Online, no one knows you're a dog. Or a male. Or a 13-year-old girl.
When my Yugoslavian friend chastised me, a writer, for not indulging in online affairs, I told him I didn't need e-mail; I already had enough junk mail. I really couldn't bother installing a modem simply to type inane messages to total strangers. Nonetheless, my mother had gone away to Europe, leaving her house mostly empty. She had a home office with a computer, where I could enjoy a sense of privacy should the need arise.
My brother had recently shown me how to track a stock portfolio, so I figured I could mouse around to check out 15-minute delayed stock prices.
I logged onto America Online one morning on my mother's account. Her name is Lynn, one of those names that, while androgynous, is assumed to be female. As a certified computer ignoramus, I didn't think to change my displayed name, so I stayed Lynn. I navigated into some all-American place called "Best Lil Chat House."
In real life, those of us over 30 are expected to be mature adults, ruled by society and superego. But here, it suddenly occurred to me, I could get away with being my most outrageous self. How far could I go? Pseudonymous and faceless, it seemed I could proclaim in the Best Lil Chat House whatever I desired. The potential for personality pranks and word games appealed to me. (Although self-given, "fictional" names are the rule rather than the exception online, the electronic aliases in this article have been changed to protect – and encourage – the guilty to continue with their delightful indiscretions.)
The talk in Best Lil Chat House was for the most part prosaic. But the use of punctuation symbols like brackets that sometimes surrounded names such as {{{{{Beavis}}}}} piqued my curiosity. These were signs of affection similar to hugs. Amid much talk of coffee, some people offered a multiplicity of @ symbols in lieu of muffins.
My first few comments met with no explicit recognition by others in the room. Everyone was busy hugging each other with brackets, kaffee klatsching, and praising the onset of spring. I was being ignored.
To stir up the situation, I announced I would have to poop soon. Still no reply. "Is anyone masturbating right now?" I wondered aloud. This remark did bring me attention. The comment earned the first reference to me by name (or rather by my mother's chosen login name, Lynnmarg). I felt an infantile joy. Suddenly, I was receiving the attention I craved. It may have been negative, but, hey, they were talking to me. They were saying I was vulgar. Veiled threats were made about being kicked off the Net. Someone mentioned an obscure bylaw prohibiting such verbal misdeeds as those I'd just committed. Mention was made of a personage known as a Guide – kind of electronic den mother providing a modicum of authority and technological direction.
But I quickly discovered that prudery was not universal. I attempted to enter a cyber-room called The Flirt's Nook. The room, however, was already at its maximum with 23 Don Juans and Mata Haris inside. I took up the computer's offer to send me to another room like the first. Here I was assailed by rabidly horny, faceless American males. I had momentarily forgotten that I was generally assumed to be a woman.
Not since I was, as a 7-year-old boy, mistakenly placed in the girls' group in day camp had I been so mortified by a genuine lack of appreciation for my gender. These male personae took little notice of the salient fact that I, too, was trying to charm females.
Even more remarkable, they paid no attention to my explicit claims to be male! "I'M A GUY," I would protest.
"QUIT SHOUTING, Lynnmarg," came one reply – a reference to my use of capitals. "This is not my computer," I insisted. "I'm a guy. My real name is Dorion."
"What kind of name is that supposed to be?" typed someone, apparently enjoying my temporary emotional distress. This offhand comment sparked a Zen-like conversion. The experience of the mystic is to die – to let go of his ego – before he dies. He or she enjoys a death-in-life: it allows him or her to identify with others, to become them and ultimately one with the universe. In my epiphany, I accepted my fate. I would be unable to prove the gender of my identity while online. Let them think I was not a guy.
At first I merely tolerated the presumption that I was female. Then I actively coveted it. Women – it sure seemed like women – were friendlier. I would log on, in a token attempt to read the notices of stock-market advisers ("any bulls still out there?") or read an article from Time magazine, reprinted electronically on the service. But it was a charade. In less than two minutes from logging on (like a junkie warming a spoon, I loved the little series of baud-connecting modulation noises coming in through the modem), I would be entering the Lobby – the assigned port of entry into the hive of rooms – and from thence into rooms like The Flirt's Nook 2 and Romance Connection. I was getting hooked.
