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Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures 265

When the partners have equal careers, there is greater potential conflict about PC
and Internet use. However, most couples then look for practical solutions. An
extra PC or laptop is bought or brought in from work. The media culture than
changes from a deliberative into an individualized culture:

Man: She is writing her thesis at the moment and if she is really busy with
it, I’ll take a laptop home from work.

In such individualized cultures gender as a factor that regulates the access to and
use of the PC and Internet at home disappears into the background. Gender as
a factor in the individual use and interpretations of the PC and Internet, as a
dimension of the user’s gender identity does remain relevant, but is no longer
constructed in interaction with the partner.
In two extraordinary cases, women took the lead in PC and Internet use: they
were the most important users and also the ones to make the decisions. In both
cases, however, the male partners appeared to have jobs in which they worked
with computers all day. Not wanting to spend their leisure time in such a way,
the home PC and the Internet became available to the female partners, both at
the time of the interview immersed in writing their final theses:

Man: I work with computers all day and really don’t want to go home
to stare at that screen once again.
Woman: And I am writing my thesis at present, so really need to be able to
work on it full time.

In these two cases, we see how the social position of the partners can also result
in a reversal of the traditional use culture around the PC and the Internet, which
indicates that even one, single dimension of gender, i.e. the social one, does not
result in a univocal articulation of the technology.
The four use cultures vary as to how gender and the Internet are mutually
shaped. It is tempting to conclude that in three out of the four cultures, male
usage offers the main explanation for the specific articulations we found: in a tra-
ditional culture the male partner claims the PC and the Internet as his domain,
while in the reversed culture it is the lack of a claim by the male partner which
enables women to dominate the PC and Internet. In addition, in the deliberative
culture negotiation disappears as soon as one of the partners can occupy the PC
and the Internet because of work or school requirements. This systematically
favours the partner with the highest income, most of the time – especially in
Dutch gender relations – the man. Only in the individualized use culture, in which
both partners use their own appliances, does the male grip on the PC and the
Internet use seem to dissolve. Although such a conclusion is partly warranted, it
is insufficient in its denial of the active role that women play in the construction
of the PC and the Internet as male. Women’s distance from the computer is not
only the result of processes of exclusion, but can also be interpreted as part of a
conscious gender strategy. Turkle (1988) has shown how women use their reti-
cence towards computers as evidence of their true identity as a woman. After all,
an interest or even a passion for computers does not align well with traditional