To have access to clean food is a class struggle.

To have access to all the treatments that you need, whether it's topical or injectables, that is a marker of wealth.

In some parts of Asia, you see people walking around with bandages on as a signal of surgery, which indicates wealth.

So I think a lot of this is a bit performative. And it also makes sense because whether people can articulate it or not,

to be a woman who grew up online means you have been taught to be a performer.

So now we are just that has been accelerated to the endth degree.

A warning to our audience, this segment contains discussion of sex.

We all know the phrase sex sells in terms of advertising or entertainment, but sex has

also been integral to the creation of the one thing that is

constantly selling us something, the internet. This is one of the core themes in artist and

UCLA professor Mindy Sue's work. Her two books, Cyberfeminism Index and A Sexual History of

the Internet, lay out a framework that centers the experiences of the women,

sex workers, and marginalized voices that laid the foundation at the tech that most of us use

every single day. And in turn, that same technology, from JPEGs to Snapchat filters,

has molded our relationships to our bodies, our identities, and one another.

Mindy, welcome to It's Been a Minute.

Thank you so much, Brittany. Happy to be here.

Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR,

a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Okay, so you are something of like an expert and an explorer of all things internet and tech and you've written

two phenomenal books cyberfeminism index and a sexual history of the internet that I really

enjoyed so to start with though like tech is a very male dominated field like I think a lot of

...