In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women made from latex and circuitry can learn to talk back and say no. Or, alternatively, that their ‘love dolls’ — in the current marketing-speak — have been hacked by anarchist feminist programmers. Please enjoy the next, cyborg-mediated stage of the war of the sexes.
Some men, of course, still believe that women are inherently no good with computers, a dumb prejudice that Jeanette Winterson ably rebuts in this collection of interlinked essays, with stories from early computing history and several outbursts of amusing ire. Today’s tech-bro coders might be surprised to learn that their jobs wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the pioneering work of mid-20th-century female computing geniuses such as Grace Hopper in America and Stephanie (‘Steve’) Shirley in the UK. ‘Women are as smart as men,’ Winterson remarks drily at one point.
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