The medium is the message
God, I feel sorry for men. Probably women are in the same boat, but since I am not playing around online with women, someone else will have to blog about that. And also, of course, I'm only talking here about straight folks; I have no idea what the sociology of gay sexchat is. Again, someone else's topic.
So this online hooking up thing. It's fascinating to me, how it really pushes people into very traditional gender roles, where women are the sellers and men are the buyers and it is a seller's market, baby. And then the reactions that people have to that situation reinscribe it. If you got your entire impression of gender relations from online, you would really believe in the neanderthal caveman stereotype of male/female sexual interaction. (Come to think about it, I think some people really do believe in that, but that's a whole other problem.)
So to begin with, what happens is, guys *always* make the first overture. Being a good feminist, and pretty comfy with my own sexual desire, obviously, I started out by making the first move a few times: but what happens then is you get swamped with responses, so you quickly learn to hold back, to be coy. Men, I imagine, have the opposite learning curve: if a guy is polite and waits to be acknowledged--in other words, if he is, in fact, a reasonably well-socialized guy--he probably runs the risk of getting overlooked. So it perpetuates this "nice guys finish last" bullshit that a lot of insecure men believe in. Now there are exceptions, which I'll get to in the next paragraph, but first, one last piece of evidence for the thesis, here: tone. Men who go too far out of their way to make the point that they are "interested in a woman's pleasure" or "respect the ladies" or somesuch? ICK. It just comes across as (a) creepy; (b) smarmy; (c) insincere; or (d) weak. Like they are either feeding you a line, or else they are trying a little too hard to say what they think "women," as a class, want to hear.
Exceptions: in my very limited and satistically unsound experience, men who are confident and have a sense of humor tend to stand out. You log in to the little sex chat room, and if you're feeling incredibly bold ("you" here are a woman), you say "hi" to the room, and then about fifteen guys all say "hi" back, and then the trick is, how fast can you read the scrolling chat, and how fast can you type? It's like playing pingpong with fifteen balls. Guys who do not immediately try to monopolize you ("Hi, sexy lady! Wanna chat in private?" to which one can only think, "why would I? What distinguishes you from the other hundred and fifty men in here asking the same question?") but who instead sort of broadcast their amusement at the entire dynamic tend to be more interesting to talk to than the ones who, doubtless pushed into pushiness by the medium, lose their sense of humor and start grabbing. And of course, the dynamic perpetuates that, too: if you put off the pushy boys, they presumably either push harder next time, or else overcompensate and end up, again, with the smarmy insincerity and / or weak-sounding problem.
And then, of course, there's the fact that it is a text-based medium. Which means that being able to type and read quickly, and ideally spell, are massive advantages--which is amusing, and kind of nice, since those are not usually areas in which one gets major mating bonus points. It also means that one, or at least I, tend to wind up meeting people who are actually quite interesting: mostly folks who write for some part of their living, but occasionally people who do other things but who happen, sometimes to their surprise, to write well. Being able to broadcast personality in what is, essentially, a rushed and sketchy first draft, is very handy in sex chat. And being able to do so collaboratively--to instantly intuit the subtext of the person you are talking to, to figure out where they are trying to get the conversation to go, and to respond appropriately, as well as broadcasting your own subtext in a way that is suggestive but not so blunt as to be offputting--is really quite the writing challenge. And fun, too.
So it's a weird medium. I think it suggests a lot about the odd intimacy of the internet: the combination of freedom and focused attention that is, I suspect, part of what we all enjoy so much about the (not-eroticized) social aspects of the web. It also, I think, may be a clue as to why sex-based web content is so huge: not just because "sex sells," but because the web as medium is somehow particularly well-suited for sex: intensely private and enormously public at the same time, allowing one to play safely with exposure and intimacy.
I think this musing of mine touches on this post over in Sergei's sex blog (such pleasing alliteration there), though it didn't start out that way.
Anyway, on that semi-academic (read: overly analytic) completely not-academic (read: sex-based) (that's a joke: academics have sex. Only it's not a joke, b/c it's painfully obvious to those of us who blog as academics about sex that there is supposedly some tension there, which is why we're all damn well anonymous) note, I am off for a long weekend. I may or may not post before I return early next week. With luck, I will be too busy enjoying my very irresponsible just-before-the-semester-starts-even-though-I-don't-have-my-syllabi-or-even-my-reserve-lists-done-yet semi-vacation.
