Fun and Games or Compu-Porn?

At a Los Angeles bridal shower, it brought shudders of repugnance. “I have to leave the room,” said one appalled guest.

In a meeting room at a Silicon Valley computer firm, it left a group of men “giggling and hiding the computer” when a woman executive walked in unexpectedly.

At a San Francisco computer trade show, it brought out the vice squad--and a 10-deep “feeding-frenzy” of men frantically waving wads of money, “begging” to buy it.

In the idiom of computer programming, an image created on the screen is called a graphic. And for this program in particular, the word is precisely correct.

Among hundreds of programs that can track tornado frequency and cast the I-Ching, there is also MacPlaymate, “interactive erotica,” a sexually explicit computer game designed for the Apple MacIntosh computer.

There is no way to describe MacPlaymate delicately--which is entirely the point, say a group of Los Angeles women who argue that such programs are inappropriate for the workplace and most every place else.

A New Low

With its vivid graphics and participatory pseudo-sex, MacPlaymate takes exploitation light-years beyond X-rated videos and nude pinups, they say, and gives a new urgency to the debate over pornography’s role in promoting violence against women.

For the less than computer literate, “interactive” means the operator is no passive observer but takes part in directing what happens on the screen.

In MacPlaymate, the user summons an animated rendering of a woman, “Maxie,” who flutters her Theda Bara eyelids, moves her mouth, breasts, legs and hands and entices the user into the program.

A user can strip Maxie garment by garment, force her to engage in a variety of sex acts, some with another woman or with any of six devices from a “toy box.” They can gag, handcuff and shackle her at her spike heel-shod ankles.

In an extra fillip, the program has digitized sound: a woman’s voice, in tinny gasps, moans “Oh!” And a “panic” button calls up on the screen “a real-looking pseudo spread-sheet (that) looks like you’re working, like if . . . your boss comes over to your desk,” marvels Dave, a computer consultant to several Los Angeles high-tech firms who asked that his last name not be used.

In Los Angeles, MacPlaymate has turned up at a graphics design firm, at a different advertising agency, among “Mac” owners at Loyola University and throughout the world of computer cognoscenti.

The program is not authorized or condoned by Apple, which has sold more than 2 million computers worldwide, many of them in offices and academic settings. Nor is it approved by Playboy, which sent off a stern letter to MacPlaymate’s Connecticut address, at which the final “E” was dropped from the name MacPlaymate, rendering it technically MacPlaymat.

In fact, MacroMind, the Chicago multimedia firm whose animation technology enabled MacPlaymate to be created--without the firm’s knowledge or consent--reached an agreement with MacPlaymate’s creator: Some of the profits from every MacPlaymate, which sold for $20 to $50, are donated to the Chicago Abused Women Coalition. And so far, about $1,000 has reached their coffers.

“We don’t condone it at all,” said MacroMind spokeswoman Brenda Ketter. “The only real viable solution to something like that is to fight back against it in the most gracious way possible.

“It’s so much exploitation,” she said, “especially with a tool (the computer) that is supposed to be so high-end and such a great process . . . even that’s getting degraded.”

For every MacPlaymate sold, scores were copied free. It is “probably the most pirated program” on the MacIntosh, says Frank Brooks, president of a Connecticut computer company.

Many men who have seen it variously describe it as a “novelty and a curiosity . . . gimmicky . . . funny . . . a one-line joke . . . a general recreational piece of software.”

High-Tech Whimsy

To most, it is a roguish bit of high-tech whimsy, created to show off just what a computer can do, and as a “a parody on pornography,” says Brooks, who knows the designer.

(The designer, now living in Northern California, did not return repeated calls from The Times.)

But to some women, well, the Los Angeles advertising executive who hopes to banish such programs says that “in our office, we call it MacRape.”

Something of an underground legend since it appeared nearly two years ago, MacPlaymate hit a higher profile only lately. Ad executive Prudence Baird learned of it from a lighthearted item in Vogue magazine about its “user-friendly” program.

Then she and her co-workers, who showed it at the bridal shower to “find out what we’re up against,” heard to their distress that many men who have seen the program think it is no big deal.

“I admit I watched it and I laughed,” says Alan, who works at a design studio that has the program and asked that his last name not be used. “I can understand how a woman would think it would be abuse. It’s just a woman there and you do whatever you want to her.” But “she’s saying ‘oh yes,’ she’s not saying ‘stop it.’ ”

‘Numbing in a Sense’

Keith Forman, a Loyola University sophomore, says that on campus, anybody “who has a Mac sees it, they want it.” When he first saw it, “I thought some things were kind of funny,” but he has concluded that “it’s numbing in a sense . . . you’re really brought down by it. It’s dehumanizing.”

