Pink Minitel (Bonus!)

Camila and Ana delve deeper into the online world of Minitel this week with an exploration of the many sides of the “pink minitel” services provided on the network. Beginning with a discussion of Olivier Cheval’s 2019 short film “Rose Minitel” (and some Agnes Varda film chat), they then talk sexy chat rooms, digital labor, online dating, LGBTQ+ digital communities, and if love is actually real. Ooh la la!

“I’ve found a new job. I work from home. I hit on men on Minitel... One franc per minute. After half an hour, I get a bonus. I get one bonus after the other. And I think of you.” - Rose Minitel, Olivier Cheval.

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Main research for the episode was done by Camila. Ana with the audio editing.
Music by Nelson Guay (SoundCloud: fluxlinkages)

References:
- Chaplin, Tamara. “Lesbians Online: Queer Identity and Community Formation on the French Minitel.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 23, no. 3 (September 2014): 451-472.
- Chrisafis, Angelique. “France says farewell to the Minitel - the little box that connected a country.” The Guardian, June 28, 2012
- Goldman, Alex [host]. “The French Connection.” Reply All, no. 10. January 17, 2015.
- Nagy, Jeff. “Pink Chat: Networked Sex Work before the Internet.” Technology and Culture 62, no. 1 (January 2021): 57-81.
- Tempest, Rone. “Minitel: Miracle or Monster?” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1989.

- “Rose Minitel.” Olivier Cheval. 2019. 26min.
- “Minitel Computer, Online Dating.” Youtube, uploaded June 1, 2014.
- "La carte de presse pour les employés du Minitel rose?", Archive INA, Youtube, uploaded May 23, 2014.

Transcript

0:14

I found a new job. I work from home. I hit on men on mental. At first, I went on three, six, one five, love. I tried to be myself. I could get nowhere. Then I moved on to three, six, one, five and such. And I passed myself off as a queer man. One franc per minute. After half an hour, I get a bonus. I get one bonus after the other. And I think of you. This is how Olivia Shiva's 2019 short film worries. Minutes starts. But you know, like in French. So by your Beyoncé you are our friend the gorilla glass I I'm her research based visual artist, writer experimental filmmaker and I'm here as well. I am atomizer. I am a web developer, work in online education and do net art stuff. And yeah, this episode is a little bonus one the the percent one. Yeah. We did like an investigation into the French Minute, our network and our last episode, but there was this whole like portion of it that I couldn't fit in. So we have all this extra research and I thought little bonus episode. So I think we're going to do some of these bonus episodes looking at kind of like specific services that were offered on these networks or like ways that it the like importance of these services are articulated in culture and society. So we're going to be looking at this like various minutes. How pink minute how kind of side of the Minato Hotel network. But our entry into it is this 2019 short film which which I loved so much. I think that it it's very I mean, it's kind of like a like a video. It could be like a video at work. So, you know, I'm into that. Yeah, it's definitely quite artsy, a little arthouse, but in a cute, kind of accessible way. I thought it that I really enjoyed watching it. It's yeah, the production is is gorgeous. Kind of the perfect like visualization, perfect esthetic depiction of eighties erotica the like synthy sounds in the background, the tight and sparkly fitting costume which is like very loud makeup, very prominent eye shadow, but also the sensual depiction of hardware. I thought that was really interesting how she like types on the keys, the kind of like slow replies on the display in the chat room and like how kind of poetic and mystical and cryptic kind of text messaging can be. Yeah, I think that was really well represented. I thought it was cool. Like, so it's about this woman teller, rocket teller, and she like, is still in love with her ex-girlfriend and keeps like calling her and leaving messages on the phone. And then she gets this job working for one of these like various minutes how pink minute how chat rooms But she's pretending to be a guy in a gay chat room and it's all she's working from home. So she has her own little machine. And then I like it when eventually she buys herself. And this whole machine, it's like variety thing because the original lot is beige, but it's also it's set in this. It's just it's solely set in her apartment. But it's like a dream. It's a dream. It's, it's, it's very like empty eighties. Yeah. And she's just like a desk with, like, a plant and it's all lit. It's of bright colors and lit in, like, pinks and purples, you know, I felt like it. It actually reminded me a lot of Agnes Varda as Claire from 5 to 7, which is like a French New Wave film from 1962, which is I mean, that one is set kind of like in like those 2 hours, 5 to 7, and it's pretty much well, the idea is that you're just following along with like actual time. And it's this woman that is she's a a singer and she's waiting to get news of a a medical test. And so she's like kind of going through this whole existential crisis across across these few hours from like and then at the end, like, she gets her answer, but her character changes a lot in that time. And this this film, it's a short film, but it also kind