The typewriter “inverts the gender of writing.” (Kittler, 183) In other words, writing, thanks to the woman-machine, becomes female.
Prior to the typewriter, from psychoanalysis, “an omnipresent metaphor equated women with the white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of its authorship.” (Kittler, 185)
Yet, “Bipolar sexual differentiation, with its defining symbols [needlepoint and stylus], disappeared on industrial assembly lines. ... Typescript amounts to the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing.” (Kittler, 186)