chabot@amber.DEC (L S Chabot) (11/12/84)
In net.flame I posted an article to the discussion about computers removing our need to think--well, that's how it started out, but it has since moved on to things like calculators causing a deterioration in arithmetic skills. Ken Lee posted a good article about skilled postions being replaced by semi-skilled or unskilled jobs, and my article was inspired by his. I got wildly off-track as is my habit; I've posted here the conclusion of the article, which discusses women and arithmetic. Warning: this is a joke, and only a joke. If this had been real seriousness, you wouldn't have been warned. + + + The problem is that nobody wants to do those jobs anyway. They're boring, and you have to climb a long, slow, boring ladder in order to make enough money to own your own refrigerator. These are the kind of jobs still depicted in comics in, say, Parade magazine--the ones where the tired, balding, newspaper-reading father is trying to argue with his long-haired son about the necessity of getting a job, and the son whines about "meaningful work" (which the father doesn't have).(It's never the long-haired (or short-haired) daughter who's in these vignettes, because in the stereotypical world she is supposed to want to get married and be kept and rear dolls. However, if she's totally unmarri- offable (i.e., ugly or independent), these now-computer-replaced jobs would be her only likely target.) The biggest problem about computers is that they are disrupting the American Way of Life As We Know It and want to keep it. By reducing the necessity for people to do mindless arithmetic calculations, they are reducing the supreme necessary difference between the boys and the girls--Math Anxiety! This is Terrible!! Girls are brought up emotionally slapped not to excel past the boys (or else no one Manly will want to marry you), so one of the things they drop first is often math. Well, now boys don't have to bother with arithmetic either. The personal computer marketeers are disrupting Our Way of Life--I mean, a four year old of any sex could interact meaningfully with a Mac, and most four year olds barely count. What's to prevent girls? Or women? Or your mother? I only see two solutions and both of them rely on making computers undesirable to females: either girls will have to learn not to count or press buttons, or crts will have to be widely known as causing sterility (this could either be manufactured into the hardware or manufactured in wordware). The former is to ensure that boys still excel at what little arithmetic anyone still does, and could possibly be engineered by creating a new fad in personal appearance so that makeup takes a lot longer to do or master (girls still have to excell in prettiness); the latter will make sure that any female who interacts with computers can be labelled as a radical feminist lesbian communist man-hating anti-family (< - since she won't have one) scumbucket (or at least to have something *wrong* with her -- won't get married like a decent person, or (eeewww yucko) past breeding age). Obviously defective :-), L S Chabot UUCP: ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot ARPA: ...chabot%amber.DEC@decwrl.ARPA USFail: DEC, MR03-1/K20, 2 Iron Way, Marlborough, MA 01752 shadow: [ISSN 0018-9162 v17 #10 p7, bottom vt100, col3, next to next to last]