1. “Who are you?”: a brief discourse about identity
    1.1 Survey: what identity is
    1.2 Social decontextualization
 

2. Identity as perceived by others
    2.1 Identity based on email addresses and login names
    2.2 Identity formed through text and writing
        2.2.1 Differences in how genders communicate
        2.2.2 Influences of the androcentric English language

3. Identity as perceived by self: the “Identity Workshop”
    3.1 Virtual Cross Dressing
    3.2 Reshaping the Physical Body
    3.3 The Naming Process
    3.4 Results and Effects
 

4. Focus: How female users’ identities are affected
    4.1 Social response to gender deviants
    4.2 The “tomboy” argument
    4.3 Women users as deviants
    4.4 Female response to identity dissonance

Endnotes

Works Cited

Abstract

 This paper explores how the use of CMC (computer-mediated communication) can affect a user's identity, specifically gender identity. I propose that identity is formed and affected as a result of a cyclic interaction between what a user believes he or she is, what he or she projects (concept introduced in Eugene Goffman’s work), how other users perceive those projections and how interaction with that user is affected because of it.

In particular, I focus on how women CMC users’ gender identity is affected by frequent interaction with a high level of male users in a environment that is historically male. I hypothesis that females became acutely aware of their status as a minority and seek to act in a gender stereotypical way to resolve the identity dissonance they experience.

1. “Who are you?”
 
 

M or F? The question of identity, specifically gender identity, is posed thousands of times a second in cyberspace. It's part of the famous identity trinity, often abbreviated “a/s/l” for age, sex, location, and it's one of the first questions asked of an unfamiliar “face” in cyberspace. How old are you? What is your sex? Where are you calling from? Some users anticipate the questions and incorporate the answer into their IRC nicks¹: “Barb35LAX”. “BiGirlInDallas”. The answers one gives to these questions help form a mental picture for the asker when communicating with another human being in a medium where “nobody knows you're a dog”² .
 

1.1  Survey: What identity is

The question of how a personal identity develops is a difficult one to answer, and each theoretical camp has a different opinion on the matter.

Freudism, or psychoanalytic process, explains that identity forms out of the struggle of the id, ego and superego, using fantasies as a significant tool for understanding the rational mind’s diminished power over behavior. Freud believed that dreams and fantasies (and were he alive today, he would include IRC or MUD role-playing as well) are “release valves” which allow the various warring parts of our consciousness be expressed healthily in a society which severely restrains our actions (Kelly).

Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory compares masculine or feminine personality structures to an onion, whose “core” was formed in the first three years of life and affects the “layers” around it formed by subsequent socialization processes (Messner, 1990).

A. I. Hallowell writes that the notion of “self” as a discrete part of a whole, as separate entity within a larger framework, is necessary for a member of a culture to behave in a socially-functional role, such at taking on and internalizing the differences between themselves and others in a hierarchy based on sex, age, wealth, etcetera  (Hallowell).

The notion of “identity politics” that has long been intertwined with the theory of social construction and have been a point of contention in many minority groups. Identity politics are the concept that if a person belongs to or holds allegiance to a certain social group, they are presumed to spend their energies and focus their attention on certain issues presumed to have relevance to them because of their membership in that group. Lesbians, for example, are commonly presumed to be feminist or support research for finding the cure for AIDS whether this is the case or not. Adhering to or supporting causes “assigned” to a person’s social group can affect how that individual perceives him- or herself– and affect that person’s self-esteem if he or she doesn’t feel he or she is being a “good” member of that group (Gergen, 1995).
 

1.2  Social decontextualization

Goffman wrote of two types of information that people give off during an exchange: that which they intentionally provide (such as what you say), and that which they “give off” unintentionally (what you do). During a conversation between two people, one may be looking at the ceiling, yet insisting to the speaker that they are really listening. The speaker then has conflicting information; the listener is communicating non-verbally that he or she really couldn’t care less, while at the same time verbalizing that he or she does. These interactions develop “frames” which are used to interpret the behavior and information a person observes (Miller, 1995).

CMC (computer-mediated communication) has been heralded as the “great social equalizer” due to it’s apparent lack of non-verbal cues, such as race, gender, disability or appearance. Susan Herring called cyberspace “socially decontextualized” (1995). In cyberspace, our “digital copies” are generally only a name, which we can change at any time for any reason, and whatever description we choose to give of ourselves, which can be as close to or as far away from the truth as we can possibly conceive. On Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists, for example, we come to be regarded as disembodied minds who either generate intelligent conversation or don’t. In MUDs, we form images of each other based on text-only descriptions which can be as outrageous or vague as we want. These descriptions are only a jumping-off point, however; how the character or persona acts on a day-to-day basis adds to the collection of impressions and assumptions.

