Feminism as a media effect and the chain of gender reversals
The general trajectory of media evolution: less physical work for men, less domestic work for women
Digital reversals are cultural, ideological, and epistemological reversals brought about by the digital acceleration of social interactions. Read more in The Digital Reversal; the entire book is written in tweets (1,295 of them), making it the first “tweetise” in history—a reversal of the treatise.
Humans are a biological species with sexual dimorphism—males and females differ in size, strength, appearance, and behavior. Media evolution, however, has been persistently extending humans beyond the body, rendering sexual dimorphism less relevant.
Promethean media—tools like the hammer or sword—used the power of the human body, so differences in strength mattered. Mechanisms like the watermill or steam engine harnessed the forces of nature but still required heavy lifting to operate. All the mentioned media used men.
Writing extended mental rather than physical faculties and may have been the first major medium that didn’t specify masculinity. When the Goths captured Athens in 267 A.D., they reportedly said, “Let us leave the Greeks these books, for they make them effeminate and unwarlike.” [i]
Writing, however, couldn’t reverse patriarchy, because “the sword and pen worked together,” as Innis noted. [ii] Media extended humans, and spatial extensions evoked enmity. So, media—whether books or weapons—also enhanced violence, thus preserving patriarchal structures.
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Printing made literature highly marketable. In search of new niches, publishers discovered a female audience. By the 1800s, the novel became associated with women—first as readers, then as writers. Through novels, women joined public conversation for the first time in history.
Enabled by printing and book sales, mass female readership—and then authorship—sent overlapping waves of cultural media effects, leading to women’s growing political engagement. But the most powerful and direct medium of society’s feminization was the typewriter.
The typewriter opened the door for the mass entry of women into the white-collar workforce, displacing male secretaries. The telephone followed closely behind: the female telephone operator became another major feminized job by the early 20th century.
Source: Kittler, Friedrich A. (1986). “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.”
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Mina Harker reflects the New Woman movement (to the extent Stoker allowed her). She’s not just an object of protection. Skilled in shorthand and typing, she organizes letters and diaries to track Dracula’s behavior and becomes a key contributor.
While the typewriter and the telephone invited women into the waged workforce, home appliances freed a vast number of woman-hours from unpaid domestic labor, creating the affordance to redirect them into capitalist production.
Washing machines (widespread post-WWII) were among the most labor-saving appliances. Refrigerators (common by the 1950s) reduced market trips and enabled bulk cooking. Vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and other appliances freed up women’s time for other pursuits.
The World Wars, themselves media effects of telegraphy and radio, sent millions of men to kill and die, and millions of women to replace them in the workforce. This shift proved women were capable professionals, commencing the disruption of traditional domestic roles.
Marketing of the electronic era highlighted demographic identifiers—starting with sex—for better group targeting. Consumerism equalized men and women; moreover, women’s decisions often became more important, shifting general perceptions of gender roles in decision-making.
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Historically, body-powered media translated sex-based biological differences into social structures. When men had an advantage in wielding swords or driving plows, they were protectors and providers, while women were oriented toward domestic roles and protected.
Electronic and digital devices don’t require strength or abilities determined by sexual dimorphism. As media evolution moved humans from nature to culture, it’s only logical that it eventually equalized men and women as media users once nature was left far behind.
If we look at media as human extensions through sex difference, the general trajectory of media evolution was: less physical work for men, less domestic work for women. Both trajectories eroded the sex-based division of social roles. Feminism is a media effect.
It doesn’t mean that “The typewriter emancipated women” (though it did its share). Media are the hardware of society; culture follows. Waves of media effects from the past overtook and overlapped each other, causing and amplifying later media effects—all aiding feminism.
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Electric society cannot sustain gender roles shaped in and for a society of mechanical tools. In the 20th century, warfare and heavy lifting moved to machinery. This reduced male prerogatives and ended the previous balance of men’s exclusive duties and privileges.
Electricity ushered in a global revision of gender roles. The digital speed of social life escalated it and pushed the revision toward reversal. The Digital Rush, when institutions embraced the values of digital activism, occasionally made reversal the goal of revision.
In its extreme forms, empowering women reversed into emasculating men. This also reversed cultural norms and public imagery: men have increasingly been portrayed as weak, unfit, or simply excluded, while women often cosplay men from past eras.
A typical reversal in portrayal: a 120-lb fighter can routinely take down a 200-lb fighter in an action film—if the 120-lb fighter is a woman and the 200-lb fighter is a man. Feminist ideology, a product of literacy, reverses into magic, a feature of the oral mind.
Intellectual escalation—the digitally accelerated search for new expressions—led creators to check ever-new boxes of social recasting. Gender reversal invited cascading intersectional reversals. In general, gender or race profiling reversed from customs to official policies.
Pushed to its extremes, inclusion logically reverses into exclusion. Despite the grievances of conservatives, however, gender reversal isn’t someone’s evil plot. The very logic of cumulative media effects led to it. At this point, media evolution simply had to kill James Bond.
John Connor survived the T-1000 but not the gender reversal. In mass-culture role modeling, the rebellious boy—the source of change since prehistory—flipped into the rebellious girl. This may be the most consequential gender reversal, overturning the global cultural dynamic.