of follows just like a couple of days, right? Like a weekend, maybe in the life of a teller. And she's also kind of waiting. It's a waiting. She's like at the start writing and she's questioning. She's always like, there's always like these two main questions that she sings about throughout the movie and in a very poetic way. And always like asks the is like wondering like, does this other person at the other side of the screen, are they in love with me or are they about like these two questions? And it's this like in clear, there's also this issue of like mirrors and reflection of self. And this idea, like Varda is really looking at like the idea of performance and identity and both mirrors and other people like reflecting back onto the main character sort of ideas of, of self-identity. And in this case, it's not so much mirrors, it's technology, right? It's like it's the it's the minute how and who she's talking to through the minutes. But also actually there is a reflection. She calls one of her friends and he's like on the TV like a dream on the TV. Right. There's like this scene and it's like an eight version of him. Yeah. Mm. And there's like, the reason that I came to this idea of linking it to that was that it starts with tarot cards. So both phones start withdrawing tarot cards. So in, in the first minute, how short she is on the phone. The thing, the piece I read at the start talking, leaving a message for her ex and then she starts like drawing cards and then the titles are over the top of the close up images of the cards, and the same thing happens in clear. So it's like she goes this the the start is that she goes to see a fortune teller and she draws cards and it's essentially like death. And and interestingly, that film is in black and white, but that scene is in color. Like when you see the cards, it's in color. And then the titles go over close ups of the cards. So I feel like this was a purposeful connection. And to me there are like all sorts of of links. But to me it is that that idea of the minute helping a reflection of self and yeah and like drawing conclusions out of symbols out of just like very simple images or pieces of text and interpreting them in your own sort of little complex way. Does Agnes Varda's Cleo also have like an eighties environment like of so it's from the sixties but it's very sixties and various is a very stylized. Yeah, she's a pop singer so she and she lives in this house that's very empty and she where she likes it has a swing and like she wears fluffy little like robes and is looked after by like this and that. Lonely, but very lonely. Yeah, kind of. And she's I think when we see her, she's very like bored and and of her life and have anxious and questioning things and then as it as the movie goes along she changes which happens in this film as well it you know we see a shift in outfit as you mention like it really moves from kind of a more sort of boring maybe eighties outfit into like full eighties leopard print shoulder pads. Funny, I don't really usually like movies that are so stylized, especially with like, like the eighties. I don't know. That's just something kind of really oversaturated about I. So I saw something online that was like that. Like very colorful, oversaturated thing is like eighties as per like what Netflix wants you to think the eighties with like but actually the eighties was just like everything was brown Yeah yeah I can imagine. But I did. I thought it was very applicable to this storyline because you know, you have you're kind of like living in her world of like this constructed idea of the eighties and it's super, super stylized, very minimal, very symbolic. And she's there alone and she's kind of constructed this like world in terms of like the sensual kind of set design, but also the world that she's living in, in cyberspace and is like constantly, constantly thinking about and pondering and questioning. So I thought it was actually a nice touch. Yeah. The other part was that you mentioned it earlier, but that so she like she's pretending to be somebody else on these chat lines and she gets paid. But then there's a certain point where she realized she starts like falling for one of the people that, that she was writing to. But then she starts questioning whether that person she's talking to is a bot or not, or is like a person pretending to be something else. So just all these layers of like identity and Yeah. Question And like also love means, right? Because is love real or is it like, is love real? And so like, like is is does love is it does it play a big part in just kind of them being like a reflection of yourself? Are you projecting yourself onto them? Like that's also like those are really kind of cool questions to ask in the context of cyber love and like you are constructing this fantasy of the person you're talking to. I think it's a it's really interesting. So this woman, Rotella, her new job is working for this like erotic chat service on the Minato Video Text Network. And we've talked about Minato specifically in a previous episode, and we'll be talking further about other video text networks in future episodes. But I yeah, I want to take a longer look at one of the sort of more interesting aspects of Frenchman as well, which is the adult oriented services, the massage rooms. They are miniature rose or pink Minato. So I mean it's always developed and administered by the government, but most