I met clay in the basement of a smoky club in New York's East Village. I had brought a bizarre multi-tonal guitar to play at one of the club's weekly open-microphone sessions. After I finished, Clay asked me if he could borrow the instrument. I said, sure, assuming that he'd give up after a few tortured moments trying to navigate the tiny frets. But his hands moved gracefully and he began to play a gorgeous blues tune.
We spent the rest of the night talking and playing music together, next to a pile of beer bottles and a pool table. He looked about 21 years old and wore black. He said he had grown up in Canada, somewhere near Toronto. He had sex with lots of people, men and women. He loved the blues and he didn't want to talk about his life before New York. He was keeping some stuff on the floor of a couple of friends' apartments, but many nights he just looked for a sexual partner and stayed with him, her, or them.
I never figured out Clay's whole life story and I never saw him again. But it seemed that he was following the path of thousands of men and women who have drifted to the big cities to fulfil their dreams and to escape home communities where the woman at the drugstore knows everybody's name. Some become enraptured with the shadows of the city and stay there. Others go for a short trip. Still others do something in between, and look back either fondly or regretfully on their "youthful experiment."
Most of us, at some point, long to be like Clay. We want to fulfil our desires, be anonymous, make up a history if we have to, and wander in the bright lights and the musty corners. But we generally don't. The bus trip's too long; we've got a real life to live; other desires and goals are more important. Now, however, it's easy to be like Clay. Many people are making up their own worlds, having sex with dozens of people, shifting identities every day. How? By going online. Men and women who never would have made it to New York have found their own digital cities. They're replacing their real worlds, and the complex relationships which organised their lives, with the internet.
sex on the net goes far beyond pornographic images. Porn has been around for millennia; the internet has merely increased its scope and availability. The real innovation brought by the internet is the sexual conversation between real people typing at different machines. This is the foundation of the bustling city that the net has brought into our homes.
If you've never been to this city, America Online makes it simple for you. It has created a system almost effortless to set up and easy to use. All you do is press "enter" on your keyboard, listen for your modem, and look for the innocuous image of waving people labelled "Chat" which appears on your screen. Click twice and you'll be transported into the labyrinth of chat rooms on which AOL has built much of its business. AOL's public chat rooms are divided into categories-some created by AOL's staff, some by AOL's members. They range from general meeting places, to discussions about rock stars, to rooms for crossdressers. But in almost all of them, users mainly flirt or talk about sex.
Researching this article, I spent dozens of room hours, saving conversations to my hard drive. On five separate evenings, I recorded chat rooms all night long and found that at least two-thirds of the chat is flirtatious or sex-related. Here's a random selection from the "Town Square," "Arts and Entertainment," and "Romance" rooms. "Ever been with a guy my age?" "I'm about to bang on my dick," "I'd just like Britney sitting on my face" [from the Britney Spears fan club chat room], "Babe, lets go chat personally," and "Any ladies with self pics want to trade? I also have a videophone." In the rooms created by members-"Dominatrix 4 sub m" for example-things become even more interesting. There are also rooms which fill up nightly, such as "xprexteexnxgixrls," in which every visitor is entered on lists where members swap pictures of naked pre-teenage girls.
When members meet in any of these rooms, their common pattern is to talk about sex for a while and then proceed to AOL's Instant Messenger, a program which allows you to communicate with someone else privately in real time-moving from the virtual bar to the virtual hotel room. In the many hours which I spent online for this piece, about 90 per cent of all Instant Messages received were attempted pickups. No wonder Ted Leonsis, president of the AOL Interactive Properties Group, once quipped to the internet magazine ZDNet that 99 per cent of Instant Messages began "Hi, male or female?"