These impressions, I believe, alter the way users respond and interact with each other. Here are some realistic examples:

Through discussion of various topics on a mailing list, you begin to develop an impression of another user as being young and female, due to his or her references to “my school” and “my boyfriend”. Eventually you find yourself referring to experiences that you would generally believe to be outside the experience of a man, and are not surprised when “she” writes back with an enthusiastic “I know what you mean!” Eventually, consciously or unconsciously, you begin to perceive that user as female, and are shocked and upset when you later meet “her” in real life and discover “she’s” a “he”. You demand to know why he lied to you. He insists he never told you he was male.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a “listadmin”, a person responsible for overseeing a mailing list and deciding whether or not a person is allowed to subscribe and participate in it. Earlier in your administration experience you had some difficulty with a user from a certain commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP). This person eventually had to be banned from the list due to off-topic and inflammatory remarks. A few months later, a presumably different user (from a different account) applies to join the list, also from the same ISP. You are now faced with the suspicion that this new applicant may be the same person. Eventually you decide to subscribe the person, but watch carefully for any signs that the new user is in fact the old one back to cause trouble.

You are a player on a MUD, and after a few weeks of learning the game you encounter a character named “FabulousHotBabe” who has “her” physical measurements in “her” character description. FabulousHotBabe dresses in provocative clothing and uses a lot of slang that you’ve only encountered when dealing with other men. Eventually when this character asks to engage in a sexually explicit conversation with you, you decline, suspicious that the user is in fact a male in disguise.

These examples are isolated but realistic, and I will discuss the various implications and elements in the next section of this paper.
 

2. Identity as perceived by others

I believe that contrary to many claims, the Internet and CMC (computer mediated communication), is not totally bereft of social cues; however, because it does lack many of the most important cues we depend on receiving in real world communication, CMC users have adapted by associating certain characteristics and assumptions to the few unique identifying marks all users bear that can be seen by others (Nelson-Klinger, 1993). Lea and Spears (1992) support this by predicting that individuals with too few social cues (such as dress, vocal inflection and gender) tend to invest the cues they do receive with greater (“inflated”) importance. These assumptions (prejudice) created by the cues available in CMC are likely to affect how users relate to each other, even if they never meet in real life.

Two cues present in cyberspace are e-mail addresses and a user’s own individual communication style.
 

2.1  Identity based on email addresses and login names

In CMC, specifically in e-mail and to a lesser extent in IRC and in MUD³s , your primary form of identification is your e-mail address, which is made up of your “login” or account name (the part that comes before the @) and your domain name (the part that comes after the @). For example, my e-mail address is gianna@csd.uwm.edu. “gianna “ is my login name and “csd.uwm.edu” is my domain name.

Just by looking at my e-mail address, one can assume several things⁴. Firstly, the .edu suffix on the end of the domain means that I have an account through an educational institution in the United States, and the .uwm probably means it’s at a state university. While some universities allow members of the community to have free or low-cost e-mail accounts on an educational institution’s server, it isn’t common, and it would be safe to assume that I am a college student or in some other way connected to the University.

Once you start making assumptions (such as me being a college student), you can jump from one conclusion to another until you have a fairly complex mental picture of what kind of person I am. Depending on your individual line of reasoning, I am probably under twenty-five years of age, have a low income, co-habitate with roommates, have a poor work ethic, am more intelligent that the average person, like sports, am disorderly, regularly consume a lot of alcohol, participate in demonstrations, or be sexually promiscuous⁵.

Once someone has a preconceived idea of who I am based on his or her (and his or her society’s) particular set of stereotypes, that someone will then interact with me based on those assumptions. If he or she has decided that I am under twenty-five, then he or she might conclude that I would not know a lot about World War I, for example, and not make an insider’s reference to it. These kind of preconceived ideas could have a great deal of influence on marketing; if I probably don’t have a $50,000 a year income, why should a promoter pitch their product to me?

Unlike a legal name (or a domain), which is assigned at birth by someone else, a user’s login is even better for making assumptions because, in general, the user is allowed much greater freedom for choosing one. There are two categories for logins: system-assigned and user-assigned.

System-assigned logins usually follow the early convention of using the first letter of that user’s legal name, followed by the user’s full last name to create logins like “nsmith”, “glarson” and “dkillian”⁶. User-assigned logins give more freedom to the owner of the account to choose a name, and can be anything from “Sara41” to “Winkie” to “TallGuyWithGoodHair”.  On many systems, a user is known almost exclusively by his or her login name when participating in local (system-only) communication activities, such as chat rooms or system-specific newsgroups. Occasionally, users are allowed to pick a separate login to use when participating in these activities (or remain completely anonymous)⁷.
 

2.2 Identity formed through text and writing

The second, and more subtle, influence of how a user’s identity is perceived is how that user communicates in CMC. Most people, whether they have studied gendered conversational styles formally or not, have a good “gut feeling” regarding the gender of other users based on various conversational clues⁸.