of the applications or services that could be accessed on it were provided by private entities. The other aspect to know it was that it was pretty much anonymous. The amount of time you spent on the network and specific services were charged to your phone bill, but it was just a lump fee. It wasn't itemized and there wasn't a tracking of users from the service provider or the governmental side either. So no one had to like clear their naughty browser history. Yeah, they didn't have to switch over into what's it for and that the VPN. So this meant that it was kind of the perfect environment for adult chat rooms to proliferate. And they really did right by the end of the eighties, around half of France telecoms minute this profits were coming from the pink health services of which there were more than 4000. That's the end of the eighties though like it Yeah there were more. It's really representative of the fact that like reproductive labor just keeps the world running, you know? So it just keeps the planet spinning around. A quote from a Los Angeles Times article, which I actually first I'm going to read the title because it's really long and just a little. Yeah, Minotaur Miracle Monster Erotic message services have become the little dirty secret of France's video text network. Critics say the government may be profiting from crime. And I also want to note that they spelt video text with a T at the end, and I'm pretty sure it's like mails just with an X with the N, with fake title. Like how do you make a clickbait title and make it long at the same time? So the quote that I pulled was The minute our system offers dozens of notorious pink services, they usually imply a women's name or boldly suggestive titles such as Brutal Beach Perv or Cruella advertised on lurid posters and billboards all over France. The services offer a whole menu of options for the user, ranging from explicit sexual graphics to direct dialog with another person. So what they're actually getting out with that like long title is that there were actually a number of high profile like sexual crimes that derived from meetings on pink minute health services, which the government was providing through France Telecom. Though French Telecom didn't see their role as being a censor, only a carrier provider. So it was almost like like this stuff was as easily accessible as like checking the weather. So it almost feels like it's like a dark web that is on the surface, like just very yeah, very easy to get into. Cool. I love it. I'm here for it. Right? So some of these services like legit chat rooms, but a lot were actually like these call center style with men posing as women and talking to multiple people at once, trying to keep them online for as long as possible so that their bill would be higher. Interestingly, like in the film, she talks about trying to get like get through more people like keep having people on shorter time as possible. But it seemed like from my research that it was more about like keeping them online for a long time. And it seems that there weren't that many women doing this job, largely because of the way that the men spoke to their chat partners, which was often like quite violent and degrading. Jerome Knox, who posed on the service as a woman named Julie, is quoted in The Guardian, comparing men replying to his messages to starving piranhas. No pressure, no pleasantries. It was direct and crude and a quote that was quoted in the paper Pink Chat Networked Sex work before the Internet by Jeff Nagy. Maggie has another man saying, As a guy, I can still take a bit of distance from the work. But some days the crudeness of the messages you get sticks in my throat sometimes I have a few female friends who are chat hosts. They're often losing it by the end of the day. When I leave in the evening, I'm dead. Yeah, it's really difficult work. It's really, really tough. It also, I did notice that it seemed like it was if it was a woman that you were going to, that you were thinking you were talking to, it was kind of knowing that it probably wasn't and that it seemed like people would would have like questions they would ask that they thought would trick to see if it was a bot or something. And the question that people like to ask was, what are you wearing? Like, tell me what you're wearing. Because they felt that the answer to that question, like a guy pretending to be a woman, would answer that in a really different way than a woman would answer. I never actually got like examples of what those two things like whether or not it's like, I don't know. Yeah, because it can also be concealed. It's just like a sexy question, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, there's something interesting with that. Like these the way that these call centers operated was very well known. It wasn't. It wasn't at all code words and quote code questions were starting to develop from that. Yeah. And as we saw in the film, there were also many LGBTQ services available in the main hotel. Some of these were like money making initiatives, money making schemes, these call center style services. But there were also some like real attempts at forming communities. They were often begun by like preexisting magazines or preexisting community groups, and it meant that they could reach people outside of city centers and in like an anonymous way as well, because in the previous episode, you also mentioned that like strikes were