No one else was crazy about my newfound devotion to AOL: not my 9-year-old son, and especially not my girlfriend. And when my mother eventually returned from Europe, she took one look at the bill and shut down the service. But by then I had already succeeded in astronomically running up her bill.
Yet I never logged on as anyone other than my poor innocent mother. I had tapped into my verbal and dextrous celerity and channeled my meanness, lust, and anger in directions other than toward my poor, beleaguered girlfriend. As in some Hindu cosmogony where the world is illusory, I hid, Wizard of Oz-like, behind my computer, practicing random kindness and senseless acts of verbal beauty – when I wasn't taking a potshot at some total stranger for something as innocuous as continuing to discuss collegiate football. I could not wait to return to the computer. I could not get enough electronic attention. I was afraid to walk down the hall to the toilet lest I miss something.
By now I was being IM'd (instant messaged) by a tireless horde of hot-blooded all-American testosterone-crazed males. Although rooms such as Romance Connection or The Flirt's Nook 2 are public – everybody can see what everybody writes – it is also possible, as they say, to go private. This can be accomplished by an instant message. Whereas rooms are the typographical equivalent of party lines or living-room gatherings, IMs are like private booths. They pop up in a window above the conversation of the main screen. I was reading an instant message – something about "panties" – when I became aware of my girlfriend reading over my shoulder. She was not amused.
At first I pretended to be female only for enlightenment, or so I told myself. Back in the Best Lil Chat House, but now at night and with a more boisterous and tolerant crowd, I hung out with people I was quick to consider my soul mates. Foremost among the kindred spirits was an entity calling itself "I am Tammy" who warmed up to me. Since this persona was using the America Online maximum of 10 characters, I was intrigued. Whoever's fingers were behind the words, the mere name "I am Tammy" proclaimed itself female with all the preposterous overstatement of a transvestite intoxicated by the artificiality of his/her own facade. I am Tammy was as nice as I was mean. When people entered a room, I am Tammy would welcome them with a personal hello. She also would periodically offer drinks to the ladies with a festive "{S TADA}" — a command that produces an audience applause sound in computers programmed to respond to it. I am Tammy kept typing LOL – "laughing out loud." I became convinced this effervescent character was not anatomically female.
Online forums are a good place for transvestites and transsexuals. No lipstick or skirts, let alone surgery or estrogen injections, are required to make the change if you're a man hoping to pass as a woman.
On the Net, you can work your personality like a novelist imagining a character. The only caveat is that, like the novelist, you must be consistent in your lies if you want to be taken seriously. Some may insist that net.imposters are predominantly men, but I believe that most of the people presenting themselves as female on America Online are in fact female.
First of all, unlike the public Internet, which started as a Department of Defense system and is still dominated by academics, computer nerds, and other geeky, socially awkward males, the chattier, easier-to-use commercial services like America Online, which now has over a million subscribers, have a greater percentage of women using them. Second, whatever the thrills of pretending, the normal homophobic male ego, even if accidentally falling into the role of a woman, does not actively relish imagining being fucked by other men, or giving elaborate descriptions of his fictive female genitalia. I've seen on a talk show the guy who pretends to be a woman on 900 lines, but he – if he is what he says – is not paying, but getting paid. Third, the longer you talk to people lying about their identities, the greater the chances that you will cross them up in their lies: while electronic transvestitism is admittedly easier than its real-life counterpart, it still takes effort, motivation, and skill to put up a convincing false front for any length of time. Any man who has been with a fair number of women probably has enough of an impression of what women are like to sense their difference in conversation as well as in bed. Fourth, I believe that deep down, most people want to be accepted for what they are, not for some experimental pose they dream up on the spur of the keyboard. I mean, I could have written this essay under the name of Catherine MacKinnon, but then you wouldn't be accepting me for who I am, right? Besides, it'd be difficult to keep up with the convoluted nest of gender-based lies.