In the real world, it's hard to meet someone; it's difficult to match up sexually and there are a thousand things to worry about-from sexually-transmitted diseases and pregnancy to embarrassment in your home community. This is particularly true for groups which have been stigmatised sexually, such as gays. Over the internet, all these social anxieties are washed away. Anyone can find porn within seconds on the net, and it's easy to hit on someone in a chat room. There's little fear of rejection because you can just bounce away, or change your name. If you are gay, you can log onto AOL and enter one of the numerous "m4m" chat rooms or the slightly less common "f4f" ones; if you are a hairy gay man, you can join "bears4bears." Transsexuals even have their own series of "shemale4male" groups. If you find AOL too tame, switch over to gay.com, a site which leaves even less unsaid. Users creating member profiles are asked to choose their "best attribute" from the following: "Body, butt, cheque book, face, intelligence, legs, personality, sense of humour, or shoe size." Shoe size, of course, doesn't refer to the size of your shoes.
Chat on the net has brought sex into a middle ground between fantasy and reality. One of the big attractions is the opportunity to fill in the blanks about your partners. If the woman of your dreams has red hair and is young and lithe, log onto AOL, enter the chat room, and describe your fantasy partner. Someone will respond with basic details which match your ideal-red hair, 5'8'', 130 pounds-and you fill in the rest of the details. You can imagine them as anyone. You can pretend that she looks like the woman you fell in love with years ago at university, or like the gorgeous young woman you saw buying milk in the grocery store yesterday morning. She, no doubt, is doing the same thing with you.
Once they've chatted a few times, people can begin to develop a pseudo-life online. Here is a conversation on AOL between a woman named Kara and a man named Jason who logged on with the screen names Emeraldeyzs and Cobalt4. They met in a chat group, gave each other sketches of their lives and careers, and began to flirt in the internet's peculiar language, where emotions are expressed by symbols and letters: means "I'm grinning," you show laughter by typing "LOL" (laughing out loud), "ROFL" (rolling on the floor laughing), or even "OTFFLMAO" (on the floor fucking laughing my ass off).
EmeraldEyzs: Do you like Natalie Merchant?
Cobalt4: The singer?
EmeraldEyzs: Yes! She has this one song......
Cobalt4: Yes...
EmeraldEyzs: There is a line in the refrain about "fate smiles and destiny"? ...
Soon they start to seduce each other over the internet and move into a sexual relationship:
EmeraldEyzs: ... pressing up against you. Loving the feel of your skin against mine...
Cobalt4: ... sliding my hand down your back...
EmeraldEyzs: ... wiggling into your hands...
Cobalt4: ... rolling you over on to your stomach, raising your arms above your head.
Their relationship then moved from the tame into the sadomasochistic:
EmeraldEyzs: Can I be forward?
Cobalt4: Please do, I expect nothing less.
EmeraldEyzs: I was thinking how nice it would be to be tied up by you...
On and on it went. They had sex repeatedly over the internet; they tied each other's ankles to the bedboards with silk scarves; Kara acted out scenes as Jason's slave; and they even had an online break-up and make-up session:
Cobalt4: Looking into your eyes as you look into mine... What do you see, Kara?
EmeraldEyzs: Hurt... forgiveness ... love.
Cobalt4: ... holding you close and tight...
EmeraldEyzs:... wrapping my arms around you... holding you so tight... softly crying into your shoulder.
Eventually Kara and Jason decided to meet in person and set up a trip.
EmeraldEyzs: I'm leaving for the airport now love, I can NOT wait to see you!!! Kissing you slow as I go.
But when Jason showed up at the airport, Kara wasn't there. He got an e-mail a day later from her account, saying it was from her brother, and that Kara had been in a car accident on the way to the airport. "She is okay though, just a broken leg, some bruised ribs, and a concussion. We expect they will release her later today or early tomorrow."