In his book, Whittle describes an event that took place on the Usenet newsgroup he frequented that illustrates this point. A regular participant, who was not well-liked by the others because of his annoying habit of flaming⁹ everyone who disagreed with him, had a fairly distinct writing style (he used a lot of ellipses). This unpopular fellow managed to spoof¹⁰ the e-mail address of another, more respected participant and began sending messages to the newsgroup, making it look to the others that this more respectable individual was enthusiastically supporting a particular product. After some investigation the spoofer’s real identity was uncovered (because he continued to use his distinctive writing style) and his reputation suffered even more when it was discovered that the spoofer was in fact a salesman for the company that produced the product he was promoting
 

2.2.1 Differences in how genders communicate

Whittle’s example mentioned above is a fairly obvious one. Besides individual-specific writing styles and nuances there is the issue of how the two genders¹¹ communicate in CMC. Awareness of this seems to be common knowledge, and We cites one response to her survey that told of a female student who adopted a male name when corresponding with other classmates over a class-oriented mailing list. We’s responder writes, “This use of male names in order to be heard demonstrates that women are more aware of gender in electronic communication to the point where they will hide their gender for fear that it will interfere with the effectiveness of their communication.”

Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker studied gendered communication before the proliferation of the Internet and their findings mesh very closely to other researchers who have observed this phenomenon online in the last few years. Susan Herring (1994) concludes that in cyberspace, writing styles are recognizably, even stereotypically, gendered. Between the various studies, there is agreement on the following ideas:

Women–

Attenuate themselves: Expressing doubt or weakening statements is a typical feminine trait, and is manifested by the compulsive use of “qualifiers”,  words that detract from the conviction of a statement. Add-on phrases such as “y’know”, “don’t you think”, “right?”, “maybe”, “isn’t it true?” are all qualifiers.

Interestingly enough, even though it takes effort to type out an entire conversation in cyberspace (to the point where proper spelling is ignored and abbreviations¹² are common enough to constitute a second language), both men and women have adopted a form of qualifier in cyberspace: the smiley-face (Guark, 1995). Generally referred to as “emoticons”, they all take the basic form of “ :-)”. The smiley-face is generally used as a dampener for a potentially misleading comment, such as a statement made to harmlessly poke fun or one that could be misinterpreted as a criticism. Tacking the smiley-face on the end of a statement replaces the self-conscious smile or other nonverbal cues that don’t exist in cyberspace. Research done by McKelton and Mabry support this hypothesis that women are more likely to use emoticons than men.

Communicate with intent to promote equality: Women’s communication is peppered with phrases of supportiveness, including expressions of appreciation, thanking, and community-oriented activities and conversations that is aimed at making newcomers feel more welcome and comfortable. Women also ask more questions, generally not as a means to get more information (as men do), but to express interest in the writer, and use more “inclusive” pronouns  (such as “you” and “we”). Women are also more likely to appeal to the group as a whole for opinions.

Produce less traffic in public forums: It is common knowledge that women are in the minority in cyberspace, due to a number of reasons¹³. However, the assumption that women would gravitate towards areas where female-related topics were discussed is a reasonable one, and Gladys We¹⁴ did a participant count in three Usenet newsgroups dealing with feminism, expecting there to be more posts from women than from men. In alt.feminism, for example, only %11 percent of the posts originated from women¹⁵, and a staggering 83% from men. So even in a presumably female-oriented virtual space, men attempt to control the conversation, sometimes through sheer numbers.

Susan Herring (1994) writes that “intimidation” was the number-one cited reason in her research why women were reluctant to take part in a flame war, and adds that the male responders didn’t fear or find intimidation nearly as distasteful as the females, but instead indicated they saw it as an expected part of communication.

Another possible explanation to this is the fact that whenever women attempt to “take over” or dominate a conversation in typical masculine form, both men and women vigorously criticize the crusader’s behavior, appropriateness and tone (Herring, 1994). When a woman receives this kind of dreaded, overwhelmingly negative response, they fall silent in protest (discussed next).

Engage in “silent protest”: When women receive a negative response to their statements (or no response at all), they are more likely to opt out of participating in the exchange. Maltz and Borker postulate that women and men actually speak two different languages, which they learn while interacting with their same-sex peer groups in childhood. Because of this “natural miscommunication”, women misunderstand male responses (or lack of) to their statement, particularly due to the lack of “positive minimal responses”. In one study, Herring (1993) calculated that during a discussion on ‘sexism’, 89% of the male-generated postings received an explicit response as compared to 70% of those written by females, and on another mailing list Herring discovered an even more disproportionate response.

Herring also writes that not only more men respond to other men, but more women respond as well. The fact that women-responding-to-women make up the smallest portion of traffic on the studied mailing lists may be in direct recognition of the superior status of men in Western culture.

Make more “positive minimal responses”:  Women use PMRs as a means of saying, “Yes, I’m listening to you, keep talking”, where men use them to say, “I’m agreeing with you.” A positive minimal response, in real life, can take on many forms– an “ummhmmm”, a nod, a hand gesture, a smile or raise of the eyebrows– but in cyberspace they are a bit more difficult to make.
 

