THE WOMEN OF feMIniSTIGRIS. (Pictured: art that could only have come from women, as none of them include any washboard abs, stoic grimaces, or lit spliffs.)
Happy International Women’s Day! The underground computer artscene was not traditionally known as a great place for the ladies. I mean, you could ogle them by the yard as Gen13 supplanted Spawn as the most popular subject of ANSIfication, and Integrity (WHQ: “The Ho-Zone”) rose to success on an official internal policy of maintaining a strict minimum quota of “babe” pictures, decorating the artscene with wallpaper you might expect in the break room at a car repair shop. (Given a starting point of the Image comics revolution underway then, was this a foregone conclusion? As in the Sensational She-Hulk before, the only major title there in which women were treated as anything other than eye candy was The Maxx, and even there if you ignored the word bubbles – admittedly the first place I’d ever been exposed to the names Steinem and Paglia in print – Sam Kieth could easily exude a kind of En Vogue syndrome… whose empowering messages were reversed into objectifying ones when you hit “mute” on the music video. Does the artscene have a Bechtel test? Sure: how come none of Alison Bechdel’s comic strips ever got ANSIfied?) If you had a male gaze, you were in luck. But all there was to gaze upon was fiction and fantasy, right? Well… it turns out that there were a handf^H^H^H^H^Hfew women active in the artscene, primarily known as the girlfriend of x or the wife of y… not due to any failures in their own right as talented artists… being overshadowed by one’s man is just something that naturally happens, right? (Ask Frida Kahlo.) Tabaqui did good work; Kitiara was an amazing force to be reckoned with! And Superchick was, well, super. But where were the rest of them? Why such under-representation here when women were so at the vanguard of video art and net.art? (I, uh, don’t have any answer to that last one.) In PD circles, ‘90s textmode art was dominated by women – jgs in ASCII and Ebony Eyes in ANSI. Raquel Meyers lords over PETSCII and teletext, Keira Rathbone is the typewriter art hero of the day, and Jennifer Daniel just got ASCII stickmen printed in The New Yorker – but never released in an artpack! What kept them out of the realm of the underground elites? (Or am I answering my own question?)
The BBS world was one where you could largely be as anonymous as you wanted to – while the uptight Fido zone coordinators might require registered users to send in photocopies of their drivers’ licenses in order to access their private directory of Cindy Crawford swimsuit .GIFs, that kind of trail was exactly what you didn’t want haunting you in the legally grey area of ThE uNdErGrOuNd… so no one needed to know your real name, location or sex unless you chose to share them in a message base or at a meet; those kinds of details weren’t what we were about, and could in a sense be considered actual liabilities: we weren’t here to represent how we existed in the real world, it was supposed to be an escape from all that!
As BBSes withered on the vine and the scene shifted over to the IRC some of that privacy was lost: despite the given assumption that There Are No Girls Online, dudes (a/s/l?) were constantly sniffing around (a/s/l?) looking for a hint (a/s/l?) of evidence (a/s/l?) to the contrary. Hackers and crackers are devious sorts, skilled at connecting dots from trails of breadcrumbs, and so now that I have your home phone number, surely you wouldn’t refuse a friendly offer of a coffee date, would you?
Mistigris served as a refuge of sorts, an island and oasis for outliers of various stripes; on top of our stubborn resolve to continue including computer music in our artpacks, we were notorious for providing a home for lit writers when the rest of the scene was prepared to turn its back on them, and (perhaps not unrelatedly) we also counted quite a few women beneath our umbrella. I don’t know precisely what factors lent us this preeminence – beyond lip service to egalitarian and democratic rhetoric (meaning that Cthulu agonizingly consulted with everyone before doing what he wanted anyway), I can’t think of any policies we consciously enacted intended to provide this effect, so it may have just been dumb luck. (I can’t take any personal credit for it, thinking back to the time long, long ago that I followed Bast home uninvited from a meet like a complete creep, resolving to be bold and get to know this fascinating and troubled writer better… and staying on my best behavior of course, especially after observing her mantleplace overflowing with 1st prize trophies from Tae Kwon Do tournaments. I must thank her after all these years for not turning me into a grease stain on her carpet. But I digress.) If I had to speculate, it might be related to Mist’s long-toothed message echomail culture, increasingly as time went on fostered on bulletin boards whose system operators and network coordinators were women (the heavy-lifting Happyfish and Etana to be specific): so straight off the bat, the cyber toilet seat stayed down.
