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Jason: John, listener Chris wants to know about plugs.

He writes, “I’ve been taught that computer cables and ports are gendered to identify each side of the connection. The male end refers to the tab or protuberance and the female end is the cavity that receives the tab. For example, in the Lightning connection on Apple products, the cable is the male end and the devices contain the female end, except for the general one, Apple Pencil, which has a male end on it and came packaged with an adapter.” Lots of adapters out there these days.

What do you think about this? And I will throw in an alternate, which is: I often in my writing about tech will refer to ports and jacks instead of using gender terms about it. I don’t know how you feel about all of that, but sometimes you do need to explain this. And then there’s the added complexity of USB-C, which also came up, which is the idea that at USB-C there’s like a protuberance inside the port that the cable goes around. And so there’s a question of what that even is.

John: Yeah, so using, you know, it’s extremely gender normative to try to use male and female terms for computer ports. And it really doesn’t make much sense and also sort of reveals a kind of preoccupation with sexual intercourse that is not relevant to the technology world.

Like, of all the things that you might use as an analogy for a thing that is a hole and a thing that goes into the hole, you know, the minds of humans, because we’re so driven by our reproductive drive to pass on our genes or whatever, goes right to sexual intercourse and then of course goes right to gender normative and say, “And therefore I’m going to say the thing that goes in is necessarily male, and the thing that it goes into is necessarily female.”

So it is problematic on multiple levels and representative of sort of the most base lizard brain kind of, you know, evolutionary—not going to say evolutionary garbage because without it we wouldn’t be where we are—but concerns of a lower life form, let’s say, because lots of living beings have a drive to reproduce. If we didn’t, they wouldn’t be around, because you kind of need a drive to reproduce to reproduce, and if you don’t reproduce you’re not around anymore.

And we have that too in spades, but it is not the appropriate analogy for a more enlightened species that understands that the gender binary and gender normative things doesn’t reflect the world as it is. It is a vast simplification that is not useful, and it is harmful to perpetuate that by saying, “This analogy is so useful and so well understood and so obviously true that we were going to apply it to the technology world, therefore reinforcing the idea that this is obvious and true and any deviation from it is incorrect.”

So I don’t use those terms either. Setting that aside, what do you use to call them?

Plug, socket, you know, that works reasonably well. Plug, jack works reasonably well. Again, the power plugs that we use to, you know, they’re in the walls of our homes that we plug things in to get electricity. We don’t call that the male and the female end. We call it as an outlet and, you know, and a plug or a socket and a plug. Those terms already exist and they exactly describe what we’re saying. There is a thing with a hole and there is a thing that goes into the hole and there’s no need for any kind of sex organ analogy whatsoever in that, let alone a gendered sex organ analogy. It’s like just garbage on top of garbage, right?

As for a USB-C, where, for people who don’t know, if you’ve looked at the USB-C, like the hole where a USB-C plug goes into, if you look inside that hole, it’s really dark in there, but if you look in there, you see there’s