On the other hand, Men-

Use an adversarial tone: On the mixed-sex lists that Herring studied, she found that 68% of all the messages posted by men used a confrontational style where the writer distanced himself from, ridiculed, criticized, or otherwise put-down the thread of the conversation or its participants. Herring also found that men more regularly used sarcasm, self-promotion, and name-calling.

Write more lengthy and/or frequent postings: This is the other half of why women post so little to public forums, especially in We’s participant count of alt.feminism (discussed above). Herring (1993) writes, “Thus while a short message does not necessarily indicate the sex of the sender, a very long message invariably indicates that the sender is male.”

Herring cites several examples where the style of a particular writer acts as a dead giveaway to his or her gender, and argues that, in light of these findings, the former assumption that cyberspace was completely bereft of social cues may be incorrect.
 

2.2.2 Influences of the androcentric English language

Social constructivists believe that it is language which determines the limits of our world and constructs our reality, and nowhere else is it more evident than in cyberspace, where typing a word can alter the universe (Budwig). The psychological notion of a schema, for example, illustrates the power of text. Think, for example, of a farmer. You might conjure up the image of Mr. Greenjeans. Simply by you reading the word “farmer” has caused the concept of Mr. Greenjeans to come into being, and in cyberspace where concepts are what your environment is constructed of, a concept is just as good as the real thing.

The ability to paint a picture with words is a highly refined art and billions of dollars are spent on reading material every year. It is the ultimate goal of ever writer to be able to fool his or her reader into believing he or she can smell baking cookies, or feel the softness of velvet, simply by employing carefully constructed phrases. Many readers, devoted to a particular entertainment series, often feel a very real sense of loss when their favorite character is killed off.

It therefore stands to reason that, considering how much power language has over reality, how that language developed and what kind of schema certain words evoke in the population also has great impact on reality.

Sandra Bem (1993, p145) argues that the generic use of the word “man” to include both genders sets a precedence which causes English speakers to internalize the experience of men to be the “norm” by which all other experience is measured, and experience of women to be “deviant”. This subtle conditioning, she writes, maintains and reinforces the subservient position women in Western culture are forced to adopt.

For interest’s sake, compare how the root languages that greatly contributed to modern English define the following terms:
 

By the 18th century the modern restrictive meaning for the word “man” came firmly into being. Even though, in a 1850 Act of Parliament, official recognition was given to the recent conception of a generic, gender-inclusive “he” (thus creating a mandate for “words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females”), the new ruling was conveniently ignored. The effects of this has been documented in history– in 1879, women were banned from the all-male Massachusetts Medical society because the admissions laws used the pronoun “he”– and continue to be felt today in studies of school-aged children that show when the term “man” is used inclusively, meant to indicate both genders, the reader is more likely to conjure up images of the male gender only. The phrase, “this girl will grow up to be a beautiful man”, is awkward exactly because of how we currently think of “man” in the exclusionary, male-only, sense.

The constant bombardment of references to men and maleness surely have some kind of psychological and sociological influence on how female users of CMC come to view themselves. In Section 4 I will more closely look at the potential impact being  in the sexual minority has a female users.

3. Identity as perceived by self: the “Identity Workshop”

3.1 Virtual Cross Dressing

Sherry Turkle writes of what can possibly be the first popular example of gender deconstruction  in Shakespere’s As You Like It, where Rosalind and Celia decide to “pass” as men. The comedy comes into play when various secondary characters encounter the girls-as-boys fall in love with them, but if one looks deeper one can see the potential powerful impacts playing with gender roles can have.

Messner writes that gender identity, rather than being considered something that people have, should be compared to a thread that is woven, stretched, and moved as new pieces of a tapestry are added– identity is constructed, in other words, as a result of that person interacting with the rest of the world.

When you connect to a MUD, you are asked to create a character, a virtual “you”, so to speak, to interact with the other characters in the MUD. In a sense you can play God; you can choose your character’s name, it’s gender, and it’s description. You can instantly shed unwanted pounds, change your hair color, and construct the “you” you’ve always wanted to be. This includes the rare opportunity to try life as the other gender, or with no gender at all. As Pavel Curtis writes, “The choice of a player’s gender is, for some, one of great consequence and forethought; for others (mostly males), it is simple and without any questions.”

Most people do not choose to play at being another gender. Women in particular are more likely to choose gender-neutral identities, especially if they have had former experience with being bombarded with attention because they signed on with a female-sounding name or a female gender (Curtis). Those that do pose as another gender (or no gender at all) are generally committed MUDders, spending a great deal of time in these alternate universes, and craft their characters with as much care as a fiction writer establishing a background for their stories.

