When I first heard about this I thought it was kinda weird, but lately it seems to me to be an accepted and rather prevelent phenomenon. Is it done simply for fun and trickery, or is it indicative of some deeper sociopathological misfunction?
(IOW, if my friend busted her BF doing this stuff, should she be worried? I told her I’d take it to the experts! Please help!)
Thanks,
A girl
I think people who do stuff like that just want the satisfaction of fooling someone… like it’s really hard to do…
Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,
hate me because i’m an arrogant bastard.
Are you really a girl?
You’ll never know.
What’s the attraction of a MPSIMS question pretending to be a GQ question?
Sorry, I wasn’t sure where to post it. It wasn’t something “pointless to share,” it’s a question, so I put it in here. I’m not trying to be annoying, I really was curious if there’s something to be worried about when someone does this stuff.
And yes, I am…
A girl
Once again, I was trying to be cute and came off bitchy . . .
This is something that has also perplexed me. I wonder if psychologically it is akin to crossdressing, another activity which has never held any particular allure for me.
And although we fully trust the A Girl assertion that “And yes, I am… A girl”, I’m sure you’ll understand why, under the circumstances, we’re going to require a DNA sample.
In most parts of the Internet (and even to some extent in our enlightened corner of it here) posters treat women and men very differently. This is especially true in chat rooms or IRC. Male posters sometimes do not get many responses but a female poster making the same statement will get lots of responses. So, many men (or boys) pretend to be women (or girls) in order to have more people talk to them. This can be just because they want to chat with someone, or because they have a question they need answered and (for whatever reason) more people will answer a woman’s question.
Then, in many locations the posters there will be more polite to female posters and let them get away with more lapses in nettiquitte than male posters. Men also tend to get flamed more often than women.
(My guess on this is that women tend to be helpful to most anyone but us men tend to try harder to help women (and so impress them with our wittiness, charm and technical prowess) than we will to help other men (who we figure if they don’t know what is going on they don’t belong in our turf.))
Finally, there are a number of (mostly teenage) males on the Internet who are rather desperate to talk to anyone female and some men pretend to be women just to have some fun at their expense.
I’m sure there are some other reasons as well but none of them are anything I would be overly concerned about (except maybe the slight tendancy for cruelty displayed in my third case.)
tanstaafl (male)
“Sometimes I think the web is just a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.” — Dilbert
tanstaafl, that still doesn’t explain the phenomenon of straight men going into cybersex chat rooms and pretending to be women, and cybering with another man. I do find it curious…
Heck I used to go into cybersex rooms for a while on IRC just for the hell of it, and no one ever believed I was female.
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
About ten years ago, I actually did this for about 20 minutes on a MUD. I think mostly I was curious to see if:
-
We men really were the testosterone-addled, slavering skirt-chasers that I suspected (Would I get more on-line attention with a female nickname?)
-
We men all had about the same stereotyped ideas about female behavior (Would the sucker have any inkling that I was not truly female, but pretending, in an exaggerated way, to be female?)
-
I could successfuly pull off a mean prank on the guy in the dorm room next to mine (I was young. It was heartless. I’m so sorry.)
The answers, unfortunately, were yes, yes, and yes.
A Girl asked
I wouldn’t call it a misfunction. If it helps you (in ways tanstaafl mentioned) then it can be quite functional.
I’ve never out-and-out impersonated a woman online, but when I first joined the SDMB, I worked hard at not revealing my sex. I wanted to become known around, and then see if people could tell. Eventually, though, I just couldn’t stand not answering certain questions that would give it away, so the (male) cat got out of the bag.
When you think about it, most of us have at least slightly different personalities on-line. I’ve known plenty of people who are shy IRL but gregarious online, or fumbling IRL but eloquent online, or friendly IRL but confrontational online, etc. So in many ways, many people are different people when they post anyway. (I think I’ll ask about this on MPSIMS.) Nobody really cares who here has penises or wombs (or neither or both) except on the flirting thread, so whether you call yourself male or female online is more reflective of your gender (the roles you play) than your sex (your biology.) If a man wants to act online in ways that society calls feminine, and wants to be treated in those roles, I think it would be more accurate for her to call herself “she”.
