Amy Alkon views with disdain a Quartz article on sexually harassing, inter alia, Alexa and Siri:
Quartz Seriously Wants To Know: Are You Sexually Harassing Your Phone?
There’s an unbelievable piece up at Quartz, reflecting a gone-mad sector of our society — ultimately driven by radical academic feminism (though typically not admitting or crediting its nutbag roots).Feminism was supposed to be about women wanting equal treatment. Now, as I like to put it, feminist no longer demand that women be treated as equals but as eggshells.
This article is a case in point. “We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment,” is the headline. […]
First of all, if I could have Siri in either a bitchy drag queen voice or an Indian accent (from India, that is), which I love, I would. French or Italian or Eastern European would be fun, too. Because Apple’s rather boring about this — probably to serve an increasingly humorless and humor-attacking public — I think I have it on the British guy right now.
But I hate Siri and never use it.
The point is, you can change Siri to a man and harass the fuck out of it. I yell profanity at automated telephone systems when they repeatedly won’t accept my answer — both because I’m kind of immature and because there was this (probably mythic) idea out there that swearing would trigger a live operator to come on.
And per these evolved sex differences — we go for different Achilles heels in men and women when we’re attacking them. That’s because men and women are biologically and psychologically different, and men are more likely to be leaders, for example, and women are more likely to be caretakers.
Though male brains and female brains are mostly similar, these evolved sex differences lead to some differences in our psychology and how we present ourselves in the world (including the roles women versus men tend to have).
