Are there any women in the world who actually enjoy cybersex?

It's a rhetorical question. (Ignore the bitter, pleading tone, that’s rhetorical, too.) I have, in fact, had cybersex with several online partners I know for a fact were actually women, because I'd met them in real life. (Many of them didn't know they were having cybersex with someone they actually worked with or otherwise interacted with in their normal, day to day life, but what can I tell you... they should be more careful who they let know their AOL screennames. Nuff said about that.) And I've also spoken to some of my cyber-partners on the phone, and they certainly sounded like women, and I've even met a few of them in real life, after making their acquaintance online, and established to my absolute satisfaction that yes, indeed, they were women.

So, yes, I know, there are actually real women out there who have cybersex, so, yes, I know, I'm being overly dramatic when I ask, in some despair, are there any actual women out there who enjoy cybersex?

Nonetheless, this is why I'm asking, and I present this sad account, which makes me look exactly like what I am (an idiot, at least, as regards matters of the heart and the gonads), as an educational experience for my viewing audience at home, in the hopes that, as Karl Malden used to intone in those American Express commercials, you won't let this happen to you:

Last week I went out looking to see if someone I know had an MSN profile. I couldn't find one on this particular person (the reason I went looking is that I stumbled across a Yahoo profile of this person that told me a few interesting things I hadn't known before, and I'd tell you what they are, but while I'll bare my soul and my ass comprehensively on this page regarding things that only concern me, I try to be judicious in what I reveal about other people, especially other people who have threatened to call the police on me if I annoy them overly). However, I did find that MSN has a whole personal/profiles section set up for people who want to hook up with other people, and unlike Yahoo's similar set up, at MSN you can email these people for free, assuming you register a working email address with the system. I have a lot of working email addresses (12 or 17, at last count, depending on whether my ephemeral AOL screennames, which flicker in and out of existence like mayflies, should actually be counted), so I promptly registered one, and started sending emails out to likely looking profiles for single chicks in the local area, hoping to make a connection.

(It is a sad truth about me, that I wish I could deny, and yet, in fact, I neither may nor can... when I'm single, which is far, far too often, I'm always looking to hook up. Yeah, I want to be the autonomous, clear eyed, noble loner, the renegade, the maverick, that strong, silent Gary Cooper type, standing proud and solitary outside the herd, resolute, uncompromising, answering to nothing and no one but the dictates of my own soul. However, that guy is a fantasy; here in The World, I want someone to cuddle and buy presents for and go to movies with and occasionally get sex off of a whole lot more.)

So, anyway, I sent out a bunch of emails and heard back from one or two likely sounding lassies and we began to correspond by email, and one of them told me she had an AOL Instant Messenger account, and I currently have AIM on my computer as well (it's free), so last night we hooked up for a pretty hot cybersex session.

Here's the thing, though. When you send an email out to an MSN ad, you do so through a blank form that does not show you the email address you're actually addressing. There's a warning on the form that the receiver will be able to see YOUR email address, but what the hell, I was looking to hook up anyway, so that wasn't a biggie.

However, when I got my first response from 'Courtney', it was a bit troublesome, as the name in the return address slot (that damned snoopy thing I always disable on all my email accounts; if I want someone to know who I am, I'll tell them) was not 'Courtney', it was 'Cal'. This troubled me. Also, the email address my response emanated from was 'war_hawk111' (at some email server, yes, but I'll spare this person your email abuse, while thanking you for the thought). Neither 'Cal' nor 'war_hawk' are e-identifiers that I find comfortingly redolent with cute young femininity (the age given on the MSN profile I responded to in order to contact 'Ashley' was 18, and yes, I'm a letch, but if you want a quality chick nowadays before she gets snatched up by some other poacher, impregnated three or four times, and dumped back on the singles market as a bitter 20- or 30-something divorcee with kids, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do), so in my initial response to 'Courtney's' initial response, I inquired as to, you know, what the hell was up.

