mazur@inmet.UUCP (08/29/85)
[Oh, I'm in the mood for adding to the heat and shedding no light...] >... When there is a net.men, and a net.men.only, >then it will be equality. Until then --- watch your contradictions. And I suppose we should have net.heterosexual, net.marrieds, and net.rec.clothes. >The reason that net.women.only didn't work (in my opinion) was >that it was a public admission of women seeking special privs. >So it wasn't posted to very frequently. So the mailing list was >built. Actually, the women of the network made a tactical error in their request for net.women.only (many moons ago). They assumed that the majority of women would want to have this type of discussion in a public forum. But it turned out that most of the women on the net were not comfortable writing about their own private experiences for all the world to see. So the expected large traffic (which is what generally is required to create a separate group) never materialized. That is why the mailing list was created, and why it has flourished, with both female and male participants. Besides that, net.women.only was sexist. But it was sexist in primarily the same sense that women's bathrooms and women's deodorant are sexist. I can see Ross on TV with his SO - "but honey, if it's so strong, why can't I use it?". "Because, silly, Secret was made for women." "Well, that's sexist - even if I can buy it and use it, they should stop making it." And don't jump to the reply saying "but I couldn't post to net.women.only". Yes, you could. We were asking (perhaps not always nicely) you not to post, but you could post. This was tactical mistake number 2, that the proponents of net.women.only assumed that the male Usenet audience wouldn't get paranoid or indignant or up-on-a-soapbox about it. But it's so nice to see that the discussion lives on, long after the newsgroup itself has ceased to exist. And don't kid anyone about why there isn't a net.men.anything. Hardly because it is a request for "special privileges". More likely because the content would be primarily about women (like why they are attracted to "assholes" instead of guys who spend 100 hours a week with a computer) - and there's enough about that in net.women and net.singles. Beth Mazur {ihnp4,ima,harpo}!inmet!mazur