Some men pose as females out of curiosity more than deception, to “see how the other half lives”. Writes one participant in the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.mud, “Back when I had time for MUD, I, too, played female characters. I found it extraordinarily interesting. It gave me a slightly more concrete understanding of why some women say, “Men suck.” It was both amusing and disturbing.” (quoted in Bruckman, 1993)

Other males choose to pose as females for the fun of deceiving others, or because of a desire to initiate sexually-explicit discussions with other men (Curtis). Males often log on as female characters and behave suggestively, encouraging sexual advances (Bruckman, 1993). Some experienced cybernauts believe that the most aggressive and promiscuous female characters on a MUD or in IRC are almost guaranteed to be males in real life. Curtis suggests these users could be acting out (latent or otherwise) homosexual urges or fantasies, in the manner that Hedges (1995) argues that some users can find posing to be helpful in determining their sexual orientation and thus solve “identity confusion” through “identity comparison”.

Female-presenting characters, no matter what the gender of their users, are often subject to harassment, challenges to “prove” they are female, unwanted offers of help, “babying” by male-presenting characters. Female characters are singled out on the basis of their gender or a female-sounding name for unwanted attention (offers of equipment, money, information, similar to “picking up the check after a RL dinner”) and sexual advances (for “payment” of said dinner).  This special treatment perpetuates the common misconception that female characters are weak or helpless; not only can it be damaging to female self-esteem and competence, it creates an uncomfortable atmosphere just as it does in real life (Bruckman, 1993).
 

3.2 Reshaping the Physical Body

The people who spend the most time online generally come from the “techie” or (more controversial) “hacker” cultures. This population is almost entirely male, and it’s a common stereotype that they are socially inept nerds.

I had a conversation with in IRC about this topic. Dave38 commented that he didn’t cyber because “he had a life”.
 

-> *Dave38* wait a sec... so you think people who cyber are social losers?¹⁶
*Dave38! * no, just have different interests than me

->*Dave38* have you ever met anyone RL that you met on here?
*Dave38* i met a guy in Washington last month from irc
*Dave38* i was there for a conference
*Dave38* he works at the airport
*Dave38* real looser too
*Dave38* waste of my time
*Dave38* this person has no life
*Dave38* I asked him what there was fun to do in washington dc while I was there and he didn't know
*Dave38* all he does is compute
*Dave38* but really had no social skills

3.3 The Naming Process

Names play a powerful role in our lives; nicknames especially have a habit of following us through life, whether we like them or not. Simply by invoking the hated nickname of childhood can force the unlucky owner to recall unpleasant experiences associated with that name. Bechar-Israeli writes that a nickname probably affects a person’s self-image and the way they are seen by others; think of a person named “Bob” and a person named “Robert”. It’s likely you will conceptualize two very different people  (remember the schema concept).

When choosing a name to use in CMC, whether it be a login, a nick for IRC, or a character name, many people pause and give the matter some serious thought. Most keep the same nick (in IRC) and then become extremely possessive of it, which has lead to the development of Nickserv and other systems of “nick registration”. These systems prevent any other user taking a registered nickname by comparing the user’s domain to the domain it was registered from. If the person taking the nick is really you, and you’re just coming from a different domain, you can prove your identity by supplying a password to the Nickserv bot.

In light of how crucial the available cues in CMC are, it’s not difficult to see why users become extremely attached to their nicks and logins. Taking someone else’s name is a gigantic insult, and I have witnessed it being done on IRC servers without any sort of Nickserv regulation, simply to cause a “nick collide”¹⁷. It’s a common trick to wait until someone leaves the server (for whatever reason) and then “steal” his or her nick, forcing the other to choose a different one to get back on the server to confront the nick-thief.

When a long-term, familiar name suddenly because unavailable for use, whether it’s because someone else stole it, or the user became aware of negative connotations to it (as in Bechar-Israeli’s article), a deep and unusual sense of paralysis suddenly sets in. The user may feel “locked out” of his or her social sphere because he or she no longer has a “key”– an easily-recognizable nick. In IRC and on MUDs, where nearly everyone is known by his or her nick only, loss of that identification can be frightening. If the user were to sign on with a different nick, he or she is essentially a totally different person, and his or her former friends and acquaintances will treat him or her as such. This is why role-playing and posing works so well.

Casual users are more likely to switch nicks, since they don’t spend much time online and they are less likely to have developed a sense of identity for that name. In my conversation with Dave38, he writes about his perceived danger of keeping one nick.
 

*Dave38* so if you keep the same nick you bring the same baggage in every day
-> *Dave38* why do you say that?
*Dave38* new nick, new person, no baggage
*Dave38* there are really no advantages to having the same nick
-> *Dave38* so you go for complete anonyminity
*Dave38* yep

Nicks and names have precisely the same connotations associated with them as user-defined logins, discussed in section 2.1, the only difference being that on MUDs you can generally “look up” the gender of the character in question.

Curtis observes that many nicks contain a quality of “wish-fulfillment”, and there is no set favored category; they come from myth, fantasy, literature, common names of RL, concepts, animals, and everyday objects. Some even take their names from characters in novels or other serial entertainment, and take their fantasy one step further and adopt the mannerisms of that character when interacting with other users.

