Women are too close to the television image (which is inextricably linked with consumerism) to assume a subjective position. On page 158 in her discussion of McLuhan's piece, Joyrich writes, "the 'irrational' media of the electric age, particularly television, return us to the mythical form of the icon in which distance--the distance between subjects as well as distance between sign and referent--is abolished." This sort of primitvism aligns the televisual form with the feminine.
I don't necessarily find this gendering compelling. Certainly there have to be ways in which Television is masculine. Gaze aside, perhaps TV can be seen as an imposition into the household, implanting images from the outside into the domestic sphere. There's something phallic there, right? Maybe?
This gendering is also complicated by the existence of Spike TV and Lifetime Television for Women. BET, for example, emerged with the assumption that television was inherently white, so if television is inherently anything with regard to gender, why does a market exist for both special men's and women's programming.
All that said, if I had to choose a gender for Television, it would likely be feminine. But, as Joyrich says, "while such tropes of analysis are seductive, they are also potentially dangerous." I think we need to continue to question whether television is feminine before we start operating under that assumption.
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