Subject: Re: gender knowledge
On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 07:44:16PM -0500, dpres typed like the wind:
> One good reason not to is that many people online fictionalize their gender.
This is SUCH a myth.
Out of dozens of people I've met online,
not one has fictionalised their gender.
Out of hundreds of people I know offline
and who are online, not one has fictionalised their gender. [1]
And I know straights, gays, males, females, TVs,
and at least one non-sexual being.
'On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog' -
when was the last time you came home
and found Shep and Rover growling at people in AOL fora?
Drew.
[1] Excluding the usual experimental five minutes on lambda
as the opposite gender before you get bored with it.
******************
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 17:31:30 -0500
From: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Re: gender knowledge
I agree; it does depend where one is, however. On IRC probably 90% of the
women are male. But somehow through Sandy Stone & chatroom stories people
get the idea that masquerading is everywhere.
I've met dozens of people (maybe well over 100) from Cybermind in real
life and almost always they seem as if I've known them for a long time.
I've never met anyone masquerading re: gender - Alan
On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Gothwalker wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 07:44:16PM -0500, dpres typed like the wind:
> > One good reason not to is that many people online fictionalize their gender.
>
> This is SUCH a myth.
[[snip]]
******************
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 15:29:38 +0000
From: Jon Marshall
Subject: gender knowledge/'impersonation'
Maybe we can investigate this subject of 'gender impersonation'
then, and people's experiences of that.
So Have you ever tried to portray yourself as a person of another
gender, to your usual one, online?
In what circumstances did you do this?
Was it on MOO/MUD etc, IRC, ICQ, Newsgroups, Mailing
lists etc?
Have you known anyone else who did this?
In what circumstances did they do this?
Have you ever been shocked/disappointed to find that someone was
not the gender you thought they were, or they presented
themself as?
What was the nature of your relationship?
In what kind of Internet forum did it mainly occur?
When someone uses spivak, or some other gender neutral
pronouns in refering to themselves, do you try to find
out what gender they 'really' are?
jon
On 2 Feb 01, at 17:31, Alan Sondheim wrote:
> I agree; it does depend where one is, however. On IRC probably 90% of
> the women are male. But somehow through Sandy Stone & chatroom stories
> people get the idea that masquerading is everywhere. [[snip]]
******************
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 03:36:02 -0500
From: Dominic Fox
Subject: Re: gender knowledge/'impersonation'
I reckon I impersonate a male speaker reasonably well, although
occasionally the mask slips and my inner hysteric flashes the world a
dangerous look. At least, that's my stereotypical male fantasy...
Rather than the rhetorical question, "What does it say about gender that it
can be impersonated?", I'd like to try the question, "Does it say anything
at all about gender that it can be impersonated?"
Judith Butler says that gender is a copy without an original, that there is
no pure prototype of masculinity or femininity. According to her, gender is
as it is instantiated, in "performance" or, if you prefer, in habitus,
hexis, social action etc.; it can be mimed because it's already a sort of
dumb-show, not the "full speech" of the psychoanalytic subject but the
muted, mutilated autobiography of the body. Conscious impersonation may
leave something to be desired precisely because gender is necessarily
somewhat "submerged", instinctual or habitual - you could cite the moment
in Huck Finn where Huck, disguised as a girl, gives himself away by
catching an object between his legs by closing them quickly - which you
would do if you were wearing trousers - instead of spreading out his skirts.
Sean Hughes once referred to Morrisey as "a man trapped in a man's body",
which I like.
Mostly we are not very good at impersonating other genders, although we can
give a recognisable impression (drag is often about this recognition,
rather than "passing"; transvestism - or at least some transvestism - may
be about "passing" unrecognised as a transvestite, although maybe a delayed
moment of recognition is still being desired - I dunno, ask a transvestite
or two). You could say this is because the real of the body always
intervenes; but I'd also want to bring in the split between "full speech"
and dumb-show, between signification and indication: it may not be the
unsignifiable real that gives you away, but rather the involuntary signs
embedded in bodily hexis, the compulsive gesture, the force of habit (think
mobsters disguised as nuns). Zizek might say this points to the real
anyway: I dunno: the debate between him and Butler is rarefied to say the
least.
Being "gender-free" would mean more, on this reading, than surrendering a
set of conscious attitudes, or dismantling stereotypes; it would require a
substantial upheaval. Becoming gendered is part of becoming oneself; that
is, gender is not simply a superstructure of falsifying roles and
expectations, erected over an authentic ground of genderless individuality.