Now, here's where we get into the Territory of Mistakes when Cyber Dating... Ignoring Warning Signs. (Actually, I suppose Ignoring Warning Signs could very well be the summation of the whole 'love/romance' thing, but let's not be quite that cynical, at least, right at this moment.)

The fact that I'd gotten an email back from a putative gurl, with a guy's name in the return address slot, and from an email address not lacking in testosterone... well, that was a BIG Warning Sign. There are a LOT of lonely guys out there so desperate for attention they'll pose as women online just to get a little. And trust me, it works... I have conducted experiments myself along these lines back when I was dating Kristy, noting how long it would take me, when online, to get an unsolicited IM, even when in a suggestive sounding adult chat room, as opposed to how long it would take 'KristiKatt', with her female profile, to get an IM. If you've never paid attention to such things, I commend the study to you. It's truly illuminating. Not only will a female screenname get unsolicited IMs much more quickly than a male screenname will, but it will get far more... in fact, if a female screenname signs into an adult chatroom, it will be deluged with unsolicited IMs within seconds.

Anyway, had I been ignorant of the Cyber Crossdressing Phenomena, I might have an excuse for blowing off such a danger signal. As I am very aware of this practice though, well... I'm just an imbecile. I wanted to believe that 'Courtney' was real, so instead of immediately severing contact (and being grateful that 'Cal' was such a bumbling idiot that he hadn't taken the rudimentary precaution of buttressing his impersonation with a female sounding email addie and a female name in the identifier slot, which is easy to do, and makes it far harder to detect gender impersonation), well, I asked about it, giving 'Courtney' a chance to hastily come up with some lame excuse.

Now, as I tend to ramble, let me digress a moment here and say that while, yes, I was indeed an imbecile, still, when one goes into the whole matchmaking scene, one has to accept a certain basic level of imbecility... which is to say, any time you see a picture of a good looking woman who is, supposedly, looking to hook up... well, in our culture, that's a definite flashing red light. Now, there may not be a male impersonator lurking behind that cute image (or, on the other hand, there may very well be), but let's face it, if the image is attractive and feminine, and yet, it's on a profile purporting to be lookin' for love, then there is a variable in this equation that does not compute. Which is to say, quite frankly, no matter what we lonely single shy guys who are terrified of face to face rejection may otherwise want to believe, a female hottie in our culture generally does not need to take out a personal ad to get lucky. So, if you're looking at a picture of a babe, and the text in any way indicates she might want to meet some random stranger she doesn't even know for some sort of intimate relationship... aWHOOgah, aWHOOgah... the alert claxons should, at this point, be going off.

In said situation, with said warning sirens ululating all over the place, what do we lonely single shy terrified guys do?

We ignore it, of course. Yes, it's a big red flag... good looking women don't need personal ads unless (a) they're not really good looking women, or (b) there is something else grievously wrong with this picture, like they're HIV positive, have herpes, or (far more common than either of those, but both are out there) they have kids.

And while many of us lonely, single, shy, terrified guys may be aware of this, nonetheless, we ignore it, because what's the alternative? Emailing some homely chick? Yeah, that’ll happen REAL soon.

Now, I'm well aware the other alternative is to actually go up to an attractive woman in actual real life... one we know well enough to have already determined that she does not have a nasty social disease, or kids, and ask her out, face to face. At which point, she will either politely turn us down and then go laugh hilariously about it with her girlfriends when we're not around, or immediately turn to her girlfriend at the next desk and laugh hilariously about it while we're standing there. Let me stop and think a moment as to whether or not this is a desirable course of action... uh... NO. Nuh uh. Noooooo THENK yew. And why any of us geeks thinks a good looking woman will go out with us if we hit on her cybernetically, when we know damned well she'd rather be beaten unconscious with a rock and thrown into a crocodile breeding pen than date us in real life, I couldn't tell you. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