However, there isn’t as much role-playing (character, gender or otherwise) as one may think; most players more-or-less interact with other players in a straightforward way. This may be because they tire of the effort required (and there is a lot of mental work required to maintain a persona very different from your usual one), or it may be that isn’t simply too difficult to uproot a character from a novel or a movie and play that character out-of-context (Curtis).
 

3.4 Results and Effects

The success of the Saturday Night Live skit, featuring the character “Pat”, is a indicator of our culture’s apparent obsession with gender. The entire skit’s success is based on keeping the audience guessing as to whether Pat is male or female; Pat dresses androgynously, has no apparent secondary sexual characteristics (breasts or facial hair), and affects a whiny voice that would be equally appropriate for a male or a female. For example, one skit showed Pat getting a haircut, and the sign says “Men’s cuts, $6”, and “Women’s cuts, $9”. The audience watches, transfixed, convinced they will now know Pat’s true gender, but are denied at the last minute when Pat hands the stylist a ten-dollar bill and tells him to keep the change (Bruckman, 1993).

In CMC it is possible to not only pose as a member of the other gender, but to not have a gender at all. As I have said, this is the option chosen by many women users who have encountered harassment and special treatment because of their female name or voluntary identification.

Shelley, a participant on a mailing list I subscribe to, is a channel-op¹⁸ and has been having problems with a certain user who appears to switch genders at whim. Shelley expresses her unease with dealing this person in an e-mail to me:

“Does it matter? Of course it matters. I treat women differently that I do men. Only I never knew how much till now. Or how uncomfortable I was saying things to someone I believe to be a man who then tells me she is a woman.”

In everyday life we rarely encounter this phenomenon, but when we do run across a person whose gender is unclear, we find ourselves becoming obsessed with finding out what it is. We examine that person’s body language, how he or she dresses, picking subtle cues and forming an idea for ourselves. We may find ourselves unable to relax and interact with this person until that question is answered.

The following chat log illustrates the unease of not knowing the other participant’s gender, to the point of abandoning the conversation. This is not an isolated occurrence; it is the standard response when I refuse to immediately answer to the a/s/l question:

*mctim* hi
-> *mctim* hi
*mctim* m or f?
-> *mctim* y?
*mctim*  i'm a male U?
-> *mctim* i said y?
*mctim* what's y?
*mctim*  just curious.
-> *mctim* y = why
-> *mctim* curious, eh?
*mctim* yes are you male or female?
-> *mctim* you're going to have to guess
*mctim*  well do have a penis???
*mctim* huh?

<Dave38> Any guys who have female nicks and spoof themselves at being females want to cyber with me as long as they don't let on they are guys and insist they are women and are 22 with long brown hair and blue eyes and 115# ?
-> *dave38* wow, now there's something you don't see everyday
*Dave38* hehehehe
-> *Dave38* so you're really not freaked out by the idea that you're cybering with a guy?
-> *Dave38* or might be, that is
*Dave38* err, actually yes
-> *Dave38* how come?
*Dave38* i'm very against it
*Dave38* i like women only
-> *Dave38* understandable, but if there's no way of finding out if the "woman" is a guy....?
*Dave38* therein lies the rub
-> *Dave38* so you get freaked out at the possibility, but do it anyway?
*Dave38* no, i don't do it
*Dave38* just chatting
-> *Dave38* no cyber, just talk?
*Dave38* right

-> *Dave38* so, seriously, I'm curious why you made the remark you did earlier, about how you'd be fine if someone roleplayed a woman
*Dave38* I was being sarcastic
*Dave38* I would be far from fine
*Dave38* that's what the queers are actually doing in here
*Dave38* is acting like women
-> *Dave38* well, then, how come it bothers you? It's not like you'd ever have to meet the person
*Dave38* i'm reality based
*Dave38* I have to know
-> *Dave38* explain please
-> *Dave38* what's stopping someone from telling you everything you want to hear?
*Dave38* simple, I dont' like guys
*Dave38* period.
-> *Dave38* but if you never knew....
*Dave38* I HAVE TO KNOW
*Dave38* that's why I dont' do it
-> *Dave38* so, the fact of not being sure keeps you from doing it?
*Dave38* yep
*Dave38* it's really not that interesting to me
*Dave38* i have too much going on in life
*Dave38* this is more like a traffic accident to me, where you drive buy and look

Curtis perhaps says it most succinctly:

“Some players apparently find it quite difficult to interact with those whose true gender has been called into question; since this phenomenon is rarely manifest in real life, they have grown dependent on ‘knowing where they stand’, on knowing what gender roles are ‘appropriate’. Some players (and not only males) also feel that it is dishonest to present oneself as being a different gender than in real life; they report feeling ‘mad’ and ‘used’ when they discover the deception.”