I did not want to be taken seriously. One of the reasons I am Tammy found me amusing, I think, is that I changed my stats about every 14 seconds. People like to find out whom they're dealing with, so they check that person's stats. A stranger can query "age/sex check" or "location check" and people will answer or not, truthfully or not.
First my stats said that I was 35/m (35, male). Then I was 22/f. Then I was 18/m. Then I was 13/f. I much enjoyed being 13/f. It was especially satisfying to be a 13-year-old girl after tossing off an esoteric epigram or a flawlessly typed reference to a European philosopher.
The people who had not seen me contradict myself – who had not seen my previous incarnation moments before as a different sex and age – took me seriously. They accepted artifice as fact. Some skeptics did not buy my statements as those of a 13-year-old girl. But many were duped. I had rediscovered the power of the prank. Even my brief forays into hermaphroditism (mf/28/Duluth) were given fleeting credence.
I began to see how the adoption of a certain age and sex would attract or repel certain people. When presenting myself as female, I perfunctorily dismissed those males foolhardy enough to attempt to contact me personally via an instant message. At the same time, I had not relinquished my male desires to bed as many beautiful young women as possible. This balancing act between artifice and lust caused an immediate problem. In my furious typing and hyperkinetic excitement, I was contacting all and sundry without true regard to conveying a continuity of personality. This amused I am Tammy but confused others.
One of these others was someone whose stats said she was a 13-year-old girl. She contacted me, it appeared, out of a feeling of kinship. Without much empathy for her youth, I revealed to her in private that I was, alas, a 35-year-old male with a 9-year-old son.
When I explained that I was flirting with her and inquired as to her virginity, as well as revealing the age of my own loss of virginity, she became upset. "I don't FLIRT with 30-year-olds!" she screamed. It dawned on me that she was indeed the 13-year-old she claimed to be.
I began ignoring her IMs, but the damage was done. She announced to all in the room that I was a "PERVERT." She was hysterical and I was sorry for that. I had merely discussed sex and taken an initially nonfatherly interest in her. I did not propose indecencies nor attempt to procure her address.
Later, I had my doubts that she was a 13-year-old female herself – could such an accomplished typist/correct speller be as young and innocent as she claimed to be? I found her vilification of me unwarranted and irritating. I proclaimed my own 13/f status with renewed vigor. Her capital-letter announcements that I was a dirty old man preying on underage girls only focused my resolve to convince others that I was indeed a 13-year-old girl. For all I knew, the girl could have been a man just more wily than I.
The next day when I logged on, I found a suspicious number of people claiming they were 13/f. To make the most of my new identity I had to do what other fly-by-nights and pathological liars do – I had to escape from the limited audience of those who were getting to know me all too well.
So I left the room that I am Tammy and I had come to dominate. With experience under my belt, I trekked the electronic flatlands to a room where no one knew me.
I was reborn as a cute 16-year-old girl from Manhattan, and this time I stayed in character. As a presumably experienced teenager, I quickly rebuffed most males. Those I rejected personally were perhaps luckier than those I completely ignored (pressing "cancel" on the instant message menu). It was a heady experience! I felt firsthand the thrill of manipulating males interested in only one thing. From our side, guys, it does seem cruel. But believe me, if you are the one rejecting the desperate creatures, it can be downright fun.
One evening, Firemed16 messaged me. I pictured Firemed16 as a bored fireman using the station computer between calls. "What can you offer me that other women haven't?" inquired fireboy with a bluster I hardly found charming. I summarily insulted him, but this only seemed to fire (so to speak) his imagination. He was not to be deterred.
"If you are as ugly as you are stupid," my 16-year-old girl persona told him, "making love to you would be like tongue-kissing leftovers drenched in urine." He left me alone.
Emboldened by my successes and new persona, I forged ahead in the common room. Unlike during my previous foray, this time I was not going through any wild personality gyrations. I was a smart girl – always. Other girls (or at least those presenting themselves as girls) were getting more attention than me. But I knew what guys wanted. "My breasts," I wrote, "look better than these ()(), my butt is cuter than this )(."