Ladies we provided an outlet for in our first century included (but aren’t necessarily limited to):
Bast- Binty
- Delire
- Eoanya
- Etana
- Flyingfish
- Happyfish
- Heyoka
- Lady Blue, who also hearkened from Kitiara’s milieu of RCA – maybe they had a few drops of what was in our water?
- Maeve Wolf
- Melodia
- Silver Angel
- Spirit Wolf
- Voi the Analogue Cat
- Weird
- and Zinnia Kray, all talented artists that any group would be fortunate to include among their ranks.
Following our revival, we’ve done better by this metric – representing contributors from eg. MIST1015, the ladies’ numbers come in quite a bit higher, including Mistigris appearances from women we’ve never featured before:
- Andrea Schmidt
- Brady Ciel Marks
- Claire Roberts
- Emily Suzanne Shapiro
- ideath
- ill-esha
- Jenn Ashton
- Jenny Ritter
- ldb
- Raquel Meyers
- Sara Ciantar
- and Theresa Oborn.
Counting ladies both classic and modern releasing in MIST1015 indicates that they make up 17 of its 66 contributors – a full quarter! I’m sure I myself am still guilty of the patriarchy’s microaggressions (at least I have stopped writing love sonnets to my disposable muses), but especially since becoming a father to two little girls (not that that’s the only reason to behave like a halfway-decent human being) I’ve tried to tread more carefully and just generally be aware of mindlessly repeating and perpetuating oppressive patterns baked in to the old system; when called on a piece of no-harm-intended sexist language (“FINALLY something to draw other than breasts”) in the instructions for my painstakingly revived Blender compo, I thanked the source and replaced it with an equivalent that everyone can enjoy. On being shown an astounding work in progress featuring cartoonish mammaries in the leadup to MIST1015 I congratulated the artist on his creative triumph but remarked (after quickly alt-tabbing away so as not to prompt too many awkward questions from the 3-year-old daughter sitting on my lap: yes, the artist simply hasn’t yet drawn the baby drinking from those, honey) that in order to avoid turning into a sausage party we’d already reached our quota of female nudes for that particular collection (because when you beg a guest appearance from CatBones, founder of the Xpak, you already know what you’re getting.) Baby steps: man-baby steps!
In conclusion: hats off, ladies, I’m sure it hasn’t been easy getting to this point in your computer art practice, with pushback every step along the way, from the dismissive dudebro clerks at the computer store asking technical questions from your tag-along boyfriend when it was you who were the one dropping a grand on your first new desktop machine, to the fedora-clad nice guys who were hoping for some kind of payment-in-kind for their tokens of seemingly freely offered technical support, to being uninvited from raids with your guild until you “grow the balls” to take part in the VoIP coordination (and all the victorious teabagging you consequently miss out on), to the run of the mill trolls, MRAs, GamerGaters and pick-up artists harrying your every movement online and who won’t take “buzz off” for an answer. Thanks for sharing your art with us. (Art: where we can imagine a future where things are better.) I can’t embed Happyfish’s on-point Tweets about how relatively culturally non-toxic we’d somehow managed to make Mistigris for the ladies due to the protected and private nature of her account (a woman securing her social media account against unwelcome visitors? How extraordinary!), so the last word is left to me and my pledge to continue working on boosting my gender ratios and curbing my micro-aggressions so that someday we can just get down to the business of making amazing art on computers without half of us having to take that order with a side of eating unfair treatment and smiling. We were the idealistic kids of computer art: we were supposed to improve on the institutions we were riffing on. The computers now are faster and display more colours – time to prioritize making participation a little more user friendly.
(So: which artscene ladies managed to carve out a little niche outside our small circle of light in the pervasive gloom?
- Amber Coal,
- Pinguino,
- Superchick
- …?)
- Adya
- GoatGirl
- Gwydian
- Jikan
- Kitiara
- Psylocke/Jamiesan
- Sara/Azayaka
- Sarah Connor/Severina
- Sprite
- Tabaqui
- Winter Rose
- Yoyo
- Sadist had Idler/disnie who was also in PLF, a girl who drew interesting stuff and was a real sweetheart IRL.
Atleast one more example ;)
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