Laura Miller (b. 1960) is a senior editor at the Internet magazine Salon. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Sight & Sound, Spin, Wired, and the San Francisco Examiner. Formerly she was the publicist for a feminist cooperative that runs a San Francisco sex toy store and mail order company. This essay originally appeared in Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights, 1995), a collection edited by Iain Boal and James Brooks that offers, as they write in the preface, a critical view of technology and its associated "values, in our view, too often detrimental to a more human life."
"Women and Children First" (Composing Cyberspace p. 99) is not available online.
1. What constitutes the "heavy load of baggage" (¶ 8) that Miller says accompanies the frontier metaphor? From your own exposure to the classic Western narrative in popular media, what might you add to or dispute about Miller's description of it?
2. Miller writes, "The idea that women merit special protections in an environment as incorporeal as the Net is intimately bound up with the idea that women's minds are weak, fragile, and unsuited to the rough and tumble of public discourse" (¶ 27). Do you agree? To what extent are you persuaded of the danger Miller asserts -- that women and children are being used to rationalize the control and "civilizing" of the Internet "frontier"?
3. What hope does Miller find in "the potential blurring" (¶ 24) of gender
roles on the Net? Do you agree that this kind of blurring is desirable? Why or why not?
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