Computer sexual images of women are not new. Pirated Playboy photos are sent through computer scanners onto “bulletin boards” often accessible to kids.

Sex sells: Photos of women in see-through shirts are used to persuade prospective male buyers of the screen’s qualities.

Some argue, then, that a program like MacPlaymate is simply the inevitable union of society’s fascination with technology and obsession with sex.

“Some of it is ‘look what I can do’ (with a computer) and some of it is the typical American attitude of, ‘let’s look at a woman with big (breasts),’ ” says Los Angeles computer writer Ezra Shapiro. He deplores MacPlaymate, as he does racist computer messages, but sees them as “following society, not leading it . . . I see the program (MacPlaymate) as trivial, and the problem with society as major.”

Baird and her colleagues do not believe that is answer enough. MacPlaymate, they note, does not require one to slink into a gritty sex boutique but is operated in the refined environment of a home or office.

For years, working women have battled office pinups and sexual harassment. The workplace, says Shana Weiss, one of Baird’s co-workers, is “supposedly a neutral, gender-free environment,” the one arena in which women can be judged on ability and character alone.

“It frightens me” that the same people who enjoy MacPlaymate could be “the people you negotiate (business) with, and if you don’t cooperate on some deal . . . this (program) is what they do to you figuratively,” says Weiss.

Larry Magid, a computer writer for The Times and other publications, remembers the Silicon Valley incident when a woman executive walked in as a group of men were using MacPlaymate.

‘At Best Stupid’

He considers the program “good technology being put to a use at best stupid and at worst degrading.” But of that moment, “I don’t recall any other instances of male bonding or any other time when a woman (employee) was excluded from anything because of her sex . . . everybody felt uncomfortable and for a legitimate reason--it was offensive.”

It is not more of the same old paper or video pornography, says Baird, but a program that turns the passive viewer into a participant. Would reaction be so cool, she says, “if this were MacLynching or MacConcentration Camp?”

In a country where the FBI says women are sexually assaulted at the rate of one per minute, the prospect of computer pseudo-sex--like violent pornography, satanic rock lyrics, kiddie porn and even racist hate material on computer networks--begs a lot of moral questions.

The oldest is whether a machine is ethically neutral, only as good or bad as its operator, and isolated from its consequences.

Yes, say most computer people.

“Like any other technological issue, the potential for good or evil, the villain is by no means the technology but the mind used to use it,” says Magid, who puts MacPlaymate on the same footing as a new computer game to “bomb” villages.

Morality of Machines

Alan Dundes is a UC Berkeley professor of anthropology and folklore who has studied computer humor and workplace graffiti: “The morality of machines is something imputed to them by humans, and this is the problem scientists get in: ‘I’m interested in hydrogen, I don’t care about hydrogen bombs.’ ”

Sex machine lore dates to the 17th Century, and while machines are neither male nor female, “they tend to be run by males; it’s a macho thing to run a machine,” says Dundes.

Put to such purposes as MacPlaymate, a computer becomes a “male technology being used to implement, complement, supplement a male fantasy,” and like pinball, an aggressive game often adorned with voluptuous women, it becomes “a technologically aided and sophisticated form of masturbation,” Dundes says.

At work especially, he adds, “a place of tension . . . machines are weapons to keep men in power . . . feminists should be fighting these programs.

“On the other hand, it’s true, how do you stop it? It’s very hard to censor, to legislate morality.”

A Perpetual Question

Which raises the perpetual First Amendment question: civil liberties versus civil rights.

Heidi Roizen heads her own Mountain View software firm, T/Maker Co. Paradoxically, her company’s graphics ads include a picture of Michelangelo’s heroic statue, David. Some computer magazines, she says, insisted they draw in a fig leaf.

“We collectively as an industry should have a responsibility to put forth our idea on proper and improper use for computers.

“But I don’t think the fact that they’re on a computer--it’s not the computer’s fault. People are people and they’re going to make those things available.”

To Magid: “As much as I don’t like this, it would be like arguing against Gutenberg because he made it possible for Hustler magazine.”

Most distressing for Baird is that computers have been cast as the vehicles of the pristine future, the chariots of the human mind. To encumber them with the baggage of sexism “is like taking apartheid or Hitler into the future . . . how can we take this anachronism into the 21st Century?”