organized 3 minutes like the student strike, right, in Paris? Yeah, I guess like having these spaces is digital spaces and anonymous space. Anonymous spaces and spaces that could be accessed by people that maybe were living in smaller towns, that weren't open, weren't open about their sexuality, or was still exploring. It could have access to these these like digital spaces that that, you know, maybe exist as sort of community groups or specific venues in city centers. But, you know, that's not something that. Yeah, that someone living in like some rural French town would necessarily have access to. So some of these functioned as for profit services like most of the services, but some of them also existed as nonprofit online communities that were just like doing it as like a DIY space, essentially. Tamara Chaplin in the paper Lesbians Online Queer Identity and Community Formation on the French Miniato writes particularly about a community started by lesbian activists under the name like Ludo Telematic The Jetties. She writes the minute homemade possible new forms of lesbian identity untethered to specific locations, organizations, embodiment or proximity, it also made possible unique ways of being out of the closet in a virtual space that was at once private, experienced in the intimacy of home office and public accessible to others, and premised on representation and communication. So that's essentially yeah, like what I was saying before about, you know, these spaces. I like so important to really facilitate experimentation on so many different levels. That's what a lot of like cyber feminism based their like theories around was the fact that you could experiment with identities. You could be multiple people in multiple spaces in the same time in the same place, and that it completely eradicated that. Yeah, the politics of proximity, of like injustices in the politics of proximity, where like people could just do whatever they wanted and it would kind of create this like social revolution and sexual revolution as well, or maybe more in terms of gender representation and identity. In this paper, Tamara Chaplin talks about how this actually might have been one of the first, like lesbian virtual lesbian communities. It's often it seemed like it. She was saying that it's often talk. This idea is often talked about, mainly within the history of the United States, and that that this particular community was really important, even though it was only around for a few years. That's often left out, even though it existed like a decade before bullets and blood communities and things in the United States. It also I mean, it had all the issues that the like nonprofit community groups have in physical space as well. And the thing is, it's like they weren't making any money because it was all for the good of the community. And they I think they had like a sense of like, like, like cheap subscription service and and different like elements of the of their service that could be paid for. But there just wasn't a full time job. Yeah. They really weren't earning like any money to keep it up and yeah, it just sort of, it ended up just kind of declining. Yeah. After a couple of years. But Chaplin points out that these stories, these kind of really specific community groups on the minute help add much needed complexity to the story of to Tell, which is usually understood purely through the minute how rose as connecting female sex workers and straight male clients or as part of a gay male culture of cruising and pornography. So you know I think that with that it's it's sort of talking about yeah that like that there is this idea of minute how rose and this side of minute tell itself as being kind of this sleazy sex sort of like service like hiding identities like just a general like public viewpoint of it. But actually it serves a lot of important purposes in terms of, yeah, like gender and sexual identity, the performance of and the like on personal understanding of and the community growth and building that. I think that this group maybe only had like 90 people that were in the in the group. But for those 90 people it means so much right. Yeah I can see that that at the time it could have been really written off as this like cheap, quick, easy way of like getting sex like it's super accessible. If you could just like dial something in and find someone, chat to them. Yeah I can see how a lot of, like, homophobia can stem from that, especially when when people are experimenting with non like heteronormative sex and something that's available to them online in a digital space. And yeah, I can see how a lot of like homophobia is derived from like that easy quick kind of access and they relate those two things together. And I think with the eighties, with the community there, like virtual community Service, it wasn't necessarily about like sex, it was about like that lesbian community. And so they had like different chat rooms and things. And it was it was more, yeah, what I think of as these like DIY punk, DIY like spaces, but, but trying to find a way to like, have that exist in this virtual, in this virtual space, which is why it was so important that they were not for profit, you know, that it was like their purpose was to like, serve community. I mean, you know, there's a lot of even in physical spaces, discussions around like money and things. But yeah, but with that, good was like an initial thing. But I