At the same time women on the Internet can enjoy less of the sort of attention they desire. Some Netfolks don’t pay as much attention to the public messages of women, and besides, female Internauts may not want to post anyway in some areas, given the outright insults and sarcasm that may await them. Women seek harmony and compromise; much of the Net thrives on controversy.
My wife, who, like most of her gender on the Internet, hates flame wars, has even run across a newsgroup whose people venture forth to start arguments in other groups. What is a hobby to some men can be an antisocial practice to women. Many women hesitate to speak up on the Net, whatever the topic under discussion. Disturbing statistics come from Gladys We, a graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Writing in the magazine Virtual Culture, she says at least four-fifths of several hundred postings to alt.feminism were by men. She tallied figures almost as lopsided in soc.women. “Only in soc.feminism,” We writes, “amid accusations of censorship, were there comparable numbers of postings from women and men.”
Given the obstacles that women often face on the Internet, then, it is amazing at times that any romances happen there. When they do, yet another danger arises—the risk of missed cues. A friendship online may cause either sex to ignore mismatched words and gestures that might put them on guard. One Los Angeles women met her boyfriend on a BBS and suffered a disaster that could just as well have happened by way of the Net. He got her pregnant, begged her not to abort, married her, and made life a real hell, not just a virtual one, until they divorced.
Worrisome, too, are the eternal tensions that go on in cyberspace between sincere Befrienders and not-so-sincere Gamesplayers, who the former have trouble detecting. The Befrienders seek friends and lovers; the Gamesplayers would just as soon toy with a human as hack a program. An argument might even be made that high tech attracts more than its share of people who thrive on impermanence. You do not last long in computers if you believe that Pentium-level chips are forever, or that 28.8K-bps modems are more than throwaway technology in the general scheme of things. Faster chips, higher speed modems, and new girlfriends or boyfriends are sure to come along. That’s the mind-set. Let’s just hope that the girlfriends and boyfriends will last.
“I am burning with a need to talk with you, to share with you my fears, my joys,” one Australian women cooed via modem to a man in the Canadian province of Alberta. Within two weeks her ardor did not just cool, it inexplicably froze. “This is the very last time I will write to you,” she said. Very possibly—we can’t say for sure without ESP—the Australian woman was a Gamesplayer.
Gamesplayers enjoy at least one big advantage on the Internet. They can post their electronic want ads through computers, known as anonymous servers, that strip their names and other compromising identifiers.[[7.3]] And replies can come through anonymous servers. The same technology used to protect privacy can let Gamesplayers fool victim after victim, and even mask genders. Particularly in fantasy games on the Net you can never be sure if you’re typing to a woman or a man who just wants more attention—abusive or not. What’s more, for the skillful there are ways to forge messages to unsuspecting neophytes.
Another negative is that the Net can be as helpful to adulterers as to the moral and sincere. A techie has just poured out to me a story of the kind that Carson McCullers would have written if she had fixated on the Internet rather than on the American South. His wife, the mother of two children, has been using the Net to cheat on him in a massive way. She befriended two alcoholics by way of her modem, the marriage counselor says he has done all he could, and now comes word that she just might have the AIDS virus; I hear it’s too early for a conclusive HIV test.
If sexual excitement is the only goal of certain Netfolks, and if the crowd in alt.sex.wanted is too creepy, some professional women just might meet their needs. As noted earlier in this book, a little outfit called Brandy’s Babes advertised on the World Wide Web—complete with hints of more than just visual stimuli. The babes are apparently off the Net now, but some would say that successors are inevitable. In limited ways the Net and the world of professional sex are much alike: both have their jargon and, for those who seek it, their anonymity.
Both worlds are rich in eccentrics. For example, I recently ran across a woman in her late forties who was about to bear a baby with a computer scientist she met on the Net “an hour before April Fool’s Day.” She says the child was accidentally “conceived about two weeks after meeting ‘in the flesh.’ We are having the baby first. Then we will talk about marriage on a serious basis. I’m delighted at the prospect of being a mum at last, and I am not your average clunky woman at all. I generally feel much better about myself. I introduced Tom to sex, and he says he had no idea how cuddle-deprived he was. He’s now quite addicted to me.” Tom and his computer are now part of her household; like many Netfolks he can use his modem to work virtually anywhere, which in some cases is yet another advantage of online romance.
Like most denizens of the Internet, the e-mail lovers just mentioned are well educated. And, although the woman was between jobs, Netfolks are normally at least affluent. If they are students, their parents are middle class or better. While the price of Internet service is coming down, and while access is free in some cities and at many American colleges, the Net doesn’t exactly teem with welfare mothers.