American women love Australian men because they speak the same language—more wittily than we Yanks do, of course—and because they all carry huge knives with which they can defend their girlfriends against crocodiles and muggers. Isn’t that so, just as in the movies? American men worship Australian women because we know they are unappreciated down on the sheep ranch, they’re literate, and have brilliant careers ahead of them. Don’t knock stereotypes if they help bring the right people together.
The film Crocodile Dundee may or may not have been on the mind of Laura Goodin when she was wandering through soc.culture.australian. She saw “a message from an Australian composer studying in the U.S.,” who told of “an alternative tune to ‘Waltzing Matilda.’” Laura asked for the music. Within months the Aussie proposed, right over the Net in the same newsgroup. “Congratulatory messages came from all over the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.” Today Laura Goodin and Houston Dunleavy are married and living together in the Washington, D.C., area, with a baby on the way. They exchanged more than 1,500 messages during their courtship, not to mention countless sessions of typing together in Teletype fashion, just as Greg and Sue have done. It is not the same as talking the old-fashioned way but can save enough in phone bills to pay for an engagement ring or maybe a more powerful computer. “A long-distance relationship is hellish,” Laura says, “but the pain is eased somewhat by the Internet.”[[7.1]]
This isn’t just happening on the Internet itself. When a New York City woman was testing a service that became America Online, marriage was the last thing on her mind. Nevertheless she ended up married in Virginia to a lover she met via e-mail. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, met his wife on CompuServe, where, supposedly, she had sought his advice on coping with a liberal professor. A chef and a substitute teacher met on Prodigy and flew off to Las Vegas together, thinking they would enjoy the video poker if nothing else; they won $4,000 and each other.[[7.2]]
A psychiatrist has even written a novel about online relationships, Virtual Love. “E-mail has been called the singles bar of the 90’s,” Dr. Avodah Offit told the New York Times. “And that concept intrigues me a lot. The traditional ways that people meet now do not allow much access to each other’s minds, and that has not led to enduring relationships.” What’s the best place to find out about your potential spouse? By sitting silently through movies or boozing it up in noisy, smoky nightspots, or by sharing intimacies over the modem? “I find people are more open on e-mail,” she says. And I agree.
The Internet, to be sure, is hardly a romantic nirvana, and although this chapter will be positive about net romance for the most part, I’ll mix the praise with some lengthy warnings. Some sections of the Net will please fundamentalist preachers no more than will the red-light areas of New York or Calcutta. From alt.sex.bondage I called up a digitized photo fit for the Marquis de Sade. The caption accurately read, “Japanese girl tied to rack while master pours hot wax on her breast. Looks very painful and her face shows it.” Just about all of those posting to the forum are male despite the heterosexual orientation of the typical messages. This area of the Net is about as woman friendly as Hustler. Offensively, too, the Internet also comes with sections devoted to bestiality, and, yes, discussion of adult-child sex. In every case, of course, society must distinguish between shared fantasies and real acts. (As indicated in chapter 6, Exonian laws aren’t the solution—parental vigilance and access-control software are.)
A more serious worry, from the viewpoint of women hoping for romance on the Internet, is the locker-room attitudes that can show up even in some respectable areas. Consider the cause of this: the numbers.
If you go by one network veteran, fewer than one in twenty of the early Netfolks were female. By popular belief, maybe a tenth of the people on the Net are female, a far smaller percentage than on other services such as Prodigy and America Online. The truth, however, is a bit more complicated. John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell of Texas Internet Consulting, which regularly tracks the demographics of the Net, reported in the May 1995 issue of their publication Matrix News that according to a survey in October 1994, 64 percent of Netfolks were male and 36 percent female. And among educational institutions the percentage of females was as high as 41 percent. Borders between the Internet and commercial services are breaking down Berlin Wall fashion, so you can expect the Internet to show an increasing amount of female influence.
The old stereotype, however, that the Net is male dominated, would seem to hold up for the moment. Even the virtual dating services tend to have far, far more men than women despite, in some cases, better terms for female customers.
The reasons for the ratios are world famous. Computers in the past were to girls what trucks and catchers’ mitts were also: the province of boys. Thousands of men in the computer industry are still oblivious to the existence of another sex. When I write popular-level computer books, male editors often demand that I stick to the technology rather than show how people use it. Most women, however, recoil from the Internet and other high tech unless they see practical reasons for bothering with UNIX commands and similar horrors; they have been raised to favor humans over gadgetry. Let’s hope that the old fears vanish as more women befriend computers and programs grow easier for both genders.
Meanwhile, however, on some areas of the Internet, women can be treated like females in Asian countries that pamper baby boys but all too often let sickly girls die or even kill the fetuses. A few men ignore female Netfolks except for purposes of humiliation, sex, or combinations of the two. Although messages from women tend to draw more replies on the Net than those from males, the end results can dismay; one man reportedly welcomed a woman to a discussion group, launched a political dialogue, then shifted in a nanosecond to a request for a swap of nude pictures. Women tell of weirdoes stalking them via e-mail, flooding their Net accounts with unwanted messages. One victim, as reported in Mother Jones magazine, suffered “an untraceable e-mail ‘bomb’ containing hundreds of sexual and violent messages, the mildest of which was ‘Shut up bitch.‘”