Anonymity on the Internet Cuts Both Ways

Female MajorityI have been thinking a lot lately about how the author of anything on the internet is presumed to be male.  People have even referred to my articles here as having been written by a "he," even though they are on feminist issues, and my author's name is clearly female.  (In many languages, even!)This is annoying as hell, particularly when you start noticing it everywhere.  However, I do think that we ourselves are partly to blame for this. And for the larger perception that the internet is a boyzone, even though men are the minority of internet users.

I think this partly stems from the use of androgynous usernames online.  Which has two sources: women who want to be anonymous (i.e. not pestered or stalked), and women who are forced to choose crappy usernames, as often happens in large systems like AOL.  (Is "mo3481_9" a man or a woman?  Who knows!  And these crappy usernames tend to propagate across a user's online life.  If you are sending email as mo3481_9@yahoo.com you are inclined to sign up on a small forum as username "mo3481_9" even though there are plenty of usernames available there.)In the absence of gender identification, the societal default is to assume male.  If you run across a forum post by mo3481_9 most people will refer to that person as "he."  This is partly because we don't have a good pronoun for "gender neutral" or "gender unknown."  Although "s/he" comes close, because it at least looks like a regular word.  It's completely unpronounceable, but less clunky than "his/her" or the ungrammatical use of "them" and "their."This in turn creates a blind spot in everyone's vision.  If you assume that every gender neutral internet handle is male, then it's going to look like at least 80% of the internet is boys.  This problem is compounded by our tendency to seek out our own gender - men tend to read blogs by men, and women tend to read blogs by women.  I would be hard pressed to name ten male bloggers off the top of my head.  And I remember how startled I was when I heard of the existence of sports blogs.  (Blogs?  For sports?  Really?  But… why?)I can certainly understand why a woman would use a gender neutral username on the internet.  It can feel like a refuge, to be able to interact with people as a shadowy figure, to shed the assumptions and prejudices that can make life as a woman so difficult.  But the truth is that people aren't treating you as gender neutral when you do this.  They're treating you as a man.  Kind of a creepy feeling, right?  Totally understandable, but kind of creepy nevertheless.I switched to using clearly female usernames many years ago, and I would never go back.  For one thing, I found that the harassment I imagined was just not as prevalent as I thought it would be.  It also made me feel like I was stepping out of the shadows, and proudly representing my gender in public.  I think it's important that people see how many women are online, participating in forums, creating content, leaving comments, and making the internet tick.