A male psychiatrist called Alex became an active member of a CompuServe chatline using the “real” name Joan and a “screen name” (nick) of “Shrink, Inc”. One version of this story says that the deception began when one woman Alex was chatting with inadvertently assumed that Alex was a female psychiatrist. Alex, amazed at the newfound intimacy he experienced when talking to a woman as another woman, he began to log on more and more and built Joan’s persona; a severely disfigured woman, whose shyness about her disability would conveniently serve as an excuse not to meet people in RL. Through many months of online interaction, Alex-as-Joan supposedly gave other troubled woman hope to overcome various difficulties and made many devoted friends. Eventually, more and more people were insisting they meet in RL and Alex began to get nervous. He decided to kill Joan off, and “put” her in a hospital with a life-threatening condition. The uproar was astounding. E-mails of sympathy poured in, and Alex was inundated with requests for the location of Joan’s hospital room so they could send flowers and sympathy cards. In a fluster, Alex told one person the location of this fictitious woman’s room, and when the other person called and discovered that no such patient existed, the lie unraveled.

The backlash was intense, and reverberations of this one incident are still felt throughout the digital community. Many users feel that it is somehow dishonest to misrepresent themselves, that we should resist the urge to deconstruct and reconstruct our identities within this virtual workshop. This issue leads to some provoking questions of how role-playing, posing and misrepresentation can have a potentially great impact on how we interact with each other in RL. If it is this easy to fluidly change from one persona to another, what implications does that have in the real world?

Speculates Dave38 on the malleability of identity:

*Dave38* I do think it will disappear in about 15 years when every computer has a camera and voice on it.

4. Focus: How female users’ identities are affected

Depending on the source, women comprise 10%-30% of all online users, placing them firmly in the minority. Computers, an outgrowth of engineering, which is in turn one of the “hard sciences”, has always been primarily a male domain (Herring, 1993). I believe that constant interaction with men, in a system designed for men by other men, has a significant impact on how women computer users come to view themselves.
 

4.1 Social response to gender deviants

Thorne conducted a series of studies of how children interact on a grade-school playground, and documented some consistent responses to how children perceive those who “cross”, or attempt to enter into games and activities typically considered “girls’ games” or “boys’ games”. The children they observed had varying degrees of success at crossing, and the gender-differentiated playgroups children segregate themselves into are started first by parents and teachers, but eventually children do it on their own (Bem, 134). Bem also argues that this sex-segregation makes gendering easier, and gendering is crucial if that native is to function in a society that has very specific work and social roles based on gender.

Children who do not display appropriate inclinations for their gender, who “resist” gendering, cause concern for parents and teachers. A young boy who shows a fondness for tromping around the house in his mother’s high heels and lipstick may be tolerated when he is very young, in the hopes that he’ll grow out of it, but if it goes on for a long time parents are likely to tell him he isn’t acting appropriately, and hand him a baseball. Even today, there are very deep and subtle rules for acting, for appropriate emotional responses, even for how we think or feel. Anyone who attempts to cross into territory assigned to the other gender is likely to be regarded with as much suspicion and fear as those who refuse to pick a gender in CMC.
 

4.2 The “tomboy” argument

Ask any woman today what kind of a childhood she had, and if she was a tomboy she is far more likely to answer with less regret and shame than a man admitting he was a sissy. Girls who play rough, who get dirty and engage in boy’s games, are far more tolerated by children and adults than boys who take the opposite approach.

One theory for this is that women who act like men, who “aspire towards being a man”, is granted a social boost for trying to be like the dominant gender. This may explain why lesbians are granted far more tolerance by mass society than gay men. Says one male user in Turkle’s book, if you are assertive as a man, you’re coded as “being a bastard”, but if you’re assertive as a woman, you’re together and modern.

On the other hand, men who act feminine, like woman, lose status in the eyes of society because he is slumming, genderally-speaking. He is acting like the subservient gender, and consequently gay men are generally violently hated by heterosexual men, who often regard them as “traitors” to their species.

No study has yet been done as to whether there is a correlation between women who were tomboys as children and their likelihood of becoming a serious computer user, but I’m willing to bet there is. A woman who is used to being considered a gender deviant from childhood on is not likely to concern herself with taking on typically feminine roles in her adult life; roles such as nurturer, mother or homemaker, all which limit or prevent extended access to a computer.
 

4.3 Women users as deviants

Women, by simply being serious computer users, are committing an ongoing act of gender deviance; not only must they resist childhood socialization that warns them away from the fields of electronics, computers, and other hard sciences, but they must take time away from the jobs in the home-sphere that they are programmed since birth to make their top priority (Bem, 134; Truong). Some researchers have indicated that they found less pressure to take on socialized gender roles among white, middle- and upper-class girls, which may indicate why they form the vast majority of the female online population. This illustrates the potential power gender socialization has on the female populace.