I found it more satisfying to be the girl every guy wants than to be just another lame guy trying to get her.
Yet despite all my shenanigans, I was still a cybervirgin. But not for long. Somewhere in Georgia, a supposed 23-year-old blonde, BxmOne, clicked her mouse onto my name. Perhaps she read my profile and found it devoid of pertinent biographical information. All she would have seen was a female dash – not too informative. (Every online user can write a profile listing sex, age, marital status, hobbies, and a favorite quote.) In any case, she IM'd me. At this point, the reader might wonder what on earth would have led me to assume that a person claiming the dimensions 38-26-34 was even a woman at all. Indeed, this thought immediately occurred to me. Though hardly homophobic, I was not about to be tricked into having cybersex with a clever man. Nor did the name BxmOne overwhelm me with confidence. Indeed, I found it rather unlikely that a real woman would refer to herself with such flagrant disregard for her inner qualities.
"First," began my little inquisition, "are you a real girl or a queen?"
"What's a queen?" came the somewhat delayed instant message, superimposing itself over the rest of my text like the intense glance of a stranger across a crowded room. Needless to say, the "woman's" comment that she did not know what a queen was struck me as highly disingenuous, considering that it could have originated in the twisted heart of a social deviant like me. I was on my guard! The deceiver was not so easily deceived!
Nonetheless, my male mind could not help repeating – what if she was a woman? On the off chance that she was, I explained the slang meaning of the term queen I had thought universal: "It's a transvestite or effeminate male homosexual," I wrote. She affirmed she was a real girl. So: I asked her what she was wearing. She had on, she said, a yellow top, shorts, and undies. What kind of undies, I wanted to know. "White jockeys," she said. The back of my neck prickled in anticipation of the mockery "BxmOne" might be making of me. White jockeys – I'm sure. I pictured a cagey old queen having fun with me. But … but … again I held my paranoid tongue. All this time I had forgotten that this Georgian woman was imagining me as female.
I set up a further test for her. "Who is your favorite musician? Who is your favorite author? What is your favorite color?"
"All these questions!" she typed, but her answers came quickly and rang true to me. (Lest you think me hopelessly naïve for believing she didn't know the meaning of queen, I later met, in Illinois, in real life, a 23-year-old Mexican-Irish girl who, when I told her this story, was also unacquainted with the slang term "queen." She was not stupid – she knew the exact location of the pineal gland. She also did not associate jockey underwear with boys.)
"What are you wearing?" asked BxmOne.
The question took me by surprise. I looked down. "Beatle boots with zippers on the side, grey-and-black striped slacks, and a turtleneck. My socks, I'm afraid to admit, are white."
I had answered truthfully, giving her details that would allow her to form a mental picture of me. I shifted slightly on my chair, anticipating the seduction of young, lustful BxmOne. There was the usual beeping noise as BxmOne's instant message announced its flashing arrival on my computer screen.
She had told me it was hot down there in Georgia. I, of course, was immediately thinking about how to ease her out of her skimpy clothing.
"Would it be forward of me at this point in time to ask about your breasts?" This was an instant message to me and it brought home, with full force, the depths of my own role playing. I paused.
"Yes," I answered, "it would." I was so concerned about her sex, I had forgotten I was lying about mine. But now, as things grew hot and heavy, I could not go back. Surely it would break the romantic mood – the trust. From her profile, I knew that BxmOne liked men.
But she had formed a mental picture of me as a woman. I could not disappoint her.
"I'm sorry," came Bxm's instant message.
"It's OK," I capitulated quickly. "They're small, but cute."
Things proceeded apace. Suffice it to say she imagined my delicate thespian-lesbian lips caressing hers. Adding – or perhaps subtracting – another layer of deceit, I told her to imagine me making love to her like a man. She acquiesced with pleasure. Somehow, my eroticism was being funneled through my fingers into BxmOne's remote form. She was doing this, doing that. The panties were ancient history. I reveled in the feeling of conquest. It was a feeling only partially mitigated by the fact that I was not who I was pretending to be.
