Lesbians are plagued by jackpuppets possibly quite a bit more than others. Not to deter from your ‘rage’, but I have to make a funny… In the olden days (and possibly still today), yahoo chat was full of pr0n-bots. They also had more than their fair share of guys whose primary language was not English and whose culture was not western. The highlight of many an evening would be watching these lesbimen hit on the bots. Some of the bots were so spammy with scripted convos that the guys actually thought they were getting somewhere. One could tell that they were really getting worked up sometimes. The best part was when they would finally get frustrated with the bot and figured out that something just wasn’t right.

Ok, back to the serious stuff. In all these years of ‘modern web’ as well as the era before (everything from 300 baud direct dial-in up to mosaic ‘browser’), I never had a lesbiman try to get me to meet one of their ‘friends’. I’m not sure if that means we are safer in the physical sense, I was just lucky, or they simply knew it would never happen. I’m leaning towards a mix of a bit of intelligence and a lot of luck. I do still see the potential for predators in the same sort of scenario that you described, maybe with a different risk.

In your scenario, you mention grooming and it’s basically like the guy is trying to set himself up for a date with the ‘you should meet my friend’ thing. While it doesn’t reduce the number of rapists out there, it does increase the chances that there will more desperate liars who hope for something consensual. What I’m looking at with a lesbian scenario is that the potential for a friendly date is pretty much tossed out the window. (sorry for leaving bisexuals out of this but that’s for a bisexual to write about) I think that we have much lower odds of such an encounter but that when they occur, we are more at risk of violent crimes.

The other thing is your mention of ‘harmless’. I’m not so sure about that one. I’m going to make some generalizations here but they’re based on my experience, so please don’t get mad at me for this. Girls can pretty easily get laid. The hard part is getting what we want more than sex and that’s an emotional connection. For me, an orgasm when I’m in love with my partner is vastly more intense than when I’m not. If I’m not in love, I can have better sex by myself. Love is the ‘force’ where attention is the ‘tool’, if that makes sense. What I mean is that lots of loving and flirty attention builds sexual energy and interest to the point that it doesn’t take much skill in the sack to produce screaming orgasms.

I’ve seen quite a few girls go through horrible emotional suffering caused by these lesbimen, myself included. My guydar has been pretty damned good for about the past 8 or 9 years when it comes to more than a simple acquaintance, but a lot of that is due to shitty experiences. You can blame it on naivete, and that is a frequent problem, but a lot of these freaks are pretty resourceful.

Back in the day, we had nothing but text, pics, and phones. Pics are easy to steal, editing software can change a sign being held up to say anything. Pitch-shifting devices can be used on a phone if the guy can’t squeeze his nuts to have a girly voice. Ok, so now we have webcams. It’s not hard to capture video of someone then play it back for someone else. Some might roll the dice and hope they aren’t asked to do anything specific, then before the laws of probability take their toll they suddenly can’t use the webcam anymore for whatever reason. A bit more tricky and insidious, some will enlist the help of an accomplice. Just doing that a few times with the ‘explanation’ that they are using a friend’s computer because it has a cam can add a lot of believability. Oh noes, we’re not friends with that person anymore or I can’t afford my own cam or my connection can’t handle it or my computer’s usb ports don’t work, etc.

My point is that there are a lot of things most people consider forms of ‘proof of identity’ when it comes to online interaction. Any of them can be faked. A few of the right things here and there, along with a lot of talk and attention, and many girls fall very much in love and are willing to do a lot to get these guys off. The harm that can be caused is not small. I’ve felt like a damned fool plenty of times. Friends of mine have gone through even worse, two became suicidal. Both of them were quite well-adjusted and had no such thoughts before, not even from some horrid breakups in meatspace relationships that lasted years.

A lot of what I’ve mentioned applies to everyone, as far as online interactions. Ultimately there is no substitute for meeting in person. For lesbians, specifically, things are different. For one thing, our dating pool is a lot smaller. That tends to make many be more willing to put up with more difficulty than other people would, just for the chance of love. Most of these guys *are* just jackpuppets who will never meet in person but they can still cause serious emotional harm. It’s the few who do hop in the van to go meet up that scare me.