wish I wish there was some kind of like sustainable way of like keeping it alive. Yeah. And like, it does feel like using it was such an easy way of billing that it could have been and I'm sure other groups were using it as like an income stream. And but I think that this group I'm not I think that I'm not sure if they existed beforehand and then they shifted over into the minute how or if it was started as part of women's health. But yeah, they, they weren't saying it as a, as an income stream. It was done for like the greater good and for the community. Yeah. But that last I did want to like mention that last quote where it talked about this like gay male culture of cruising and pornography. I I'm sure that there must have been like more complex gay male services on them in itself. But I am researching mostly English sources. My French is I can understand a little bit, but you know, as you can tell, I am not great. And so I'm pretty limited on like what I can find in English and, you know, I was lucky that the Tomato Helpline wrote this this great paper about the eighties and I haven't I haven't found any other like equivalent it and there were gay male services on the menu so there were a lot but from what I can tell it was they were mostly connected to like existing magazines. And those magazines were maybe already catering to this specific, like what she calls cruising like this, cruising culture or like a pornographic like in the images. And that was what was then, like transposed over into the virtual space. Yeah. It's it's weird to use the word cruising because that dismisses that you are being totally gay and that you are looking at like gay pornography. And that's completely fine. I mean, I think some of it was like looking for hookups. Yeah, and I think that's what she's like specifically talking about with that. Whereas say the Getty, the service was more about like community building and forming like friendships and having like discussions and stuff that weren't centered on like finding sexual partners. Yeah, I just wanted to mention, you know, even from what I said about the details, where it's like these little these small groups are really important to the history of Minato and to any of these digital spaces and cyber feminism. Yeah, often these small groups go on recorded. I think it was lucky that the GTA is actually just like archived everything that they did. So that was enough to, you know, and then I think Tamara Chapman also did some like interviews and things with, with the members that are still around. So there was a lot of stuff, but like not every group will record and archive everything that's happening. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't, that it did, that it didn't exist. So there was also just like straight up online dating services and chat rooms, heterosexual like non sex centered, but like, I guess I mean Tinder and, you know, looking more for relationships. That's but like now I think it is sort of hard to know how successful they were. I did find a minute how like a dating online dating documentary and this lady she she talks about about using the minute how for a period of time and it's funny because it's in French and then it's dubbed in English but it's dubbed in English with like quite a British accent. And there's a the line where she says, We'll listen to it in the second, but it was the pits. And why is that a direct French translation or is that like a weird like eighties nineties British British terminology? So yeah, let's listen to this lady talking about Michelle Foot. You've got to be a nutcase to use the minute the time. You mean it's sad, really. People use the minute I have a problem communicating. Some can't live without it. I can lose one. So for those you need to look here. They're just little patches of loneliness all connected up the city to you. Jason, We hope you found it disappointing. This is not disappointing. It's just that I lost six months of my life. I didn't get much out of it. Overall, there are two or three people I see who I met over the miniature, but there were moments when I thought it was the Pips. She was just. It was the most stupid thing I've ever done in my life. I think it was the machine itself which seduced me at first. You can become totally fascinated by the fact that it is silent and the people are anonymous and they can create their own personalities. You don't see them, so everything is completely false. I think things go much faster in a screen relationship than in a real one. Okay, so like two lines I love from that. She's a poet. I'm obsessed with this lady. They're just little patches of loneliness all connected up. Oh, and then. Oh, I think it was the machine itself which seduced me at first. She's incredible. So, like, in all of these cases, there is this anonymity to I mean, it's how that allows people to act out fantasies or perform identities that they wouldn't be able to in the physical world. So whatever reason, for multiple reasons and going back to the like specifically to the call center style business, as I said before, like there was this widespread knowledge amongst users that the people on the other side of the messages particularly were often men pretending to be women. And it seemed like in the film that many people like did shift from that into quite personal conversations with these strangers on the service. And I guess that maybe it facilitates it, right? Like