In 1929, Virginia Woolf observed that the books men had written about women offered a strange idea of womanhood. Poets idolised them whereas historians ignored them, and what emerged was a "worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen, chopping suet". In these early years of digital culture, a new version of this old duality is becoming apparent, whereby women are simultaneously idolised and despised.
Online, the female body is both revered and desecrated. A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center about online harassment found that women aged between 18 and 24 are almost twice as likely as their male peers to be sexually harassed and four times as likely as the general internet population. They are also four times as likely to be stalked online as the average user.
Misogyny has migrated from the physical world to cyberspace. The writer Lindy West expresses a grim sense of resignation, saying, "Being insulted online is part of my job," while emphasising that the resulting pain feels "exactly like you would imagine it would feel to have someone call you a fat cunt every day of your life". The idiom of this online violence is fixated on the wounding of the female body. "I'm going to cut off your head and rape it" is one of the chronic threats that the classicist Mary Beard receives whenever she enters public debate.
Read more: Google's Digital Justice League: how its Jigsaw projects are hunting down online trolls
While the female body is verbally mutilated by so-called trolls, elsewhere it is regarded as a digital treasure trove. For the corporations that harvest our data, a pregnant woman is especially prized because online advertisers regard her as a bonanza of long-term-buying potential. As a result, in behind-the-scenes auctions, marketers compete intensely for her data.
Fiction writers have begun to respond to this digital objectification. In 2012, the novelist Jennifer Egan's short story Black Box was posted over ten nights as a series of tweets. This experiment in social-media narrative describes a young American woman, a "beauty", who is sent on a spy mission to gain intelligence about an unnamed man, her "Designated Mate". The woman must perform the role of idealised lover, both alluring and inconspicuous, all while kitted out with subcutaneous recording devices. She thus becomes, much like the pregnant online consumer, a cache of valuable data which, once retrieved, is more important than the body containing it. The promise of masculine intervention and manipulation is made clear to this spy-beauty. One tweet warns: "The quantity of information captured will require an enormous amount of manpower to tease apart."
Well-known speculative fictions about artificial intelligence, such as the film Ex Machina and Channel 4's Humans, entwine anxieties over sentient robots with male desire for the "mysteries" of the female body.
And yet this feminising of AI is not restricted to sci-fi fantasy. The tech company Protonet has recently crowdsourced a new smart home hub called Zoe, which allows our domestic electronics to be coordinated and programmed using a private cloud server. "Zoe doesn't share your most private information with the outside world," co-founder Ali Jelveh tells us in a promotional video.
Described more than once as "beautiful", Zoe "looks more like a design object than a tech device". The system's front plate can be customised; one of the examples shown is a picture of Marilyn Monroe. Zoe's mellifluous voice is reminiscent of the AI-operating system Samantha in Her.
As both pariah and fetish, digitised woman confronts new versions of an ancient prejudice. Online abusers seek to disintegrate her into a collection of body parts, unable to tolerate her unified, coherent participation in digital life. Meanwhile, in our cultural imaginations, as well as the cutting edge of robotics, she is being reassembled as the calm, obedient face of artificial intelligence. The classic stereotypes of femininity - Woolf's "spirit of life and beauty" - are inspiring the humanoid gloss given to our increasingly smart machines.
And so, if anyone were to write an account of this networked era's dominant notions of womanhood, they would encounter among them an unreal creature. To borrow from one of Mary Beard's online attackers, they might discover a "headless female pig", resplendently pregnant, and setting our kettles boiling with the utmost respect for our privacy.
Laurence Scott is author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (William Heinemann)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
