Gender-Switching in Cyberspace - Do Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Too?

  One reader of the previous 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."