“The Internet is a feminine space”

Douglas Rushkoff:

Archetypally speaking, the Internet is a feminine space. The Internet is something you enter into, that you’re enveloped by. The Internet goes hand in hand with the real feminism movement, in that for the last 2,000 years we’ve had stories and media about male tragic heroes that climb up an incline plane of tension, have a climax of some kind, and then get to rest, die, or sleep. You know, crisis, climax, sleep. Male-orgasm curve. That’s the way TV works and radio works and theater worked and novels work.

Now we’re on the Internet. The Internet works through a series of connections. There is no ending. There is no finale. There is no climax and sleep, there’s just another connection, another connection, another connection. And the more and more you connect, the more potentially euphoric it becomes, the more empathic it becomes, the more connected we all are, the more intimate it all is. That’s archetypally female.

What gamers are ultimately dealing with is that this medium that they believed was going to be dry and boylike and help them experience difference and antagonism is having the reverse effect. It’s acting like water. It’s connecting them to everyone and everything, and all of a sudden this tool that they thought could prevent intimacy while still giving them orgasms and death thrills is now promoting intimacy on a level that human beings couldn’t even imagine was possible 20 years ago, much less that we’re experiencing today.

And that’s the problem. That’s really what the backlash is against. But that might be too heady a concept.