All right, actually, I can tell you why. It's because we shy, lonely, terrified geeks cherish a delusional fantasy... that somewhere out there, there's a beautiful, desirable, smart, funny, sweet woman, just like Sandra Bullock in all those stupid Hollywood romances, who is sick and tired of good looking studly assholes hitting on her and cheating on her and lying to her all the time, and who, for some reason, can't find a genuinely nice guy, and SHE's the one whose personal ad we are answering. That this is pathetic and insane is something I suspect we are all aware of; attractive women have no difficulty meeting nice guys in real life, we're the ones who hold doors open for them and change their tires in the rain and move their computer monitors from one desk to the other and carry big boxes full of stuff out to their cars for them. However, they do not FUCK us; instead, they airily say 'thank you so much, you're the best!' and then they drive home and hop on the dick of their studly, flat bellied boyfriend, who most likely just got done putting the wood to their younger sister or closest friend five minutes before they pulled into the driveway. As Merlin likes to note with a sigh in Excalibur, "it's the way of things". But we tend to ignore that when we're responding to personal ads, otherwise, we'd just stick our heads in our ovens and be done with it.

All of which is to say, when you're out there trying to hook up online, you're pretty much going to be Ignoring Warning Signs anyway, once you've gotten past the initial 'she sent me a pic of herself and she's a babe and yet, here she is online wasting time with me instead of being in a hammock somewhere with some squash playing Jag owner' stage.

Which brings us back around to me and 'Cal' and 'Courtney', in that, in 'Courtney's next email to me, she explained that she shared an email account with her brother, and, you know, that was why the account seemed to have rather a male sounding name on it (war_hawk) and the identifier had a male name in it (Cal). And, thereafter, every email I got had the name 'Courtney' in the identifier slot, so, you know, that was taken care of, and we could get back to the important stuff, like the sexually explicit emails, the cybersex, and the maneuvering for a movie date sometime this upcoming weekend.

Okay, obviously, 'Courtney's thoroughly lame explanation dealt with nothing and should have satisfied no one. She shares an email address with her brother? Oh, please. In an era where anyone with a 1975 era modem can try AOL for free for 25.6 billion hours and every AOL account can have up to 147 separate screennames, where 90 seconds filling out a form that no one ever fact checks can get you a free email account on Yahoo, Hotmail, Juno, Net Zero, Justice.com, or any of a host of other free net service providers, this is simply ridiculous. Furthermore, what 18 year old girl is going to use an email account she shares with her brother to exchange sexually explicit email with anyone, much less a 41 year old guy? What, she just trusts her brother not to read email that isn't addressed to him? Riiiiiiiight.

I knew all this. But look. This was a nominally cute female paying attention to me, and somewhere, wrapped up in all this (bear in mind, I only responded to local profiles) was the vague possibility that I might actually get to take this nominally cute female on a date at some point. (Yeah, yeah. There was never even a vague possibility of this, and I'm flatly a dimwit for ever remotelybelieving otherwise. All I can say is, that's a very big boat and there are a lot of us in it. So shut up.)

So I just soldiered on, noting these discrepancies, but not, at that point, willing to point a finger and shout "j'accuse, mon petite frommage!", or whatever it is that President Bartlett said to his wife Abby in that episode of WEST WING where he found out she'd only insisted on going to Camp David for Thanksgiving because the President's campaign manager had polling data showing that a majority of voters favored the idea.

(Isn't it charming and endearing the way I throw in these pop culture references all the time, studding them through whatever I write like little sparkling diamonds of wit and topicality? No? It makes me look like a pathetic dweeb with no damn life at all? Well, fuck you, then. Go read Uppity-Negro.com; that's where all the cool kids hang out, and you'll fit right in there, you snide, snarky, judgmental buttnugget.)

As I say, I noted these discrepancies, but, hoping that by some bizarre contortion of sanity and logic perhaps 'Courtney' actually did share an email account with her brother, who wouldn't read any of his 18 year old sister's email, or if he did, wouldn't mess with her about it, and who obviously didn't mind the fact that his sister had just changed the name in the identifier slot on their shared email account to hers instead of his, which would pretty much have to confuse the fuck out of any of his correspondents, I just trudged onward. I did, however, keep them in the back of my mind, and so it was that I asked 'Courtney' to send me another photo of herself, besides the adorable one that had been on her MSN profile.

