Re: And why. . .? (long)

Julie wrote:

> mpresley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> 
>> 
>> Still, I suspect that most Wagner listeners are men--especially when it
>> comes to the Ring.
> 
> I've only attended one full cycle in 1999 but to my recollection the
> crowd was about 50/50.

I was thinking more of record buyers.  

>> Finally, Newsgroups are historically male propagated.  The technology
>> began as an offshoot of arpanet (the male dominated military) and was
>> built by
>> unix geeks for unix geeks--99.9% men.  It was only recently...umm...let's
>> see...probably the ubiquitous rise of MS Outlook Express with it's
>> dedicated newsreader that the masses were first able to easily navigate
>> Usenet.

> Now, are women part of the masses or not? For the purposes of your
> analysis, I mean.

Sure.  And I expect things to evolve as the technology becomes more
mainstream.  When I was in school very few women were geeks.  To our
consternation, the girls all had a life.  You didn't see them hanging
around a computer lab at 2am in order to grab some 'terminal time'.  But
things are different now.  Today, many of the community colleges offer a
lot of tech courses.  And I happen to know that close to half (in my area)
of the students taking the classes are women.  I'm talking the 'dirty
fingernail' stuff, like router topology networking and Unix-Windows server
management.  And to the kids growing up these days, it's all second nature.      

Besides (getting back to Wagner), his main theme was the role of love in our
lives.  It's kind of a shame for just men to be talking about this. 
Especially since so many of us need to be taught about the nature of love
by a woman.

michael-linux ru224791