I’m left wondering… How often does one of these guys show up at the meeting place and wait to see the poor girl who’s been stood up, maybe with the typical dimwit idea that a ‘real man’ can ‘convert’ a lesbian? I’ve had plenty of friends who have been stood up for an in-person meeting. I have many who have been assaulted by guys they didn’t know, some in their own homes. How many of these guys wait in the parking lot and stalk my girls to their homes, jobs, or the park she went to so she could cry about being stood up? The last one is the scariest because such a girl will usually call her friend from the public meeting place to say she’s not waiting anymore (safe call, for us kinky people).

Also the ‘predators’ you mention. I have come across those guys who pretend to be women then introduce you to their ‘friend’. But honestly I could handle them. I think you are making out women online need some kind of ‘protection’ from these nasty men and I don’t agree.

Obviously the Alexa/Caitlin issue is different especially as it deals with sex education for young people. BUt in terms of consenting adults chatting online I think you are over-dramatising.

I will say though I find your definition and description of ‘jack puppets’ a bit troubling. I expect those men are exploring something to do with a ‘bisexual’ or even a ‘transexual’ urge. But that doesn’t make them creepy to me. Or even annoying. Yes going looking for sexual experiences on the internet or via the internet with the hoping of meeting in RL can be frustrated by people who are not what they say they are. But it can be frustrated by a whole lot of other things too. Sex is frustrating there is not just a ticket to a selection of people who suit our needs and desires.

Internet life is full of possibilities to play with identity. As someone who has been online as long as you have I don’t need to tell you that.

I think you are being a bit judgemental about those particular people.

@Lia — Thanks!

However, importantly, I don’t believe one has to think “all the guys they’re playing with are dumb as dirt” to think that the majority of the straight men online want to play with biological women, not with biological men. Not understanding how many hetero men play online as women doesn’t make one dumb as dirt. You said that; I did not. I think it implies that anyone who does not have the depth of experience *I* have in online chat is stupid. I don’t think that at all.

I certainly don’t particularly feel a need to get hopped up about people who want to play sexually by pretending to be (in the real world) a different gender than they were assigned at birth (and/or now inhabit in real life) for the sake of a fantasy, especially in light of how many people do it. I mean…whatever.

For what it’s worth, though, straight men seeking explicit sexual chats with women online DO put a LOT of energy into determining whether they’re chatting with biological women. They really, really do. Saying “I’m a guy playing as a woman because it turns me on” is guaranteed to end most chats before they begin. There are significant exceptions but they don’t represent anything approaching the majority.

So intentionally and explicitly deceiving those guys does seem unethical, yes, but…sorta…whatever. “Bona-fide jack puppets, I believe, are more or less harmless.” Harmless, as in “I (Thomas) have a hard time envisioning how this would *harm* anyone,” so I think in the overall scheme of things we’re in agreement.

Bona-fide jack puppets, I believe, are more or less harmless. They’re not really ethical, sure,

I’m curious as to how you’d argue that playing a role online, with no expectation of a deeper or offline relationship, is “unethical,” especially given that this phenomenon is common knowledge if the jokes I’ve been hearing, oh, the entire time I’ve been online are any indication. Unless you’re assuming that all the guys they’re playing with are dumb as dirt, it seems safe to assume that they’re engaging in this knowing that they don’t know who they’re playing with and are willing to take that chance (even, I suppose, if they’d perhaps rather not know about it). Without the kind of predatory grooming behavior you describe, and with only consenting adults being involved, I’m having a hard time envisioning how this would *harm* anyone.

- long before we all got into cyberspace I discovered that the apparently respectable but needy were capable of doing much more harm to me than obvious rogues. Or to put that another way, if something’s too good to true then it probably isn’t. Alexa was certainly an outstanding example of that, her mixture of masculine/feminine essence was the siren’s song to guys like me.

- your writing’s nearly always scrupulously gender neutral. But in this post you paint a pretty clear picture of a supply/demand balance that’s way out of whack.

I gather you’ve been around cyberspace since the days when we all thought that most women were just as desperate for sex as most men, but just reticent and repressed. A couple of decades on, it’s pretty clear that while women are making good use of their new found freedoms and opportunities, they remain much more discriminating (and less inclined to the zipless fuck) than their male counterparts.

Perhaps sometime you could take a step back from the daily deluge, and blog about the trajectory of roles and expectations since cyberspace went public?