Now, mind you, had Courtney been able to do so, it would prove nothing. I have folders full of photos of the same girl(s) that I have downloaded from various sites online. Many of these photos show the same girl in varying different outfits, in varying different places at varying different times, and in varying different stages of undress. If I wanted to pose as a chickie poo, any of these folders would offer me a vast range of 'corroborative' non-evidence as to my authenticity, and, well, I'm not a chickie poo, and in fact, have never met any of the girls in any of those photos.

However, if someone, when asked for an additional pic besides the one on their profile, absolutely cannot cough one up... well... it's another flashing red light.

And, let's face it, 'Courtney' to date had not shown a lot of acumen for a cyber-crossdresser. Using an account called 'war-hawk' is a real dunderhead move for such, as is forgetting to change the name in the identifier slot. Clearly, we weren't dealing with an experienced or shrewd feminine impersonator, if, in fact, that was the case. So, it came as no real surprise to me when 'Courtney' regretfully informed me that 'she' didn't have any more pictures of herself scanned. Uh huh. Riiiiiight.

So, I said disingenously, send me the photo of yourself you put on your profile. I thought I saved it, but now I can't find it. And I'd like to look at it while I read your email.

Ah, well, 'Courtney' replied, she... she'd send me that pic later, she had to find it, it was on a disc somewhere. Uh huh.

All danger signals, flashing in bright red lights, with sirens and claxons shrieking in the background. Was it enough for me? No sir, it was not.

However, after a long conversation with 'Courtney' online, which got pretty embarrassingly (in retrospect) steamy... I realized something.

See, 'Courtney' had given me her AOL Instant Messenger handle, 'matricalculator' (she was a math major at a local university, supposedly) and asked me to IM her next time I was online. Since AOL Instant Messenger is a free program, I fairly easily installed it, set up my own handle, and did so, and we had the forementioned steamy conversation, which I enjoyed a great deal. And then 'she' signed off.

And, lying in the afterglow, I only want to learn what she knows... er, sorry, that's a Spandau Ballet song... anyway, staring at my computer screen, eyes not really focusing... I notice...

In my Buddy List window, it's spelled 'matriCALculator'.

'Cal', get it? Name of the hypothetic brother 'Courtney' shares her email accout with.

Cal is, apparently, also someone 'Courtney' shares her AIM account with (and, by the way, 'war_hawk' was NOT an AOL account).

So this means that brother and sister not only share an email account on one particular server, but they also share an IM account on an entirely different server...

And it all came tumbling down.

Oh, I know. It's not like there weren't danger signals galore. 'Cal', if such is his name, was an astonishingly maladroit female impersonator. The good ones leave you hanging, never quite knowing for certain whether you simply did something to offend them so deeply they never want to talk to you again, or if it was just that they took the fantasy as far as they could, and since you started to get insistent on actually meeting them, they finally had to cybernetically disappear (which is as simple as noting you on their Privacy Features, so you may not Buddy List them or Instant Message them any more; to all intents and purposes, they simply vanish... at least, until you look for them from another screen name... which can be illuminating, if somewhat irksome). And, honestly, if you just pay attention to detail, becoming a persuasive and authentic seeming cyber-chick isn't all that hard... you set up a suitably feminine sounding screenname or email addy. If it's possible to fill out a profile, you do so, further fleshing out your female persona. Nowadays a lot of the commercial web providers give an automatic link in your profile to a free personal web page, so go ahead and set that up, too, for your fictional female... garnish it with a few casual, everyday photos, type in a few paragraphs of suitable text (if your female persona isn't supposed to be that bright, be sure to misspell a few words and use poor sentence construction), etc. Do a little research on the basic questions some of us more savvy cyber-letches may ask to trip up the novice cyber-crossdresser (pantyhose size, how you put your bra on), and make sure you can remember your own lies with reasonable consistency and that you always have a convenient, plausible excuse readily to hand as to why you can't do phone sex (guys will always ask) or meet someone immediately (we'll ask that, too)... and you're in. You're guaranteed to garner a lot of attention from horny, lonely males like me, if you want to milk it that way you can get a lot of free porn, and if you're especially sadistic, you can break a few hearts and maybe even make some poor geek commit suicide. It's fun for all ages! If, alas, not for all genders.

