MAPPING TECHNOLOGY ON THE BODY, AGAIN: TOYS R US, CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, AND THE NEW ESSENTIALISM Nancy Steffen-Fluhr1 Abstract--The mapping of technological agency onto allows one of them to pretend-drive his sports car. The first masculinity requires ongoing cultural work. This paper five gifts listed inside the catalog are: a digital tape measure, examines several sites where that cultural work is being a cordless air pump, a professional leather tool carrier, a done most vigorously, including a Red Envelope mail-order Swiss army auto tool, and a star navigator. In direct contrast, catalog, a TV ad from Capital One, the Amazon.com/Toys R the Red Envelope Mother’s Day catalog had featured such Us Website, a news story on astronaut Laurel Clark, the gifts as a lavender heart wreath, a tranquility fountain, a Harry Potter book/film series, and the essentialist polemics heart toggle bracelet, and a pair of fuzzy pink slippers. of Christina Hoff Sommers. It demonstrates how marketers The story that the objects and images in the Red sell products (and ideologues sell ideas) by selling gender Envelope Father’s Day catalogue tell is quite clear: Male “normality,” exploiting the fear that any gain in identity is inseparable from technological agency—the technological agency by women will be accompanied by a ability to use tools to make things happen. So, too, is male commensurate loss in identity-as-agency by men. happiness. The cover photo acts out in miniature sociologist Judy Wajcman’s assertion that, historically, men have Index Terms—Technology, Gender, Children’s toys and tended to bond with each other around machines in ways books, Christina Hoff Sommers that exclude women [2]. Although there are many pictures throughout the catalog of Dad interacting with his Sons, For most people in the United States, the fact that women there are no images at all of Dad and his Daughters. are 51% of the population but less than 10% of the nation’s The Red Envelope Father’s Day and Mother’s Day engineers has an obvious explanation: the Geek Gene is on catalogs illustrate the paradoxical durability of pink/blue the Y chromosome. Although gender styles and gender stereotyping. US women today probably spend as technological styles have changed significantly in the last much time partitioning their hard drives as they do thirty years, the belief that technology is inherently a “guy crocheting tea cozies. Yet we continue to employ the thing” has remained remarkably intact. This persistence is “snakes n snails/sugar n spice” dichotomy as an everyday not merely residual. The mapping of technological agency organizing principal despite the fact it is recognizably false onto masculinity requires ongoing cultural work. to our lived experience. This is largely because binary This paper examines several sites where this cultural thinking is so convenient, both existentially and work is being done most vigorously, starting with the commercially. An undifferentiated yellow world, in which aggressively pink and blue marketing strategies that US human traits could float free, would be more interesting than mega-corporations still employ and concluding with the the Ken and Barbie world we choose to live in; but it would essentialist polemics of Christina Hoff Sommers, author of also entail more anxiety. A binary gender scheme promises the recent book The War Against Boys (2000). predictability, a state that many of us confuse with “security.” Predictability also significantly reduces risks and SELLING PINK AND BLUE costs for retail marketers who consequently encourage us to think pink and blue as much as possible. Thus, despite an Gender is to people as water is to fish, sociologist Judith increase in the number of unisex bathrooms and other radical Lorber once observed [1]. The gendering of technology is social changes that have taken place in US culture over the similarly pervasive and invisible. The assumption that men last thirty years, on test after test, Americans continue to have the technological “right stuff’ (and that women do not) characterize men and women in the same starkly bi-polar is not simply a historical residue of the time when the only terms that their grandparents did: Men are dominant, US engineering school was the male-exclusive West Point aggressive, independent, objective, competitive; women are Academy. It is hardwired into the 21st century US cultural emotional, subjective, understanding, empathetic. infrastructure. For example, consider the Red Envelope In the early 1970’s, psychologist Sandra Bem developed Father’s Day catalog that I received last year. The cover the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) in order to test her pictures a European-American man and two young boys, theory that “psychological androgyny” was the healthiest presumably his sons. They are all laughing happily as he human state. The consensus at the time was that healthy 1 Dr. Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, Murray Center for Women in Technology, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102. [email protected]. WEPAN 2003 Conference June 8 - 11, 2003 Chicago, Illinois 1 psychological functioning required congruence between homophobia is inseparable from gynophobia. The feedback one’s self-definitions and the prevailing cultural norms for loop between the two continually reinforces the binary one’s sex. (Girls were expected to be “feminine”; boys, system that produced it. “masculine.”) Gender aschematic individuals were typed as In such a system, masculinity and femininity are deviant. Before the BSRI, instruments treated masculinity constructed as interdependent terms. They only have and femininity as opposite poles of the same scale, making it meaning in relationship to each other. That is, being a boy impossible even to measure androgyny. Bem’s innovation means not being a girl…just as being “white” means not was to employ two separate scales. Using a group of being “black”. The problem, of course, is that it is northern California college students as a cultural test-bed, impossible to prove a negative. In this sense, both she culled out a set of 20 adjectives that were strongly “masculinity” and the equation of masculinity and marked as stereotypical masculine traits and 20 adjectives technology are fragile concepts that require constant that were strongly marked as feminine. She added a third set propping up. If a woman could be instrumental, and thus of 20 words that were not strongly associated with either technological, and still be womanly, then traditional gender gender. On the BSRI, subjects use a seven point scale to rate categories themselves would become unstable. Men would how well each of these 60 adjectives describes them [3]. be in danger of having no separate ground to stand on in a For the last 25 years, I have administered the BSRI to zero sum game in which separation is the sine qua non of my students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Over identity survival. That is why the separation of femininity that time, there have been significant changes in response. and technological competence is such a persistent feature of For example, unlike Bem’s northern California students of US popular culture. the 1970’s, most of my students today do not regard the word athletic as strongly marked for gender. Women FEMALE GAIN IS MALE LOSS students in particular bristle at the adjectives gullible and childlike. However, both male and female students continue Contemporary mass media is permeated by the fear that to validate the underlying binary construct. They still tend to any gain in agency by women will be accompanied by a define men as instrumental and women as affective—and to commensurate loss in identity-as-agency by men. Today, as define instrumentality and affect as opposites. Since in the decades ago, stories about instrumental/technological contemporary world, instrumentality is canalized through women tend to foreground everything about them that is a- technological objects (the car, the computer), the attribution technological—i.e., nurturing. For example, in 1984, Good of greater affective competence to women inherently marks Housekeeping magazine ran a photo spread on two female them as technologically incompetent. In the zero-sum game astronauts, Dr. Rhea Seddon and Dr. Anna Fisher, both of gender stereotyping, a technologically adept woman is the highly-trained flight surgeons. The layout was entitled “First exception that proves the rule. Mothers to Fly in Space” [4]. (By the same token, astronaut Given the prevalence of female kick-boxers and leather Alan Shepard was “the first US father to fly in space,” but he girls in the current mass media (e.g. Shania Twain in her was never billed that way.) La plus ca change, la plus c’est “I’m Going to Get you Good” video), one might expect la meme chose. Nineteen years later, the MSNBC increased reporting of androgyny on the BSRI. And, indeed, anchorman ticked off the credentials of the seven astronauts my students are much more tolerant of gender aschemia than who had just died in the crash of the space shuttle Columbia: they were 25 years ago…but only for women. Androgyny is An Air Force pilot/mechanical engineer; a doctor/gymnast; a a trend that flows one way, from fem to butch, never the Navy aviator/track team star; an Air Force colonel with other way around. Both males and females in my classes advanced degrees in physics and chemistry. “There was even tend to support females in their desire to claim such traits as a mom onboard,” he added. The “mom” in question was self-reliance, independence, assertiveness, etc; but those Commander Laurel Salton Clark, a naval flight surgeon characteristics remain defined as inherently masculine even specializing in problems affecting crews of nuclear when women are said to possess them.