it's not only the the screen in between and like the text based nature of the communication. It's also like a knowledge that the other person is maybe not is isn't probably isn't who they're saying that they are and there's this sort of performance there. Yeah. Yeah. And also the fact that it's weird that that there were so many people pretending to be women online because like you said, I think it facilitated this kind of a caring conversation or like a, a script to be transmitted of like care work and, and like emotional labor. I think it's a lot easier to do maybe when you're like performing to be a woman and or presenting to be a woman. And it's very much like part of that, like gender toolkit, right? Well, like I it's interesting you say scripts, which I know you mean that in a different way, but like they actually use scripts that were pre written and then they would adapt like a real like call center but like, Yeah. Mm. And they would adapt them like to the situation And there's also like this idea, I think it seemed like even though they were acting these roles for the animate actress, it was also kind of hard to separate their own personality from the personality of that they were portraying through them. In a tale similar to Khattala and Rice Men is how the short film I was about to draw that same connection back to the beginning of the podcast where it's like, Oh, you literally had actors on Minotaur and now you have this very stylized movie about Minotaur, but it works so perfectly because the acting, you just, you know, that they're acting and, you know, they're on a set and it's very reflective of like what Minotaur was actually doing in terms of like giving people the space to perform. Yeah, Another quote from the network sex work before the Internet paper was that their work is an important case for the history of digital labor. It invites reflection on how gender identity and technology interact in platform economy centered on attention, effect and self-presentation. The animators pioneered the kind of shadow labor in hosting moderation and advertising that social media giants today rely on to keep their platforms safe and profitable. And something that we mentioned briefly in the like the main minute whole episode was that these chat host these and a mattress and a mattress and not only were employed to be the chat partners, but they were also employed to moderate what was going on and also to like weed out the physical sex workers that might come onto the platform and try and find clients. The physical sex workers were sort of seen as taking away profits from the from the chat services and another quote from that same paper. In a strange reversal, teams of men whose job it was to perform as women police the presence of women attempting to exercise their trade, the massager on the chat, on the chat rooms and you know, any sex workers, physical sex workers was excluded from the digital sex work space, which was, you know, a physically safer space to work. But they were very much pushed out, pushed out of out of it. Yeah. There definitely must have been like a shift in labor. I mean, you can see that now as well. With Onlyfans fans, there's like physical sex workers that are going on to Onlyfans. But then there's also like people that are on the platform that are like shifting them into physical sex work. And there's this kind of like these two things are constantly bleeding in. Yeah, And obviously the politics around that is, is really, really complex because physical sex work in many places is criminalized. But then there's digital sex work that is still sort of like in that gray area. And so you don't really know who is taking work from whom. It's also like we see it with the newspapers as well, where there was this kind of separation between physical newspapers and digital. And when Unitel came through, then the newspaper companies were really concerned that it would take away their readership, their physical readership, to have things available online. And so the like, the stepped in and were like, Well, if you don't have a physical presence, you can't have a digital presence. So this idea of these like, yeah, the two separate worlds and how they interact is something that comes up a lot. And I would say these like early computer days, but as you say, continues now with this negotiation of like the relationship between the physical and the digital in all of these ways. Yeah. And it also just really brings out the injustices of how sex work is treated because you have the like the most famous kind of scandal with sorry to bring up only again, but yeah, that scandal with like influencers coming in to Onlyfans, bringing all of their followers with them and then making tons and tons of money on Onlyfans that bringing taking away like clients from existing sex workers that were on there for a while or like we're trying to like build up a sort of like career on there. And as soon as you got an influencer on there, it just kind of like shifted all of those followers onto the already popular people. There's no there's no compensation. There's just like it's so precarious and it's it's criminalized as well. So you have absolutely no like safety net and all these shifts, you know, change the expectations of clients and also the like view that the public has on your profession and yeah, that like and that is something that you don't have control over. Know that like just