Tuesday, July 03, 2012

6. Gender-benders online: experimenters or betrayers?


One very freeing aspect of creating a persona to intermingle with others online is the fact that you can be whoever, or whatever you want to be.  While many people do choose to be an online person who is not completely the same as their physical personality, it simply does not occur to them that online they can also be another gender, or even choose to bypass gender entirely and experience the life of a neuter.

According to Nick Yee, in his research for the Daedalus Project <http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000551.php?page=1>, male users are much more likely than woman users to play a character of the opposite gender.  Older male players were especially probable to have tried playing a female, and also tended to have more online personalities in general.  Yee has several theories for the reasons of this phenomenon: that the anonymity of the internet allows men to escape from their more rigid social roles, and to receive the attention and help that a female character is constantly offered.  Online, anyone presenting as female is likely to be inundated with messages and even harassed sometimes by male personalities.  Others may find it thrilling to play a female and view it as a way to control a woman fully.

An Ubersite (www.ubersite.com) user who called himself Icarus1987 decided to do a little experimenting with a female identity in a normal chat room, to see what it was like to be a woman for a few hours, without the hassle of imitating one physically.  (The complete story, along with several transcripts can be found at <www.ubersite.com/m/42017>.)  Icarus1987 created a profile for what he thought would be a typical female, making his ‘Heloise’ a 19-year-old Minnesotan, putting in her profile only a picture of one of his female friends in a nice formal dress.  He deliberately chose the name Heloise to avoid any connotations that a name like ‘drrtygrrl69’ would have.  Icarus1987 was not originally seeking to dupe other users into debauchery or finding out other males’ sexual fantasies.  He simply named himself Heloise and entered a busy Yahoo! chat room.  Almost instantly, a male figure sent him a private message, wanting to chat.  Heloise spent over an hour in the chat room, and during that time, she received more than 20 invitations from male figures to chat privately.  Some left her alone when she stated that she was just waiting in the chat room for a friend to show up.  Others became angry or abusive when she told them politely that she was not interested in speaking with them, or even just busy, calling her a bitch and a lesbian.  They peeked at Heloise’s profile, saw the picture Icarus1987 posted and demanded photos of her that were more revealing.  Even when Icarus1987 decided to pretend he was Heloise’s father, the members he chatted with still tried to get him to tell them more about her, or to learn another way of contacting her privately.  Heloise decided to see how far she could push these men, asking one to howl, make turkey noises and passes at some of the other male members of the chat room, promising more revealing pictures, and even enticed one user into an act that got him banned from the site.  When Icarus1987 hooked up his webcam and took pictures of his cat to show the eager users, Heloise was again attacked and called names, though this time she deserved it, at least in part, for not delivering quite what she promised.

Upon reflection, Icarus1987 concluded that it did not matter which chat room he entered as Heloise: the ‘guys had a screen name to hide behind, and without laws or the threat of physical confrontation, this was what most of them were like.’  (Icarus1987, 8/17/2004 http://www.ubersite.com/m/42017 ‘gender bending online experiences’) they felt free to harass Heloise and ask for sexual favors, though she had not entered a specifically adult area, or advertised in the chat room that she wanted to speak with male users.  Her passive presence was enough to spur these other users into action, demanding attention.  When Heloise declined politely to speak with them, their attention turned to violent words, simply because a female presence was among them.  Icarus1987 never revealed himself to the other users, but his contact with them was casual, and he did no damage with his social experiment.  As Sherry Turkle states in her book, Life on the Screen:
Enabling people to experience what it ‘feels’ like to be the opposite gender or to have no gender at all, the practice encourages reflection on the way ideas about gender shape our expectations.  (1995:213)

This short experience made Icarus1987 appreciate more than he had known about how females are treated both online and in the physical world.  Though his was a superficial experiment, it did have more effect on him than he expected, and led him to be more thoughtful about his own behavior in chat rooms.

In his book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold describes a more sinister situation that happened in the late 1980s in a CompuServe community.  Joan was a young woman in her late 20s who worked as a neuropsychologist in New York.  She had a warm, friendly personality and soon became an integral part of the community.  Other members of the community came to depend on her, so it was a shame that she could only communicate with them online.  Though many online relationships do eventually move to other forms of communication, Joan could not talk to anyone on the telephone as she was mute, and was reluctant to meet her online friends in person, being scarred physically and left unable to speak by an accident with a drunk driver.  She said that her ‘sponsor’ had given her a computer so that she could use it to reach out to others without having to meet them face-to-face, and thus to enable her to have relationships with other people without having them react to her disfigurements.  (Rheingold, 2000:170-172)

Joan’s warm online presence was enough for others to form a bond with her, and she developed deep, personal friendships within the CompuServe community.  Joan’s inability to speak with or meet others—except online—proved very convenient, as she turned out to be a man named Alex, who was a psychiatrist in New York.  His confession prompted feelings of outrage and deep betrayal from those members of the community with whom she had deep personal relationships.  The case of Joan differs from that of Heloise/Icarus1987, as Heloise was a one-time, casual experience, while Joan was a fleshed-out online persona who made friends based on how she presented herself online and how she acted.  Though Alex may very well have been sincere in the words he posted online through Joan’s mute mouth, the fact that he was not actually a woman hurt those who had been relating to Joan as they would to another woman.  As this took place in the early 1980s, the concept of the easy anonymity and multiple personalities one can cloak oneself in online would not be deeply ingrained in those early internet users who encountered Joan.  (Rheingold, 2000:170-172)

Lindsay Van Gelder wrote about Joan/Alex in Ms. Magazine’s October 1985 issue in a piece called ‘The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover’: ‘Many of us online believe that we’re a utopian community of the future, and Alex’s experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against deceit.  We lost our innocence, if not our faith.’  (Rheingold, 2000:171)  Currently, most users are sophisticated enough to sense the undercurrent that there is the possibility that the person one connects with online is not always quite who they say they are.

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