Women who participate in CMC almost always have to take on masculine attitudes and mannerisms, sometimes simply to be heard among the hordes of men, producing far much more noise and traffic (Herring, 1993). Women have to strike a delicate balance in their communication habits; they can’t be too quiet, or they will be ignored, and they can’t be too loud, because then they’ll be regarded as unpleasant, both by men and other women (Herring, 1993). Women are also expected to disclose in interpersonal communication (Henley and Freeman) but report feeling unsafe due to media hype of “cyber-rapist” and stalkers online.

Herring made a surprising, and rather depressing, discovery in her 1993 research: women are more likely to “downgrade” themselves in the area of computer knowledge, to rate themselves as less competent, even though they had the same, or more, training than men. This echoes the phenomenon still present in schools today; girls can’t be smart or get good grades in math or science, and girls who do are somehow looked at askance as not playing their socialized gender role in society.
 

4.4 Female response to identity dissonance

Women as computer users, as I have already discussed, are in a position of deviance. They have been subjected to an entire life of socialization as to what they should and should not to, think, say, and feel, to the point where the woman is not longer conscious of it (Bem, 153). Her status as a woman, and what women are supposed to do, does not mesh well with her status as a user, and it is likely that she will experience some kind of gender dissonance between these two roles.

Women experiencing this disharmony may attempt to resolve it in a number of ways; becoming “hyperfeminine”, engaging in stereotypically feminine behaviors (acting helpless, as sex objects, nurturers or substitute moms), to assert their femininity (Bem, 135, 153). As the old saying goes, “when you’re under sixteen, you’re a tomboy, when you’re over sixteen, you’re a dyke”, these women seek to emphasize their heterosexuality and keep themselves very firmly in the submissive, feminine role of society. Many female users I have spoke with say that they like to flirt and be suggestive online because they feel safe; while I don’t necessarily disagree with them, I do ask why they feel the need to flirt in the first place.

[1]  IRC: Internet Relay Chat, a real-time social, text-only medium where users from all over the world can meet and discuss any topic they can conceive of with little to no delay between communications. A “nick” is short for nickname, and is the user’s primary form of identification while using IRC.

[2]  The assumption that you’re communicating with another human can sometimes be false, especially if you take “bots” into account. A bot is a computer program that occupies virtual space in IRC and MUDs, and can be programmed to perform many functions from general housekeeping dutites to acting as an AI (artificial intelligence) by simulating human interaction, even to the point of flirting with other users. For more information on bots and the area of AI, I recommend consulting the web page at http://www.vperson.com/mlm/julia.html for information on “Julia”.

[3]  A “MUD” is short for “multi-user-dungeon” or “-domain”. They were originally based on the old Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying popular among college students in the 1970’s, until someone got the bright idea to take away the swords and the magic. I use MUD as a generic term to mean a variety virtual spaces used for real-time social interaction.

[4]  The argument of epistemological theory, or “why we know the things we know”, is too deep to get into here. I got my overview of the subject from the electronic text document accessed at http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Consciousness/knowing_knowing.article.

[5]  These assumptions come from an informal conversation with friends about how our parent’s generation percieves Generation X.

[6]  Very rarely will a system assign a completely random login, like “GVX632”. If a user has this kind of cryptic login, then my arguments regarding logins as a means for establishing identity will probably not apply. An interesting study might be to find out whether or not this kind of random login affects its user.

[7]  I will discuss how the naming process affects the user’s self-identity in Section 3.3.

[8]  Susan Herring (1994) found the same to be true in her research as well.

[9]  “Flaming” is a slang term for a viscous barrage of verbal insults. A “flame” message typically consists of poor grammar, misspellings, personal insults and a healthy dose of four-letter words.

[10]  To “spoof” is to imitate.

[11]  The notion of there being only two genders has been challenged by transgendered and androgynous individuals. For more information on this idea, I recommend consulting the work of Kate Bornestein and Allucquere Rosanne Stone.

[12]  Some common abbreviations are: AFK (away from keyboard), BTW (by the way), ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), and my personal favorite, RTFM (read the f***ing manual).

[13]  Reasons such as socialized phobia of math and scientific fields, less access to computers due to more time being spent taking care of a family, or less access because they are rarely employed in jobs where using computers is part of her duties. See section 4.2 for more discussion on how this affects women’s self-identity.

[14]  We, 1993.

[15]  Unfortunately, We did not specify how she determined the gender of the poster. Only %6 of the posts she surveyed were chalked up under “undeterminable”.

[16]  Lines prefaced with a “->” mark indicate that’s what I said, lines with no mark are what the other person said.

[17]  A nick collide occurs when there are two users attempting to use the same name, and the server throws off one of the users (usually the last one on).

[18]  Channel-operator, a user with certain administration powers over a channel in IRC, responsible for maintaing the channel and performing certain housekeeping duties, like kicking out distruptive users. In many channels, bots take over these responsibilies.

[19]  I never did tell Dave38 my gender; I logged off amid a flurry of questions and as far as I know, he’s still wondering.

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