And by the time you are done parsing that paragraph, I'll be back.
So this online hooking up thing. It's fascinating to me, how it really pushes people into very traditional gender roles, where women are the sellers and men are the buyers and it is a seller's market, baby. And then the reactions that people have to that situation reinscribe it. If you got your entire impression of gender relations from online, you would really believe in the neanderthal caveman stereotype of male/female sexual interaction. (Come to think about it, I think some people really do believe in that, but that's a whole other problem.)
So to begin with, what happens is, guys *always* make the first overture. Being a good feminist, and pretty comfy with my own sexual desire, obviously, I started out by making the first move a few times: but what happens then is you get swamped with responses, so you quickly learn to hold back, to be coy. Men, I imagine, have the opposite learning curve: if a guy is polite and waits to be acknowledged--in other words, if he is, in fact, a reasonably well-socialized guy--he probably runs the risk of getting overlooked. So it perpetuates this "nice guys finish last" bullshit that a lot of insecure men believe in. Now there are exceptions, which I'll get to in the next paragraph, but first, one last piece of evidence for the thesis, here: tone. Men who go too far out of their way to make the point that they are "interested in a woman's pleasure" or "respect the ladies" or somesuch? ICK. It just comes across as (a) creepy; (b) smarmy; (c) insincere; or (d) weak. Like they are either feeding you a line, or else they are trying a little too hard to say what they think "women," as a class, want to hear.
Exceptions: in my very limited and satistically unsound experience, men who are confident and have a sense of humor tend to stand out. You log in to the little sex chat room, and if you're feeling incredibly bold ("you" here are a woman), you say "hi" to the room, and then about fifteen guys all say "hi" back, and then the trick is, how fast can you read the scrolling chat, and how fast can you type? It's like playing pingpong with fifteen balls. Guys who do not immediately try to monopolize you ("Hi, sexy lady! Wanna chat in private?" to which one can only think, "why would I? What distinguishes you from the other hundred and fifty men in here asking the same question?") but who instead sort of broadcast their amusement at the entire dynamic tend to be more interesting to talk to than the ones who, doubtless pushed into pushiness by the medium, lose their sense of humor and start grabbing. And of course, the dynamic perpetuates that, too: if you put off the pushy boys, they presumably either push harder next time, or else overcompensate and end up, again, with the smarmy insincerity and / or weak-sounding problem.
And then, of course, there's the fact that it is a text-based medium. Which means that being able to type and read quickly, and ideally spell, are massive advantages--which is amusing, and kind of nice, since those are not usually areas in which one gets major mating bonus points. It also means that one, or at least I, tend to wind up meeting people who are actually quite interesting: mostly folks who write for some part of their living, but occasionally people who do other things but who happen, sometimes to their surprise, to write well. Being able to broadcast personality in what is, essentially, a rushed and sketchy first draft, is very handy in sex chat. And being able to do so collaboratively--to instantly intuit the subtext of the person you are talking to, to figure out where they are trying to get the conversation to go, and to respond appropriately, as well as broadcasting your own subtext in a way that is suggestive but not so blunt as to be offputting--is really quite the writing challenge. And fun, too.
So it's a weird medium. I think it suggests a lot about the odd intimacy of the internet: the combination of freedom and focused attention that is, I suspect, part of what we all enjoy so much about the (not-eroticized) social aspects of the web. It also, I think, may be a clue as to why sex-based web content is so huge: not just because "sex sells," but because the web as medium is somehow particularly well-suited for sex: intensely private and enormously public at the same time, allowing one to play safely with exposure and intimacy.
I think this musing of mine touches on this post over in Sergei's sex blog (such pleasing alliteration there), though it didn't start out that way.
Anyway, on that semi-academic (read: overly analytic) completely not-academic (read: sex-based) (that's a joke: academics have sex. Only it's not a joke, b/c it's painfully obvious to those of us who blog as academics about sex that there is supposedly some tension there, which is why we're all damn well anonymous) note, I am off for a long weekend. I may or may not post before I return early next week. With luck, I will be too busy enjoying my very irresponsible just-before-the-semester-starts-even-though-I-don't-have-my-syllabi-or-even-my-reserve-lists-done-yet semi-vacation.
And by the time you are done parsing that paragraph, I'll be back.