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Gender reversal in pop-culture imagery, however, is just a superficial manifestation of deeper media-ecological processes that have redefined the frameworks and values in education, academia, politics, corporate culture, family settings, and many other areas.
Media evolution tends to reduce the sex-based division in social dynamics. Instead, “a new global gender divide is emerging” in politics: young women are becoming increasingly progressive, while young men shift conservative.[iii] The political divide grows into gender enmity.
Women became empowered enough to gain autonomy and be left alone. A forecast shows 45% of U.S. prime working-age women (25–44) will be single by 2030.[iv] In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General warned of an “epidemic of loneliness.” [v] The UK created a “Ministry of loneliness” in 2018.[vi]
For women, media as “extensions of man” easily become “replacements of man”—from jar openers to sex toys. Men get their own set of “women extensions-replacements” too. Promethean media were homebuilders; electronic and digital media are homewreckers.
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When patriarchy reached its limits, it reversed into feminism. But when feminism reached its extremes, it didn’t reverse into patriarchy. Instead, it spawned two reversals: even more progressive trans activism and conservative reaction. Both now coexist, fueling polarization.
Although some outcomes of trans activism can be seen as a patriarchal reversal—when biological males enter women’s spaces—the essence of this new reversal is questioning sex as a determinant altogether. “Boys will not be boys” has logically backfired with “What is a woman?”
These shifts may seem political, cultural, or demographic, but they also reflect a fundamental trend of media evolution: the extensions of the body lead to its “amputation” once media replace it. Gender might not be reduced to sex—but sex will be reduced to gender.
With biotech able to redesign the body (“transcending biology”—Kurzweil[vii]) and digital media replacing “biological” networking with social networking, nature stops making sense. The highly mediated body withdraws from nature, rendering all facets of physicality less relevant.
Gender reversals are just ripples in this Maelstrom. They aren’t even the final ones—gender reversals will multiply and branch out as media gain more power over the body. Imagine gender-inspired affordances for an AI companion, a cyber-organism, or a fully uploaded identity.
The next gender reversals may involve non-human entities. Society’s views shift—what was once sexual perversion is no longer seen that way. Will ethical and criminal laws or even taboos apply to relationships with embodied AI companions? Revisiting them will surely be advocated.
Once the body is abandoned for a digital habitat, the gender divide into two or sixty-two categories will become a philosophical matter—like Yin and Yang (or sixty-two of each). But the superuser, merged with its medium and environment, will have other matters to attend to.[viii]
As for the gender reversal, its ultimate form is emerging as the reversal of population growth into depopulation. It reflects many factors—from changing family dynamics and growing loneliness to revisiting the concepts of gender, family, and parenthood.
But in the big picture, media evolution made the natural sexual dimorphism of the human race irrelevant because, with AI development, media are no longer needed in the reproduction of their organic symbionts—us. Another carrier for intelligence seems likely to be found soon.
Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[i] Innis, Harold. (1947). “Minerva’s Owl.” Presidential Address to the Royal Society of Canada. In: Innis, Harold. (1951). Bias of Communication. P. 4.
[ii] Innis, Harold. (1950). Empire and Communications. P.11.
[iii] Burn-Murdoch, John (2024, January 26). “A new global gender divide is emerging. Young men and young women’s world views are pulling apart. The consequences could be far-reaching.” Financial Times.
[iv] “Rise of the SHEconomy.” (2019). Morgan Stanley.
[v] “New surgeon general advisory raises alarm about the devastating impact of the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in the United States” (2023, May 3). HHS Archive.
[vi] Daley, Jason. (2018, January 19). “The U.K. now has a “minister for loneliness.” Here’s why it matters.” Smithsonian Magazine.
[vii] Kurzweil, Ray. (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
[viii] See: Mir, Andrey. (2010). “The chain of Singularities.” Substack.
The equality Paradox: in highly gender equal nations like the Netherlands and Sweden women massively (80%) choose feminine jobs in healthcare and teaching over what the official rethoric has been prescribing for 2 generations (engineer etc). And if possible part time, regardless of being a mother or single. While super-masculine jobs like sewage, bicycle repair and bricklaying have such low status under progressive middle class women that they never bothered even speaking about those.
And in another highly feminized field - marketing - you still see the boys doing the digital marketing i.e. messing around with software, dashboards and data, while the girls do the images and the writing...
The police in my city n the NL is now so feminized that you hardly see two cops doing a job like in the past, it's always 6 or 8 who show up to investigate or arrest someone. As they have significantly regressed in physical stength and intimidation factor (they often 'interact' with immigrant males who have no regards whatsoever for female cops - and also find Dutch male cops rather soft).
Femke Halsema, the Amsterdam mayor - a feminist lady from the Greens, participated in a documentary on equality. She visited a firestation (the male / femlale representation should be 50/50%. Anything else is an expression of patriarchal dominance!) to discuss discrimination with the female firefighters (tattoos, juicy local accent i.e. light years removed from the mayor's own academic ideological habitat). The females said something horrible; they actually appreciated the physical strenght of their male colleagues. Since that came in handy when doing...their job. The left left within minutes...(Halsema: 'I forgot i have another appointment, but i'll see you later. Goodbye'). A hilarious moment in the documentary.