reaching Generation Y is our best opportunity for changing the culture on the abortion issue."

Scary, huh? It gets worse:

"The Rosetta Foundation has been advertising a new Web site for teens, TeenBreaks.com, on Google through the keywords "abortion", "teen abortion" and "teen pregnancy." When a keyword search is done on abortion, bringing up over 10 million Web sites, TeenBreaks.com is outbidding the abortion clinics and pro-abortion groups for that all-important first place spot.

Each month, TeenBreaks.com has averaged over 3 million hits, over 50,000 visits, and over 1,000 cyber connections by pregnant girls on Optionline.org. With a budget of $15,000 per month, TeenBreaks.com remains in first place for these three keywords all day on weekends. However, on weekdays when teens are in school and have greater access to internet, this budget allows TeenBreaks.com to outbid the abortion clinics until about noontime. When the funds are gone, the abortion sites take over again. Plans are to raise additional funds to remain in place all day, every day."

So, the first website that pops up the majority of the time gives misleading information, biased facts, sexist and stereotypical attitudes towards girls, boys, and teenagers, AND knows it's doing it while trying to reach a larger base with its dangerous message.

I'm pissed. And very worried.

Ever since I was a young girl, I've loved those stereotypical "boy" things: technology, electronics, fixing things, video games, and a lot of boys' television programming (Ninja Turtles, anyone?).  You can ask my dad, who is an electrical engineer, about what sorts of things I have always liked to do, and he would probably tell you about the innumerable times I wanted to be videotaped dancing and subsequently hook up the videocamera to the monitor and watch myself on the tv; or those times when I asked him to teach me how to fix broken electronics; sometimes I wanted to create my own movies, and later I even wanted to learn to "build" computers (we were pretty poor for many years, and couldn't afford such things).

I fell in love with computers, DOS, computer games, and when I set my eyes on a Nintendo it was absolute love at first sight.  Duck Hunt &, Mario Bros, your bread and butter of the original NES, were making me want this toy sooo badly.  But again, we were poor and couldn't really afford these things.  I settled for Frogger on our Commodore 64.

As a professor, my father had internet access before most other people did.  We dialed up on a 14k modem and connected through the university at which he was employed.  Fun times, with the buggy original Netscape and slow-loading graphics from indexed image galleries. 

I think you get the point.  I loved this stuff.  And for the longest time, I had no idea that it was "boys'" stuff.  I never even thought about it.  Sure, I noticed that when I gleefully found my friends' brothers' SNESs and 64s, that they weren't nearly as happy as I was, but I didn't care.  This stuff was just fun for me.