Engendering is part of individuation - what Jon appeals to as "difference",
in the first instance the difference between "me" and "not-me". It can be
pernicious for this reason - an entire identity can come to depend on the
maintenance of various forms of apartheid. If the difference
between "whites" and "blacks" stands in for the difference between "me"
and "not-me", then anything that threatens that distinction seems to
threaten the very basis of individuality ("communism"!). It's interesting
in this regard that South African apartheid introduced a third
category, "coloureds", which seems to have had a transitional
function...but I'll leave it to someone better informed to gloss this (or
dismiss it).
Although any mention of Andrea Dworkin seems to have an inflammatory effect
on any discussion you try to have, unless it's prefaced by "that fat
fascist bitch everyone naturally and justifiably despises" or some variant
thereof, I would want to cite her discussion of the place of gender
differences in cementing the "fundamentals" of male identity. One thing
that has always been at stake in her attack on what she sees as gender
apartheid is the viability of a male identity predicated on the
subordination of a female Other; she does argue that an end to this
subordination must mean a complete uprooting and dismantling of that
identity.
One of the (to my mind rather derisory and cynical) defences put forward by
the Little Sisters bookshop in Canada against the confiscation and
censorship of imported gay and lesbian pornography by Canadian customs
officials was that this pornography was a vital support for a fragile and
imperilled gay and lesbian identity: that gay and lesbian people needed to
see representations of their own desires, that pornography had a positive
role to play in the politics of visibility. An attack on gay porn is an
attack on gay identity, on gay existence itself, they said.
So much the worse for gay identity, in my view; and what about gay men and
women who loathe pornography and refuse to have anything to do with it? Are
they miraculously self-sufficient, or merely bourgeois and
complacent? "Here at the sharp end, boy, you gotta have your hot prison-
rape scenarios just ta keep going...you straight-acting middle class queers
just don't know what it's *like*..." But I digress. If you take the Little
Sisters' spokespeople at their word, then what you find is that they
fundamentally agree with Dworkin and MacKinnon about the role of
pornography in maintaining sexual identity. It would make strategic sense
to them, as it does to Dworkin and MacKinnon, to attack and try to destroy
any pornography that sustained a sexual identity they thought of as
pernicious and oppressive. The fact that they don't appear to think that
*any* sexual identity is pernicious and oppressive is by the by; although
maybe you could press them on the issue of paedophilia and pornography
involving children, for instance. The point is that heterosex porn, like
gay porn, is seen by both its enemies - Dworkin and MacKinnon - and many of
its friends as something closely identified with heterosexuality: for them,
an attack on heterosex porn is an attack on heterosex identity, on
heterosexuality itself...
******************
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 08:48:22 -0500
From: David Streever
Subject: Re: gender knowledge
I agree with you!
At 09:51 AM 2/2/01 +0000, you wrote:
> > One good reason not to is that many people online fictionalize their
> gender.
>
> This is SUCH a myth
******************
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 09:03:38 -0500
From: David Streever
Subject: Re: gender knowledge/'impersonation'
At 03:29 PM 2/3/01 +0000, you wrote:
>So Have you ever tried to portray yourself as a person of another
>gender, to your usual one, online?
Yes
> In what circumstances did you do this?
>
> Was it on MOO/MUD etc, IRC, ICQ, Newsgroups, Mailing
> lists etc?
The only time I was ever on a MUD.
>Have you known anyone else who did this?
No
>Have you ever been shocked/disappointed to find that someone was
> not the gender you thought they were, or they presented
> themself as?
Haven't been tricked. Yet.
>When someone uses spivak, or some other gender neutral
> pronouns in refering to themselves, do you try to find
> out what gender they 'really' are?
Yes; it's usually pretty easy.
******************
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 09:06:27 -0500
From: David Streever
Subject: Re: gender knowledge
I impersonated a woman once in the one and only MUD I ever played in, but
everyone wanted to have sex with me. I didn't feel comfortable misleading
people (and I wasn't getting turned on by their lines anyways) so I just
started telling everyone I was a guy.
*****************
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 20:06:31 -0600
From: "E. Dettmar"
Subject: Re: gender knowledge
I've always wanted to play at manliness--in much the same way that I should
like to be thought wise or formidable. Not that these are in any way linked
to gender--they are simply a few things that I am not. Somehow, though, I
can never quite make myself do it; discovery seems inevitable. I have an
underdeveloped theory of mind.
Emily
*****************
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 10:50:35 -0800
From: Caitlin Martin
Subject: Re: gender knowledge/'impersonation'
On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, Jon Marshall murmured:
> Maybe we can investigate this subject of 'gender impersonation'
> then, and people's experiences of that.
>
> So Have you ever tried to portray yourself as a person of another
> gender, to your usual one, online?
Yes.
> In what circumstances did you do this?
