skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (11/28/88)
From "Hard-core software: Game program rated X" in Sunday, November 27, 1988 Greensboro _News and Record_ reprinted fromm the L.A.Time-Washington Post News Service: At a Los Angeles bridal shower, it brought shudders of repugnance...In a meeting room at a Silicon Valley computer firm, it left a group of men "gigglind and hiding the computer" when a woman executive walked in unexpectedly... In MacPlaymat(e), the user summons an animated rendering of a woman, "Maxie," who flutters her Theda Bara eyelids, moves her mouth, breasts, legs and hands and entices the user into the program. A user can strip Maxie garment by garment, force her to engage in a variety of sex acts, some with another woman or which any of six devices from a "toy box." They can gag, handcuff, and shackler her at her spike heel-shod ankles... Many men who have seen it variously describe it as a "novelty and a curiosity...gimmicky...funny...a one-line joke...a general recreational piece of software."... Computer sexual images of women are not new. Pirated Playboy photos are sent through computer scanners onto "bulletin boards" often accessible to kids. Sex sells: Photos of women in see-through shirts are used to persuade perspective male buyers of the screen's qualities... For years, working women have battled office pinups and sexual harassment. The workplace, says Shana Weiss, one of Baird's co-workers [an ad executive] is "supposedly a neutral, gender- free environment," the one arena in which women can be judged on ability and character alone. "It frightens me" that the same people who enjoy MacPlaymate could be "the people you negotiate [business] with, and if you don't co-operate on some deal...this [program] is what they do to you figuratively," Weiss says. It is not more of the same old paper or video pornography, says Baird, but a program that turns the passive viewer into a participant. Would reaction be so cool, [Baird] says, "if this were MacLynching or MacConcentration Camp?"
slf@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Sharon Lynne Fisher) (11/28/88)
> Computer sexual images of women are not new. Pirated Playboy > photos are sent through computer scanners onto "bulletin > boards" often accessible to kids. Heck, MacPlaymate itself isn't new. It was at the West Coast Computer Faire at least two years ago. What's new is the media's discovery of it. I understand there's a woman in Marin working on a male version. And regarding the "pirated Playboy photos accessible to kids," I know a number of people who, as kids, read their parents' Playboys because they weren't put away or weren't inaccessible. In other words, the BBS doesn't make it particularly more accessible to the kid; s/he can probably find it at home or look at it in the drugstore or something.