Food for thought,
Your Quadell
The guy I mentioned in the OP was actually using a name like Lucious36B or something, to intentionally try to lure men into talking with him. He told my girlfriend when she confronted him that it was just for fun, to get the “lured ones” to a certain excited point and then turn on them and dump them. Too weird for me. But now I see that it seems to be a common occurrence, so I thought maybe I was overreacting. I can see having some fun with people once in a while.
As far as my own gender, well there must be a doctor on this board somewhere, I’d be willing to submit to examination. Don’t they need blood for DNA? I hate needles. I’d give my saliva though. 
A girl
I don’t think the doctor will need DNA to see if you’re a girl, there are other ways.
Do you?
Crystalguy
That’s what I love about the SDMB; we can all post like we’re brains in a jar.
BTW, I wonder how many women ever pose as men?
Your brain-in-a-jar,
Myron
Imbibo, ergo sum.
Before I discovered the SDMB, I used to hang out at an online place called hangs head in embarrassment “Bianca’s Smut Shack.” Even there, I spent almost all of my time in “the bookcase,” a “room” that was devoted to more intellectual discussion and featured very little cybering (what little there was usually was the result of people from other rooms looking for a quiet spot to make out). I posted as a male 95 percent of the time, under the same handle as I use here. HOWEVER…
There was a room that was “intended for women”, where all the lesbians hung out, and on average more than half of the people in that room were men (poorly) pretending to be women. I used to go in there and assume a female identity and poke fun at all the poor dumbsticks. I never got caught. There was a certain ironic thrill in having a woman commiserating with me about all the idiot men pretending to be women.
In my case, it was just fun and games. I never tried to seriously deceive anyone or swap emails or anything like that. I looked at it as a chance to exercise my feminine side.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
Girl, (not meaning to sound critical or anything, but I think you need to think about getting a new name, 'cause it’s hard to address you without sounding like somebody on a talk show–“Girl, you get yourself out of that relationship, you hear me?” etc. although maybe you don’t mind that, or shall I address you as A Girl? Or just A? 
People address me as Nott), anyway, are you talking about a sex chat room, or just regular chat, or like what we do here at SDMB? Because I think that if your friend’s friend was pretending to be a woman in a sex chat room, then he was probably doing it just “for kicks”, like he said, to see what would happen. I don’t think it’s a sign of a serious dysfunction.
But maybe he was enjoying exploring what it might be like to be female. So what? Everyone has a “homosexual” side to them, it’s just more overt in some people (and some people are just more in touch with it than others), and I think both men and women enjoy the occasional opportunity to dress up in the opposite sex’s clothes, or to be the opposite sex on-line.
Just because he pretends to be a woman on-line, or puts on a dress for a costume party, or heck, even if he’s a full-bore four-on-the-floor cross-dresser, doesn’t mean he’s sick.
I think it goes over the line if he’s breaking someone’s heart who doesn’t realize the relationship can never come to anything, and it’s truly evil if he’s jerking some poor schmoe’s chain on purpose. Guys have a nasty word for that, when girls do it to them in person, and it’s the same thing on-line: don’t be a tease just because you think it can’t catch up with you. It’s an ugly thing to do to anybody. Some people take all this message board stuff completely, totally seriously (I’m not naming any names… ;)) and you have no way of knowing what’s going through their heads.
But anyway, part of being on a message board or in a chat room is that you can be whatever, and whoever, you want to be.
IMHO, if a poster happen to have testicles and a penis but want to check in as Barbie, or JaneAustin, or XenatheWarriorPrincess, that’s fine with me. All I care about is what he has to SAY.
Thanks, Nott.
Good point about the name thing, I didn’t think about that when I made it up! Most people just call me A girl.
As far as the friend and I can ascertain, this guy was signing on in AOL under his girl name and just waiting for men to IM him. His profile said he was a dancer and a secretary and IIRC something about big breasts, so of course he probably got a lot of IMs.
I guess looking at it from a guy’s POV, a girl pretending to be a guy to have sex chat with another girl, would actually be a good thing! haha!! So maybe it’s not such a big deal…
A girl
You got it.
P.S. Right after I hit the Submit Reply button I realized that maybe you’re the “A” Girl like the “A” List.