suddenly yeah, you can be having quite like a great career on only fans and then yeah, suddenly there's like me that goes down. Yeah, the platform goes down and there's like an influx of new clients that, you know, viewers or patrons. What, what are fans of fans that, that maybe coming for a specific influencer but don't understand and the the types of relationships like the safe the safety you know how to Yeah like negotiate codes of conduct yeah exactly and that you know is always shifting something else that's sort of interesting with minute in that like physical digital is that it's the is the advertising and I'm not sure you know that's like a sense of France is like a little like it's like sexy and open about it. I actually don't if that when that started and how real that is but when I was like Minato was around for 30 years and it was massive for like 20 of those years. And there were ads everywhere and there were apparently sexy minutos ads everywhere with like, sexy lady, really like, like bus stops. Yeah. So, yeah. Do you have, like, billboards? Like billboards and like. Oh, yeah. And also, you know, little ads in, I guess like fine boots and things like that, like normal. But yeah, because I mean, they would just have like a sexy picture and then it would have like three, six, one five. Rochelle Sorry, I like whatever it was called. Oh, yeah. I just wondered, I guess, how much of my sense of like France as as this, like sexy twice actually. Maybe came from this period of time. The question we shouldn't really be asking was is that is like, was that a good thing or a bad thing for like sexual liberation and for feminism? Because it obviously did like, you know, reinvigorate a lot of damaging perceptions of like femininity. But that's always going to happen. That is just how like gender works and the fact that, like we know and we have the knowledge of that gender was being performed and gender was being put into scripts and put into digital assistants. Developer Toolkit that literally says the fact that like gender is a construct. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, what is that like gender roles that are being proliferated into society through these services, But you know, other things. Going back to our discussion about the May 68 strike, that that that period of time was also like a big sexual revolution and like feminist revolution as well. And in second wave feminism. Yeah. And so it is interesting to think about like minutes how starting a decade after that and what role it played and where it was like coming at, at what point I can imagine like second wave feminists hating on men. It'll be, yeah, men are the ones that are playing nice and a true in that article that I've referenced a few times. Pink Chat, the author sort of muses on this a little bit, I guess thinking about, well, minutes how and minute how Rose could be seen as a way as like a form of an enacting ideas, but also as proliferating stereotypical gender roles. He has a quote I portrays minute how he uses seeking the social fluidity and theatrical erotically charged self-presentation of May 1960 might have found what they were looking for in the animators services. And from a state perspective, the necessary might seem to channel those lingering dissident energies into safe, monetizable channels, recuperating the legacy of May for new kinds of effective communicative capitalism. So like how much it like that there was this sense, this feeling kind of in the air I guess the question is yeah what what did minute what what role did mental play? Which side does it take, Does it sort of attach itself to? But I guess it's both, right? It's like the minute health Network was so large reaching that it's not like it was being used for one specific purpose. It's being used by like a large portion of society for all sorts of different reasons and had the like longer lasting social societal effects are also, yeah, coming from different sides. It's also very, very broad. It was part of everyday life for a lot of people. Yeah, like every day performance is abstract ones were, were applied in mental. It's really really cool. Yeah. And I love the film. I thought it was like I said, it was a vibe, but I guess I mean that it was really I felt, I mean, just putting on like an art of film kind of had the, the way that it, the set design and the sound and everything work together really. I felt portrayed, yeah. Like a sense of this kind of connection and disconnection at the same time that was maybe happening in France. Mm hmm. Yeah. And the sensual visual representation of tech. So next month we're going to look at a UK based video Tech's network, right? Press presto. Yeah, we're going to be looking at that and talk about the kind of political climate of what it was being developed, what cut it off some Thatcher took a lot of Thatcher hating Thatcher bashing, so excited for that. Thanks everyone for listening. Yeah. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. I started using the mini tool almost a year ago. I couldn't stop. It was practically the only way I lived. Took up all my time. Not when I was at work on Monday, but I don't have an MBA. But I used to come home and half an hour later I was at it. I'd forget to eat, go to bed, then wake up and start again. But then I got up earlier in the morning to use it before work building up. Ralf and I ran out. You? It was getting out of hand. My kitty.