>
> Was it on MOO/MUD etc, IRC, ICQ, Newsgroups, Mailing
> lists etc?
I had a male character on LambdaMOO for a very short while. I did it
because I wanted to see what it is like to have a male character since I'd
only had same-gendered characters. It was interesting. I had to
constantly remind myself to use the male pronouns when referring to myself
which was quite a trick. As I said, it was a short-lived experiment,
primarily because it was boring as hell. In a world that was dominated by
ment, playing a female character meant a certain amount of guaranteed
conversation (not all of it of a sexual nature). It was simply easier to
meet people in a female-gendered body. I think I also stopped playing the
character because by the time I decided to experiment I already had a
well-established main persona on the MOO that I was very attached to & not
being her was uncomfortable. Not everyone MUDs/MOOs in the way that I
do. Some people maintain a relatively fluid set of identities, shifting
from body to body, but not me. For whatever reason, I tend to prefer a
fairly constant identity, although on LambdaMOO that body has well over a
dozen morphs.
> Have you known anyone else who did this?
Yes.
> In what circumstances did they do this?
I've known some folks who did the gender neutral thing on e-mail
lists. On MOOs/MUDs gender's always been pretty fluid -- I've known girls
who played boys & boys who played girls & girl & boys who played
Spivaks. I've never known anyone on the MOO who used a completely gender
neutral character, interestingly. My latest online obsession, MMORPGs, is
also full of gender play, although it's somewhat limited by the steadfast
(& oddly conservative) limitation on genders available -- male & female
only allowed. In any event, Asheron's Call (the MMORPG that I play) is
full of boys playing girls, including some that I know.
> Have you ever been shocked/disappointed to find that someone was
> not the gender you thought they were, or they presented
> themself as?
Yes.
> What was the nature of your relationship?
list.friend
> In what kind of Internet forum did it mainly occur?
A smaller mailing list broke off from cybermind & FutureCulture (which
used to have a lot more overlap & interplay). It was a mailing list of
women from both lists who wanted a place to interact without the boyz. As
it turned out, one of the people we invited was transgender & anatomically
male, or so we discovered. We had some discussion after regarding whether
or not the person in question got to be one of the girls. In the end,
that person stayed with us.
> When someone uses spivak, or some other gender neutral
> pronouns in refering to themselves, do you try to find
> out what gender they 'really' are?
I'll admit that I'm always curious, yes, but not so persistantly curious
as to be obnoxious. Most of the spivaks I've known on MOOs have been
women offline (information I've discovered after knowing them for a
longish period of time -- to the extent that our online contact crossed
over into offline). The most successful spivak I've known, however, was
male offline. I know e's really male because we've hung out a lot in the
real world. Interestingly, not only is e "really" male, but e's a breeder
& I dated him briefly (he's now married to someone else e met on the MOO).
It's funny to hear you refer to spivaks as gender-neutral since most of
the spivaks I've known think of spivak as a gender in & of itself. They
see themselves as having gender, but not male or female as traditionally
couched. Gender neutral tends to imply to me lack of gender & that's not
how I've thought of this, particualarly on MOO which has a neutral or null
gender category with its own set of pronouns (which isn't spivak, btw).
For me the only real concern ever w/the spivaks I've spent time w/is
remembering to use the correct pronouns rather than defaulting to
whichever set of traditional pronouns defined them in my head. In other
words, I found that I'd made a decision about the person's "real" gender &
I tended to discover I'd made that decision when I typoed while talking to
them & used the wrong either male or female pronouns -- Freudian slip with
lace & combat boots, I guess.
cheers,
c
*****************
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 11:46:29 -0500
From: Cesar Cruzado
Subject: Re: gender knowledge
This reminds me one of my first online chat experiences. I used to have as a
nickname in RL my initials CC. In spanish it sounds like a masculine name but in
english it sounds like "Sissy" which is remotely macho, as I later found out. So, I
picked as OL nick the same initials and started joining some chatrooms, on random
categories.
Imagine what followed. I got hit by a lesbian who thought I was also lesbian
(had said that I prefered talking to women), though I believed she was interested
in me because of my macho talk. And this went so by days. When we got to the point
in which real names and background are exchanged, she couldn't believe I was a man.
And all the time I had no intention to fictionalize my gender.
Cesar.
----- Original Message -----
From: "catcher at times"
To:
Subject: Re: gender knowledge
--- David Streever
The other David said: many people online fictionalize their gender.
> This is SUCH a myth
Well, even if it weren't, maybe I could have great cybersex with a
woman pretending to be a man. ,-)
renata
*****************
There are more comments in the relevance of gender posts. See in particular Part 6 onwards
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