Role play danger areas
Is it acceptable to swap genders and "role play" on the net in the guise of the opposite sex? Are you comfortable with the idea that some people develop intimate online relationships with people whom they deceived in that way? What do you think of a teenage boy who pretends to be in his thirties? Or an octogenarian who plays the role of a 20-year-old to feel young again? Is it permissible to hint you are a drug addict on a support group when, in real life, you are a scientist studying drug addiction? Should you post long confessionals without a word of truth in them, just to enliven the discussion and see the reaction? Clearly, that illusion conservation rule that gave shape, form, and structure to our childhood role plays is very tenuous on the net.
Gender-swapping is an aspect of role play that has caused Internet users to form into opposing camps. For example, Elizabeth Reid discovered some very diverse and passionate viewpoints on such activity among MUD players. Some participants felt it was a clear violation of ethics and considered it to be despicable and perverted. One player said, "I think if you get off on pretending to be a female you should go and dress up and go to some club in San Fran where they like perverts - just don't go around deceiving people on muds." This reaction is particularly revealing because the MUD itself promotes considerable role-playing and people create bizarre descriptions of themselves, such as those I mentioned in the last chapter. A player can become an elf, a lizard, a 10-foot-tall Amazon, or a wild swampfox. Despite the acceptability of such fantastical self-presentations, a number of players object strongly if you dare to deceive others about that central trait of gender. For them, the frame for online communication should generously permit all kinds of role-playing, but should draw the line at gender deceit. This particular construction of the frames for real life and online life, and for the membrane between them, is very strict about this issue.
Other players argue that men who pretend to be females are not necessarily perverted, but are "cheating" and violating rules in another way. A MUD administrator for a fantasy role-playing game on a Boston host showed me the system statistics that summarized the gender characteristics of registered players. Only about 25% were female-presenting, and they tended to receive more attention and chivalry in the form of hints and gifts, and occasionally received more harassment. The administrator also knew that a fair number of those female-presenting characters were actually male. From the data people confidentially submit to him when they request a character, he guessed that only about 15% were really female and the rest were gender-swapping so they would get more help on the game and solve the puzzles more quickly.
Some men choose female characters to learn something about what it feels like to be a woman, although they may not realize the consequences the deception may bring. Steve Silberman, a writer for Wired magazine, posed as "Rose" in a chat room, though he felt shamefully dishonest about it. His first lesson came as he began receiving one message after another from people who had ignored him in his male persona. Some messages were friendly, some were come-ons, and a few were nasty, brutal, and harassing. Silberman said, "I was shaken by how quickly uninvited male adoration could take on a violent edge." He settled into a conversation with "Adam," an actor who shared the love for poetry that Rose included in her online description and began disclosing more personal information and intimacies. When Adam became amorous and suggested meeting in real life, Silberman confessed his true gender with heartfelt regret about his betrayal and deception.
In the lighthearted Rules of the Net: Online Operating Instructions for Human Beings, authors Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun offer 250 pages of opinionated and uncompromising rules covering behavior online.33 Strangely, they have little to say about gender-swapping except for this cryptic remark: "You are allowed to change your sexual orientation or gender. At will or just for fun. But be prepared to suffer the consequences." The omission is especially puzzling because Tom Mandel was one of the targets of an infamous gender-swapper on The WELL, that pioneering online computer forum based in the San Francisco Bay area. Mark Ethan Smith, a middle-aged woman in real life, taunted Mandel as an oppressive sexist until her acerbic, relentless flaming led to suspension of her account.
A widely publicized and notorious story of online gender-swapping involved the Joan/Alex chimera, a.k.a, the "case of the electronic lover." Alex was a New York psychiatrist who used the nickname Shrink, Inc. to chat on CompuServe, and began having online conversations with women who assumed he was actually a female psychiatrist. Titillated by the immediacy and intimacy of the conversations in which people thought he was a woman, he began logging on as "Joan" and created an elaborate and detailed persona to go with his new nickname. Joan was handicapped and disfigured, but emerged as a model of the determined female who could overcome all odds to establish relationships and surmount her disabilities. Women flocked to chat with Joan, and some experimented with lesbian netsex, but when the most determined insisted on meeting her in person, Alex had to end the charade. He first hinted at a serious illness and then said she was going to the hospital, where Alex would write her out of existence.
Unfortunately, Alex got too caught up and embellished his masquerade with some telling details of time and place. Online friends who wanted to send flowers and show sympathy discovered that Joan had not been admitted to the hospital.
The fury over Alex's deception was immediate, but the feelings of betrayal were complex and varied. Some were angry at any gender deception, while others, less concerned about online gender-swapping, were outraged by the thought that Alex was using the online "Joan" persona to front for him so he could hear intimate self-disclosures from women and also, experience lesbianism vicariously. Most, but not all, agreed that Alex violated some trust or other. They do not agree, exactly, about what trust that was or why his behavior offended so many people. The play within a play can cause all sorts of problems when others don't know the frame in which you are operating.
Oddly, the online community is far more generous toward women who pretend to be men, and it is rare for Internet users to show outrage at this gender deception. How much women do this is not really known, though MUD administrators report that women gender-swap far less frequently than men. More commonly, women choose gender-neutral names, especially to avoid online harassment.
Gender-swapping, or any deliberate demographic disconnect between your real self and your online persona, could be considered fanciful role-playing, or it could be classified as outright lying. What we reveal to others online is so easily exaggerated or falsified that it makes the environment a very tempting place to conduct a few experiments.