Psst ... wanna hear a joke? This just came off the Internet, via e-mail.

"You know you work on the Internet when:

Cute? Sure, it's cute. Just imagine Dennis Rodman with that Netscape tattoo. But there's a dark side to the digs. What irks me is their main assumption: that people who work on the Internet are men -- men who choose computers over women.

And so Live Wire must cheerfully ask: Where it the humor in this? Humor, a word that shares its roots with the word "humanity," says a lot about us as we toddle across that rickety bridge to the 21st century.

Oh, I could rant and rave about how, at the dawn of the PC age, when men hunted for the biggest, tastiest microcomputers they could spear with their credit cards, women were depicted in computer ads as fleshy come-ons to guys lusting for the latest in technology.

I could show how early PC ads were a print preview of "adult" CD-ROMs like "Virtual Valerie," a game in which players apply sex toys to an animated woman. A woman who never complains, never talks back, never asks for much.

I could even point out how there's something a bit pathetic about the men pictured in these jokes, described as they are in terms of weakness and addiction, and rather inadequate in handling personal relationships.

But I won't.

Instead, what's most interesting to me about this humor is what it reveals about our uneasiness with the way computers can infiltrate even our closest relationships.

Face it: Our growing ability to communicate through computers is changing things, and we don't know if we're going to like it. We turn to humor, as we often do, to vent our anxiety. When we do, though, it seems to come back to that silly war between the sexes.

The jokes, in essence, say this: That not only computing, but the vast, promising and influential Internet itself, is a man's world. It's beyond "Girls Keep Out." In this world, girls must compete for a boy's attention not with other girls, but with boys' toys-and the toys win.

When Live Wire entered the computer industry more than 15 years ago, women hoped to find opportunity in silicon valleys everywhere. We did, more so than in truly hard-core technical and scientific fields, but the gap hasn't closed nearly as fast as many of us would like. For example, Computerworld, a trade newspaper, has reported that only one out of four computer operations managers is a woman.

Nonetheless, women are learning to master computers. One would assume they are inspired by Live Wire, but one must be modest. Women are buying computers "for the kids" and, more important, using them at work. Forecast magazine reports that more than 25 percent of women have home computers and that more than a third of the people logging onto online services are women. So in terms of use, if not industry power, women are attaining significant minority status.

Given all that, saying "Men Are from Cable-Modem Mars, Women Are from Virtual Venus," seems like a faintly musty, antiquated way to divide the sexes. Geez-and all this time I thought it was wage gaps.

The true picture's different. Tens of thousands of women are hoping that the Internet will give them access to the future in a way the PC industry could not. They want the boys to share their toys. They're hoping that the Internet's separation from the raw mechanics of computing, its ability to mask physical differences, and its crying need for people skilled in language who can build community, will reward them for pushing into that boy's club, tearing down its walls and letting in fresh air.

Let's help 'em. By all means, acknowledge the way we let computers both change our lives and reflect them -- but don't pass these jokes along. Ask whether the cartoon life they draw has any bearing on your real one. Think about where "buying in" to these out-dated attitudes gets you-and figure out where you want to go instead. Make sure the joke's not on you.