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206 Deborah Wheeler

they lack the skills to search for information that is not eas-
ily accessible through personal association. I’m most worried
about how it is changing youths’ attitudes towards sex. We’re
seeing it schools now. Students are more comfortable inter-
acting across gender lines than ever before. Young people are
experimenting with their sexuality in ways not common to
this conservative society. Adults would rather close their
eyes to these changes and pretend that traditions live on.
These are circumstances in which youths will not get the in-
formation they need to be safe in their experimentation, that
is, until there is a problem which is out in the open and pub-
licly acknowledged, one which cannot be concealed. This
same process happened with the drug epidemic.

Layla’s narrative helps to reinforce the images, presented in a more
sympathetic voice, by Su’ad and Badriya. Su’ad and Badriya are
both part of this new youth sub-culture, which Layla characterizes
as “interacting across gender lines . . . experimenting with their sex-
uality in ways not common to this conservative society.” To a degree,
the Internet is helping to support this culture of openness towards
new gender values. But public sanctions on such openness still re-
main the norm; and it is in light of conservative morals that right
and wrong are judged, keeping to a limit the degree of impact which
Internet technology can have on young peoples’ lives.

Lessons from the Kuwaiti Case: Culture, New Technology,
and the Persistence of Local Values.

In my studies of women’s networks in Kuwait I have tried first to un-
derstand the culture which surrounds and regulates women’s lives. I
have next tried to interpret how new communications technologies
and their use in Kuwait make transparent local cultural practices.
From within this context, I have then tried to grasp how the Internet
is shaping women’s lives. In Kuwait, local cultural constraints make
female Internet use a limited force for social change. Most women
with whom I spoke considered the Internet to be a tool for global fem-
inist practices, divorced from, and unable to help with the local strug-
gles of Kuwaiti women. 21 Cultural hegemonies in Kuwait, which
define women’s place, women’s voice, and women’s activism, limit
open and organized gender struggle. The need to publicly link a text
to a voice means that social pressures towards conformity for the
good of the “family” (broadly defined) acted more powerfully to con-