To understand this article, we must ask the questions: how do theorists choose to engage with metaphor to construct their meaning and how do these metaphors play on current (and collective) social anxieties, assumptions and fictions? In Susan Herring’s analysis, one observes that she often uses the metaphor of the "virtual frontier" to conceptualize cyberspace. In her article "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier", Laura Miller argues that the metaphor of the frontier is a potent one in "the rich figurative soup of American culture", and that "the way we choose to describe the Net now encourages us to see regulation as its inevitable fate. And, by examining how gender roles provide a foundation for the intensification of such social controls, we can illuminate the way those roles prescribe the freedoms of men as well as women"(p.49).

As a linguist, Herring must be conscious of the discursive power of the frontier metaphor, which is evocative of the anarchic ramshackle settlements of the old American Wild West where only the toughest and baddest survived. Herring has not failed to note the gendered implications of using the frontier metaphor, but is uncritical in her use of it and does not deconstruct its political implications. By doing so, Herring implicates herself in this metaphorical construct. She situates women in a particular role, one which is already familiar to us from legions of westerns: the good, morally superior woman who comes into the badlands to exert her civilizing domestic influence. Furthermore, by describing it thus and placing women within a certain online role, she has also constructed a fundamental part of cyberspace’s discursive future.

However, says Miller, women should not welcome increased protections uncritically; rather they should "regard the notion of special protections (chivalry, by another name) with suspicion"(p.53). One reason for this is that online women do not have the physical disadvantage which they experience in real life, nor do they have bodies which can be physically violated. Online, says Miller, "where I have no body and neither does anyone else---I consider rape to be impossible". The famous story of the cyber-rape in the MUD, first described by Julian Dibbell in the Village Voice, which later became the apocryphal account of violence against women online, raised the question of whether speech equalled deed. If the "rapist", a character named Mr. Bungle, wrote on the screen that he was raping another character, is that the equivalent of him actually doing so? And if so, what implications does this have for the connection between women’s minds and their bodies? Miller writes, "[I]n accordance with the real-world understanding that women’s smaller, physically weaker bodies and lower social status make them subject to violation by men, there’s a troubling notion in the real and virtual worlds that women’s minds are also more vulnerable to invasion, degradation and abuse."(p.55) In other words, the assumption exists that since women’s bodies are gendered, their minds must be as well, and Herring’s analysis seems to support this contention. Hence women’s online personas are subject to all of the constraints and abuses which are present in the physical world. But should this be the case? While perhaps it is hasty to trumpet the age of genderless cyberspace, promoting the concept of women’s minds as an open plain on which the male frontier pioneers trample—nature penetrated by civilization—does women a grave disservice. Miller notes: "As someone who values online forums precisely because they mandate equal time for each user who chooses to take it and forestall various 'alpha male' rhetorical tactics like interrupting, loudness, or exploiting the psychosocial advantages of greater size or a deeper voice, I find [this notion] perplexing and disturbing. In these laments I hear the reluctance of women to enter into the kind of debate which characterizes healthy public life, a willingness to let men bully us even when they’ve been relieved of most of their traditional advantages. Withdrawing into an electronic purdah where one will never be challenged or provoked, allowing the ludicrous ritual chest-thumping of some users to intimidate us into silence—surely women can come up with a more spirited response than this."(p.55)

But does Miller’s rebuttal to the "gendered mind" theories really signify a new era of gender-free mind-meetings, or does it adopt the familiar Cartesian mind/body dualism as its basis? If the latter, feminists should remain concerned for the future of the gendered body, since experience has taught us that women are generally the losers when the supremacy of mind, intellect, and spirit are discursively lauded. Does rejecting the idea of cyber-rape simultaneously trivialize real physical rape, or does it mean a new age of women socking it to the loudmouths and bullies? Beneath Miller’s theory I detect the sort of frontier individualism which she criticizes, for her solution sounds very much like the "Well, why didn’t you just punch him in the nose/grab him back/tell him to go away?" response to women complaining of sexual harassment. While I think the questions Miller raises about the gendered nature of online communication are certainly valid and merit further exploration, I am also concerned that her strategic solutions, like frontier justice, lean towards the private, the particular, and the individual without much challenging the systemic nature of gendered discourse and communication.