But none of it was true. Kara wasn't Kara; her brother wasn't her brother; and she hadn't been in a car crash. Kara was a woman named Deana, one of Jason's ex-girlfriends, who had broken up with him because of his addiction to the pleasures of the virtual world. She'd had a son with him during their real-world relationship, before he left to pursue trysts online. Creating her screen name of EmeraldEyzs was her way of getting back at him for hurting her. Soon, Deana sent her last false message to Jason and deleted the EmeraldEyzs account from AOL.
sometimes cyber-relationships work in the real world. The internet can open communication between people who wouldn't have talked before, and it has created a new form of communication which combines the spontaneity of personal conversation with some of the intimacy of letters. It's a wonderful way to stay in touch long distance, and there are few people with access to the internet who haven't had a relationship enhanced by email.
But relationships which work are usually built on a real-world base and a set of shared experiences away from the keyboard. Relationships on the net which develop without this background tend to fall apart. Online, users build fantasies about their partners from sparse details. When you meet someone online, your perception of them has been boxed into a single scripted dimension. In the real world, no matter where you are, relationships have layers. If you court someone in a small town, you may have gone to nursery school with his brother and you might have a friend who works for his father. If you court someone in a big city, there's more mystery; but you still can sketch in important details just by meeting his friends, finding out where he spends his free time and what he hangs on his apartment walls. You learn whether he's kind and thoughtful-qualities that don't easily come across a digital screen.
In cyberspace, nothing is real for sure and there are almost no reference points. One long-time AOL user I spoke to had an affair over the internet with a man she found incredibly interesting and thought must be very attractive. After a while, he mailed her a diamond ring and she agreed to fly to Colorado to meet him. But it didn't work out. "He was the ugliest, hairiest person I'd ever met in my life," she said. "I faked being sick and went home." In part this failure shows how complicated attraction can be. But it also shows the coarseness and unreality of online relationships. It's easy to build up an intimacy which seems to be worth a diamond ring; it's hard to make the relationship strong enough to get past body hair.
The other problem with online relationships is that it's devilishly easy to deceive. Almost everyone I met online claimed to be between 18 and 25, and very good-looking. People frequently pretend they are a different race, and changing sex is a relatively well-known ruse, called "gender-bending," which 40 per cent of all sex-chat users have engaged in, according to a recent study. One man I met in a chat room said that a close friend of his had seduced another man online by pretending that he was a woman. After cybersex, he revealed his own identity and his partner responded, "that's OK, I'm a woman." In 1998, a couple who married after meeting on AOL divorced four months later when the bride realised that she had actually married another woman-who had covered her chest with bandages and said that they had to avoid intimacy for fear of HIV.
People tell lies in the real world-on street corners, on the telephone, everywhere. But there are ways to figure them out, and it's much easier to track down a real-life person than an onscreen address which can be deleted in a second. It's possible that the man in the chat room who told me the story about gender-bending had made it up. I'm pretty sure that Deana was telling me the truth, because she sent me heaps of transcripts, dated files, and images-and we talked on the phone. But it's hard to be certain of anything on the net.
these fantasy worlds are addictive. According to a study by Al Cooper, a psychologist at Stanford, one per cent of all internet users can be classified as "cybersex compulsives" whose sexual internet use is enough to lead to negative consequences at home and at work; another 8 per cent of all users in the US (about 2m people, the same number as cocaine addicts) spend more than 11 hours a week pursuing online sex. According to James Fearing, of National Counselling Intervention Services, "This has come on so fast that we don't know how big it is. What we do know is that families are breaking up, young people are flunking out of school, and people are being fired from their jobs." Last summer, for example, Kelli Michetti, a 29-year-old Cleveland housewife, attacked her husband's computer with a meat cleaver when she decided that he had been spending too much time pursuing sex online.
To most people, the thrill of such trysts is not in the consummation, online or off. According to Robert Weiss, clinical director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, "Sex addiction is not about sex. It is not about orgasm... It's about looking for sex. Your heart is racing. Your endorphins are pumping. You are in a drug-induced narcotic state." Weiss compares it to gambling, where the thrill comes not from winning, but from watching the dice roll or the slots spin.
