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John Suler, Ph.D. | Rider University | Copyright Notice | This article dated May 96, revised May 97, Feb 99, April 99 (v2.5) |
The beauty, and sometimes misfortune, of the internet is that it offers the opportunity for people to experiment with their identity. One way to do that is to switch one's gender to see how the other half lives. In a text-only chat room the first step is simply to change one's online name. In the visual "habitats" such as the Palace, there is the added challenge of creating an opposite sex "avatar" or "prop" to visually represent one's new self. The choice of name or avatar can greatly influence the image one wishes to cast - Bambi wearing skimpy lingerie, Rocky with sunglasses, Sheila in leather and chains, Lyle playing guitar, Hera in a long, white robe. After selecting a new name and appearance comes the even more challenging task of trying to play the role of the opposite sex person one has chosen. It's not an easy thing to do.
Gender swapping is probably much more commonplace than we realize. Everyone familiar with cyberspace life has heard of or even experienced the kind of dilemma faced by Brad. I have seen and heard of more males switching gender than females. If this accurately reflects the population of cybercitizens as a whole, an interesting question surfaces. Why are males so interested in experimenting with a woman's identity? The answers go far beyond cyberspace and point to larger social and psychological issues. Here are a few possibilities:
I think I can sum up a factor about Genderhacking by repeating a line I saw someone type in a chatroom once: "Won't someone at least pretend to be female?" Lets face it, the majority of users of the internet are still male, and in such an ambiguous environment as the internet, the ability to lose one's inhibitions is quite strong. With a great many horny computer nerds out there, and no counterpart women on the net, I think some men pretend to be women - not because they have any desire to have sexual experiences with men themselves, but because they wish to perpetuate some form of cyber experience. It is as if they are an actor, manipulating the puppet of a women (just as they might in their own mind, during a sexual fantasy) but in this case, they are sustaining the puppet for some other stranger at the end of another modem to play with. Once this cyberstory then exists, it doesn't really matter who wrote the woman's lines or who wrote the man's. For both can enjoy it from whatever perspective that they chose.
Unfortunately, the wide latitude for online gender-switching makes situations like those of Brad much more common. Even though exploring the anima and animus can be enriching, healthy, or just plain fun - hurting other people is not an acceptable outcome. There is a very thin line between the right to experiment with one's gender and the violation of the rights of others by deliberately deceiving and manipulating them. At some point in an online relationship, in order to protect their feelings and even their "sanity," people sometimes find it necessary to test the companion to see if that person is faking gender. Some savvy internet users question their companions as as a kind of subtle, surreptitious detective work. Others immediately and rather presumptuously test the waters as soon as they meet someone who presents as the opposite sex
But can gender-switching be accurately identified? Out of curiosity, I asked a group of approximately 30 women what questions could be asked to detect a male pretending to be female. The questions they suggested all revolved around female biology and products. The issues that surfaced while they discussed the use of these queries were quite intriguing, and controversial. No doubt, people online would experience many of these questions as embarrassing, or as personal invasions into their privacy - so the need to protect one's own feelings would have to be weighed against the other person's rights. Applying them would probably only be appropriate when the relationship had progressed to the point where a person felt emotionally involved with the "female" companion, but suspected that deception and manipulation was afoot. Even more controversial was the fact that not all the women knew the answer to all the questions, which raised doubts about whether there even is knowledge that specifically identifies a female. For some of the questions, there may not be a "correct" answer at all, or the correct answer may depend on such things as your geographical location and culture. Detecting gender-switching might be a matter of determining how many questions the person seems to get "right," combined with weighing the manner in which the person replies to the questions. Does the person fumble, confabulate, get defensive and angry, etc. But even this strategy can fail. In some cases, it may be impossible to tell whether the person is being deceptive.
Here are some of the questions suggested by the women:
Do Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Too?
