soft approach. For some, it can be because they want to "belong" to the dominant computer culture. Lorraine, who programs by imagining what "the components feel like," ends her description of her programming style by adding, "Keep this anonymous. I know it sounds stupid." But for others, their experience of closeness to the object is a source of conflict. When Lisa began programming, she saw herself as communicating with the computer, but the metaphor soon distressed her. "The computer isn't a living being, and when I think about communicating with it, well, that's wrong. There's a certain amount of feeling involved in the idea of communication, and I was looking for that from the computer." She looked at it, and she frightened herself. "It was horrible. I was becoming involved with a thing. I identified with how the computer was going through things." Lisa, like the soft-approach programmer Anne, placed herself in the space of the computational objects she worked with and was prone to anthropomorphization, responding to the computer as though it had (at least) an intellectual personality. In Lisa's case, her own style came to offend her. As a programmer with a soft approach to the discipline, she rebelled against where her style had led her, because it had led her to what she experienced as a too-close relationship with a machine. Carol Gilligan talks about the "hierarchy and the web" as metaphors to describe the different ways in which men and women see their worlds (Gilligan, 1982,