Sex on the computer is not merely a means toward the end of real sex, or a replacement for sex. It is also an end in itself, a nearly infinite space where free spirits can commingle to the tune of their own inclinations rather than those of a watchful society. Sure, most cybersex is as predictable as the real kind. But the computer variety opens up new possibilities. It separates what we think of as the soul – inner self-awareness – from the body, allowing us to create ourselves anew. It's aesthetically thrilling.
As long as the written word remains the primary network medium (which may not continue for long), cybersex will stay the greatest boon in the history of erotic writing. Cybersex merges the delicate wit of Victorian belles-letters and romantic poetry with the real-time responsiveness of two lovers going at it.
Yet another plus is cyber-reality's ability to reproduce the erotic atmosphere of a Renaissance masquerade, since behind our masks we are no longer as inhibited as we would have been had our real selves been on the line. Yet these masks work only if they are not true lies – that is if they accentuate the truth. On America Online, I understood more fully than ever before the origin of our word "person." Before the Latin persona, meaning role, the word was the Etruscan phersu, or actor's mask.
Still wanting to dominate BxmOne in a masculine manner, I had her turn around in her mind's eye and submit to my cupping hands and fervent caresses. Submit she did, of which I was glad. Still unsatisfied (desire online is especially interminable), I had BxmOne imagine a man entering the room, one who was dying to engage her in forbidden pleasures. But, just as cavalierly as I had produced him, I ordered him to leave the room. Then I brought him back. I cannot recall whether it was a minute or so later before I had this dapper individual reenter the room as I was still pleasuring BxmOne in cyberspace.
It didn't matter. I was still typing like a banshee when BxmOne interrupted to announce she had achieved orgasm when the man had entered the room. "I just came," she wrote. "You are so passionate!"
I pressed return but my IM did not reach its destination. "BxmOne," the computer informed me, "is no longer online."
With a little postcoital half-smile, I leaned back in my mother's office chair, proud of my seduction of this hot, unseen angel from the south. Not only had I never had cybersex before, but I had never experienced firsthand what it's like to play a lesbian. Days later, I would watch the lesbians clustered outside the Coffee Connection in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, in a new light. I felt like Casanova. It was a human experience, a personal and intimate one – but one made possible by the computer.
My editor remains "utterly convinced" that BxmOne, and indeed everyone in this story, is a guy. It's possible, but I doubt it. I mean sure, BxmOne could have been the dyslexic, anorexic brother of a hemophiliac pair of incestuous Siamese twins, but she could also have been a young woman experimenting sexually in a forum free from those Four Horsemen of the sexual apocalypse: pregnancy, sluttiness, rape, and AIDS. If I were a horny young female virgin, I might well take my first tentative trip across the minefield of modern dating protected by the anonymity of cyberspace. Call me crazy, but I don't believe that it's only men who troll for sex online. Women, however, have a greater requirement for safety. And outside of masturbation, no sex is safer than cybersex. For all I know, BxmOne could have been a guy. For all I know, he could have been a girl. It's not something I plan to lose any sleep over.
Once I had learned how to use a name other than my mother's, I had other experiences – all as male. Still using my mother's tag, I seduced a young "woman" from Minneapolis who could see the Metrodome from her apartment. "Be gentle," she told me, "I'm only 110 pounds." When I half-voyeuristically threatened to reveal to others in the common room what we were doing (she had been "flirting" with them, I jealously felt, instead of devoting her undivided attentions to our more salacious activities), she quickly disappeared.
I think some real fear of being found to be other than a nice girl came over her. As the personage "Foolaroun," I had my way with BaronS of Brockton, Massachusetts. She buddied up to me when I dropped the name of hometown fighter Marvin Hagler. Though only 16, she stole away with me into a private room (which she christened "Dog") for an afternoon interlude. Her typos were consonant with her alleged age. It was my first time in a private room. Like a woman asking a rake for his address, she told me to e-mail her, but I never did.