On the other side of the coin, spotting the competent, reasonably experienced fake female is much, much more difficult, and of course, as instanced above, our worst enemy and their greatest ally is our own willing gullibility. Like Fox Mulder, we want to believe, and as a general rule, we'll overlook quite a few really stupid gaffes before the light finally dawns. If a cyber-fake is careful not to make such gaffes, we often have little choice except to be played through once more to the same inevitable end we've been played to before, so many times... suddenly, our favorite online girlfriend is never online when we are any more (which means we've now been Privacy Blocked and 'she' won't show up on our Buddy Lists), our emails get deleted unread (always a bad sign, but one that, if we ever do re-establish contact, 'she' can claim was a 'mistake' until 'she' manages to blow us off again), or, every once in a while, if we just got shilled by someone who has a vestigial conscience, 'she' may send us a token blow off email, usually one in which 'she' tells us that the always promised visit has to be postponed, generally because of some horrific event impacting on her health meant to elicit our sympathy (and, if we insist on staying in touch, set us up for a further horrific development that will keep 'her' from ever being able to visit us, due to godawful complications, etc.).

There is, alas, only one way to determine if the person you're talking to is 'real' or not... meet them. This is pretty much the acid test, and conversely, if your cyber-girlfriend just keeps finding reasons why the two of you can't meet, no matter how much she really wants to, well, that's a pretty good indicator the other way.

There are other indicators short of this one, though. As I say, when we're all revved up and in hot pursuit, we tend to ignore them, but I'll point them out here anyway, in hopes of maybe doing someone out there who is already entangled with one of these cyber-incubi a good turn.

(This is a variation on the old standby that, no matter how baffling her behavior is, you cannot simply ask what the hell she wants you to do. Try that once on a girl and she will never go out with you again, trust me. Women want men to take risks, and what they REALLY want is a guy who can read their mind and do exactly the right thing without hints or prompting... and since none of us are telepathic, this means we often do the wrong thing, and then, she never wants to see us again. Yet they regard it as cheating and disrespectful and just plain wrong to simply ask them, "do you mind if I kiss you?" or "would it be okay if I held your hand now?" Women want us to risk rejection; it reassures them that they're desirable, even if they'd rather swallow a live cobra than let us paw or smooch on them.)

So, if you just have to know if 'she's real or not, here's a few things you can try... but do so at your own risk:

On this subject, I will note here and now that I have never, in ten years of cybering and trying to hook up online (and occasionally succeeding) encountered, even once, a partner who actually had a digital camera or a scanner and who was willing to, on the spot, present me with actual proof of such (like, taking a picture of herself holding up three fingers on one hand, or something like that). NEVER.

And, while I have managed to actually hook up, I think, three times with women I met online, none of them have ever been all that physically attractive. Once again: in our culture (and in most human cultures) physically attractive women do not need to get with strange guys in an environment where they cannot actually see or be seen by said strange guys. If 'she' tells you she's a babe, and yet, she's on AOL or Yahoo or MSN looking to hook up with some random male she's never met and knows nothing about... ::bzzzzzzt:: there's something wrong with this picture.

However, if you're a geek, like me, you will continue to ignore that, and hey, as long as you're just looking for a jerk off partner online with no real world consequences, go for it. When you get that urge to move things into three dimensions, though... tread warily. Here There Be Woofers. And Very Fat Chicks. And a whole boatload of guys who look a whole lot like you.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

NOTICE

There is such a thing as a social contract. Even among bloggers. And I pay attention to it.