One reader of this article - a "straight, happily married mother" - e-mailed
me to say that this article had validated many of her own experiences
in cyberspace. She had participated in fantasy role playing, except she
was a woman assuming the persona of a man. She only played the roles for
a short period of time, she stated, usually one evening a week. "I found
the characters tiring to keep up and had to stop. Usually I found myself
shifting into a feminine, softer mood and had to quit before I got my
character in serious trouble. I got too empathic and too flirtatious with
males buddies. I knew my cover was slipping and my true proclivities slipping
out and so I had to kill the character." She listed a number of reasons
why she played those male roles:
1. To find out how other females act with men. This was partially competitive and sexual on her part, she noted. "What do other women do to entice men? Are the other women better than me at it?" She usually concluded that this wasn't the case. She felt other women were somewhat silly and boring. Also, men seemed to have more pressure on them to be entertaining.
2. To practice "writing" a seductive male character. She was interested in romance novels and how they are constructed with a heavy emphasis on the "hero." Whereas the heroine is the point of view, that character doesn't necessarily have to be well developed. The object of the novel, she explained, is the capture and/or discovery of the hero, who MUST be a well defined personality. In her online gender switching, she experimented with hero personalities to see how they affected women. She felt her character was much more attentive and romantic than the average male. She acted the way she would have liked a male to court her. An important realization for her was that the projection of power and competence can be very seductive. "I hadn't truly appreciated how much a guy has to constantly maintain the facade of strength. One slip of weakness and the women crush you like a walnut."
3. To run a clan. In some game environments, a clan is a group of players who challenge and compete with other clans. While some of the clans were lead by females, she had difficulty gathering followers as a female persona. Once she switched to a male character, she immediately became more successful in building and running her group. She also discovered that being a clan leader draws much female attention and that the girls are very competitive in fighting for the position of the clan master's "wife." It was much easier dealing with the competition from male underlings jockeying for position.
4. To experience "power" that she had not been able to experience in real life. As a very quiet adolescent, she felt dominated by stronger willed boyfriends, which affected her development in ways she was still trying to understand. "Donning a male identity allowed me to freely express certain aggressive and powerful actions that I don't seem able to project when perceived as a female. I say perceived, because this was all about how others saw me. All during the time, I felt like "myself" and female. It was just the male side of me that I was allowed to show, but had always been there."
Wanting to correct the apparent lack of
data in this article about female users, another reader offered to share
her experiences. When she adopted the username "The Doctor," she originally
intended it to be gender neutral. Consistently, however, she was judged
to be male, forcing her to correct her companions' perceptions. The perception
was so persistent that she herself came to think of the handle as a male
persona. On one occasion, when she attempted what she felt was a very
benign overture towards a vulnerable teenage girl, the girl interpreted
this as the advances of a "dirty old man." This unexpected reaction suddenly
reversed her perception of her own overture. She was as horrified as she
would have been if she was witnessing some "dirty old man" acting sleazy
towards a young girl. She instantly dropped The Doctor as her primary
handle, after using it for only two days. The only times she reverted
to it was when she felt hurt or vulnerable in a cyber-relationship. The
more intellectual, male persona helped her gain distance, objectivity,
and clarity, enabling her to "get my head together when my heart was feeling
shattered." Why she adopted a male persona to accomplish this is, as she
put it, "a mystery of socialization in a patriarchal society."
'He' was much shyer than my normal 'real' or cyber self, if also 'older', and presumably 'wiser', and I could often 'see' 'him' in my mind's eye, 'wiping his glasses', which I also do not wear, as 'he' hovered as observer on the fringes of a chat, before committing 'himself' to considered opinion. This is very unlike my primary (Aries) identity, which tends to jump in first, boots and all, and ask questions, and, if necessary, apologize for tactlessness later! I wonder if I am an oddity, or are there other women out there who use male personae for similar reasons? I see "The Doctor" as not a little like the researcher's 'grey owl' primary avatar! But this could also be interpreted as a wholly feminine image, i.e. the grey owl of the goddess Athene!
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