The problems of addiction cut across gender-even though many more men are online and men enjoy pornography more than women. Chat, according to numerous studies, is just as popular among women, who are more drawn to interactive sexual fantasy. According to Dr Kimberly Young, of the Center for Online Addiction, men are more "hard-wired" to like pornography, but chat rooms "become a safe forum for women. And they can find it addictive to explore sexuality in different ways."
Sceptics counter that people hooked on online sex are just people with addictive personalities. To some extent this is true, but there is evidence that many internet sex addicts are new to addiction. Mark Schwartz, clinical director of the Masters and Johnson treatment centre in St Louis, says that internet sex addiction is spreading in the way that cocaine spread through white-collar society in the early 1980s. Because of ease of access, "people are finding themselves addicted to something for the first time."
the spread of sex on the net was almost inevitable. As Gerard van der Leun, a user of The Source, one of the first online services to allow sexual chat, wrote presciently in the first issue of Wired: "All media, if they are to get a jump-start in the market and become successful, must address themselves to mass drives... But of all these-food, shelter, sex and money-sex is the one drive that can elicit immediate consumer response."
Another early user of The Source was none other than AOL's future CEO, Steve Case, who was then working for Pizza Hut and logging on at night with a painfully slow Kaypro computer. Case also recognised that a technology had been developed which broke down a sexual barrier-and he marketed it. Sex didn't move into the core of AOL's business as a result of any corporate perversion-the company has now developed one of the best systems for keeping children away from online porn. It moved into the core of AOL because the company wanted customers.
The power of sex chat became clear in the early and mid-1990s, as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy battled to control the internet service provider market. AOL was the smallest of the three, but it began to gain rapidly, in no small part because it was also the raciest: the first company to market its chat groups heavily, the only one to allow private rooms, and the first company to have unregulated message boards. Prodigy didn't even develop chat rooms until it had already started to fade. CompuServe's somewhat similar "conference rooms" were heavily patrolled. Also AOL energetically promoted its policy of allowing accounts with multiple screen names-helping families, but also allowing users to switch to code names such as "hotlegs49" for trawling the chat groups anonymously.
Prodigy was then owned by Sears and IBM, and CompuServe was owned by H&R Block. The parent companies were terrified for their reputations-and worried about potential liability. According to Jenny Ambrozek, Prodigy's manager for Bulletin Board Communications, "It became clear very quickly that IBM and Sears had major problems with being associated with a product that was sexual." Another senior Prodigy employee once told Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal that sex chat is "why AOL has 8m members and Prodigy has faded to a shadow of its former self." There were many reasons why AOL eventually buried its competitors, but sex appeal was a main one. According to a former AOL employee: "If they [AOL] were going to get rid of all of the people who are perverts or paedophiles, their numbers would go down by millions."
There's nothing legally wrong with sexual chat. If someone wants to risk a divorce in order to spend their life playing S&M games on a computer screen, they have and should have that right. But there is something unnerving about this. When I asked Deana what society would be like in a future with high-speed broadband internet connections, she merrily typed back: "Everyone will be fat and online 24/7."
The internet provides an illusion of attractiveness, of intimacy, and of self-confidence. It allows you to have a relationship or an affair without really having to get to know the person you're with; and it lets you end the relationship just by pressing the delete key. It allows you to become blonde or honest by simply saying that you are. It allows you to behave like Clay, my guitar-playing friend, without having to wake up in a strange bed with a hangover. On the internet, we can all live Life Lite.
The cities created by the internet are no longer just easy to get to, and they're no longer just breaking down barriers: with the advent of broadband access and free connections, they're actually coming to look for us. For all the many wonders of the internet, it's hard not to suppose that there are going to be more and more people ending up like Jason: stuck in the dark corners of their carefully constructed cyberworlds, bouncing from relationship to relationship and person to person-letting their eyes blur and the distance between themselves and their computer screen shrink.