Perhaps my most ambitious persona was Lust Angel. I invented this persona while stoned and online. One lovable but foul-talking youth was disheartened to learn of the number of males in the room around him. Like sailors, men online always seem to be looking for females, whether they are there or not. Slowly, the mental curtain came down, and he realized he was surrounded almost entirely by males. "What about you, Lust?" he asked plaintively. I did not want to bring him down. "Not you, too?"
"I am," I reported after a pause, "temporarily inhabiting the body of a male."
"That sucks," wrote the teen.
As Lust Angel, I made rose-tipped arrows {@—>—;—>—>– (ZAP!)-> with Batman-like expletives in them that would flash across the screen. It was really quite impressive. The arrows shot out across the bottom of the screen as I attempted to inject celestial lust into the earthlings. A certain Slystallon kept on daring me to hit him – an impossibility, of course, since each line on screen appears below, not in, the preceding one. I could not even get close. Sly and his friend joked that my batteries were going dead as the design and aim of my arrows declined. Nonetheless, Sly thanked me later, while I was, as Lust Angel, seducing a young woman named Stacey319 from Indianapolis. There had been, Sly said, a certain someone in that room he much wanted to hook up with – and he appreciated my efforts.
When I asked Stacey319 what she looked like she replied "fat, old, 330 pounds, toothless, and bald."
"That sounds extremely cute," I replied calmly. "But tell me seriously."
My persistence paid off; she turned out to be young and attractive. Her answers were quick and believable. It was getting near 4 a.m. I had had another hit of pot and a cup of coffee – I was sick of being celestial and wanted to seduce a mortal. I showed the thorn of my poison rose to Stacey319.
"Are you going to relinquish yourself willingly, or do I have to take you by force?" I asked Stacey319.
"Be a man," came her exciting reply. "Take me, Lust Angel. I'm your vixen."
I'm not sure exactly what we did but my memories are that it was very lustful, that she was very uninhibited, and that she was not the world's best speller. That part just attracted me to her all the more. "Give me a detail," I asked when she had gone as far as she could go, "so I can think about you later."
"I was so wet," she said, "I had to wipe my hands on my T-shirt and panties."
It was a most satisfying encounter. I was, I should probably add, fully clothed. Afterward, I decided to give her a very long-stemmed cyberrose.
"Thanks, Lust," she said.
The next day I encountered a 5-foot-9, 23-year-old green-eyed woman from Portland, Oregon. Her name was BadGrrl4U. She said she had a cute butt.
"I'll bet you're being IM'd to death," I said, pondering the effects of her name.
She was, she said, she was. I had her follow me to a private room called Nasty where we could be alone. There I entertained her so thoroughly she decided to delay her return to work. It was supposed to be a quickie, but it turned into a longie. I did most of the typing, but when it was over, she said she had never been seduced like that before. We were in a toilet stall, then on a desk, then at one point I brought in all the other guys who had been trying to IM her, and so on. The Marquis de Sade would have swirled his brandy. BadGrrl4U told me she wished she had a copy of our exchange.
She asked me my real name and I told her. She told me hers. I gave her my address and she said she would send me her picture. The next day I located her, but she was in a private room with an airline pilot and a guy from Texas. This proved disturbing. When I entered the room, they left. A guy moseyed in after me, promising that he had just bathed.
Finally, I contacted BadGrrl4U and told her it was crazy but I was jealous.
"Why?" she asked. She went on to tell me that she had tried to contact me but I was offline. This was true.
"I'm worried you're a nymphomaniac," I confessed to her.
"I don't think so," she replied. "I just really love sex."
"That sounds just like my old girlfriend," I replied. "The one who used to cheat on me." The talk went on for a while. I craved a connection with her. Perhaps it was because I had told her my real name.
Bad told me she never cheated on her real-life beau. This was a strange thing to say, because I recalled that the previous afternoon she told me "I have people I see" when I suggested she must have many boyfriends. Was I was deluding myself to think that she was being completely honest with me?
I still have not received Bad's picture. Maybe it's better that way.
