draught only
Online Theory and Concerns
Gender Ambiguity
When we look at the way people portray gender relationships online it is easy to be struck by the phenomena of gender ambiguity and impersonation. There is often a discourse of radical gender freedom - a person can be whomever they want, as in this quotation - similar remarks could easily be found:
"The structure of MUD programs destroys the usually all but insurmountable confines of sex. Gender is self-selected. This freedom opens up a wealth of possibilities, for gender is one of the more 'sacred' institutions in our society, a quality whose fixity is so assumed that enacted or surgical reassignment has and does involve complex rituals, taboos, procedures and stigmas. This fixity, and the common equation of gender with sex, becomes problematic when gender reassignment can be effected by a few touches at a keyboard. MUDs become the arena for experimentation with gender specific social roles, and debate over the ethics of such experimentation. The flexibility of self-presentation provided by MUDs makes it possible for players to experiment with aspects of behavior and identity that it would not normally be possible to play with. Players are able to create a virtual self outside the normally assumed boundaries of gender, race, class and age". (Reid "Cultural Formations In Text-Based Virtual Realities." Master Thesis. University of Melbourne: Department of English, 1994: 60).
Cross gender 'impersonation' was among the earliest things reported about people using MOOs (Curtis, Bruckman). Bruckman also reports that she was disturbed by her unease about gender ambiguity " why should this matter? I am having a casual conversation with a random stranger; why should I feel a need to know his or her gender?", and it is perhaps this question which needs answering more than the related issue of 'why people do it'.
When Using MOOs, people often provide text descriptions for their character or themselves - these are usually activated by an '@look' command ie if you wish to get the description of Rala, you would type '@look Rala'. You might then perceive something like:
You see a short coffee coloured woman with dark eyes, and short black hair, she is wearing a canary yellow tank top and cut off, faded, denim jeans. Her feet are bare. She smiles at you warily and flashes her pointed teeth.
These kind of descriptions, irrespective of the explicit gender claims made by the person, are often thought to give clues to the players real gender. Schaap reports that "Highly stereotypical descriptions filled with clichés are usually considered as failed attempts to either play a character of the opposite gender or as compensation for something lacking in the player's real life" and he quote a female character, Shadow, claiming that: "male players tend to put less detail into their clothing and appearance, female players tend to emphasize the details... i.e. males say "blue" females say "aqua", "sapphire", and "dark navy". Also, females tend to be more careful about what they say and how they say it". As we shall see, there are many other ways that people claim to be able to detect 'real' gender'. Schaap himself is of the opinion that in general males can be distinguished from females as "female players seem to be more interested in role-playing 'social situations,' friendships, affective relationships, social intrigues, etc. where the playing of the role, the identity and psychology of the character and the nature of the interaction are stressed most. Male players on the other hand, most often seem more intent on achieving more material goals, such as the collection of in-game money, rare items (preferably weapons) and the attaining of a position of power".
What ever the truth of this ability to distinguish males afrom females, the net world is also not without 'explanations' for gender swapping behaviour. Gender being such a prime category, that attempts to 'mess' with it, demand explanation. Suler gives a list which pretty much replicates the explanations I have heard online.
* Due to the pressure of cultural stereotypes, it may be
difficult for some men to explore within themselves what
society labels as "feminine" characteristics.
* Adopting a feminine role in cyberspace may be a way to draw
more attention to themselves..... The
gender-switched male may even like the feeling of power and
control over other males that goes along with this switch.
* Some males may adopt a feminine identity to investigate
male/female relationships. They may be testing out various
ways of interacting with males in order to learn, first
hand, what it's like being on the woman's side.
* In some online games where participants assume imaginary
identities (e.g., MUDs), being a female may be advantageous.
* Disguised as a female, a male looking for intimacy, romance,
and/or cybersex from another male may be acting upon
conscious or unconscious homosexual feelings.
* Transsexuals (people who feel, psychologically, that they
are the opposite sex rather than their given biological
gender) and/or transvestites (people who cross-dress for
sexual arousal or as an identification with females) may be
drawn to virtual gender-switching. In rare cases,
gender-switching could be a sign of what would be diagnosed
as "gender confusion" - i.e., a psychological disturbance
where one's identity as a male or female has not fully
developed.
Wright conducted a survey of male gamers who used female 'avatars' or characters in games. If we classify games in which a person takes a gender in the game world into the two broad types: of Role Playing Games, in which a major part of the game is portraying a character, and Action Games in which the main purpose is fighting against other players or against machine driven monsters. Then it appears that males that males are slightly more prone to take female parts in RPGs, and to claim they do so in both types of game, because of gameplay advantage. This may be because female characters have special abilities, or because other players are perceived to be more likely to be helpful, or other players are more likely to hold back from killing a possible woman.
Though Wright uses a sample which is too small to give much general information about the distribution of explanations for gender swapping in the general gaming population, several hundred comments on her work have suggested that the actual explanations that males give for their gender swapping, are much the same as the one's she lists: Gameplay Advantage, Adding to the Roleplaying Experience (or sometimes exploring issues of gender for oneself), finding it is more visually pleasing to look at a female avatar, better modelling, variety, and amusement at the response of others. It should be noted that some people who choose female avatars, do not roleplay them as female consistently or at all. Further it should be noted that males who play women, may not do so 'naively', but may make use of sociology and psychology textbooks to flesh out their acting - some evidence that we cannot entirely divorce academic analysis from popular culture - it will be plundered as much as any other myth.
Gameplayers are also split on their perception of their ability to determine someone's true gender. Those who do say they can usually determine gender differences may refer to academic research on differing uses of language by the genders as guides to this distinction - apparently unaware that others are reading the same kind of sources in order to fake their characters.
The main disadvantage to playing female characters as reported by Wright was considered to be " Sexual propositions, harassment, and/or insults, and problems stemming from these behaviors", however a considerable portion of her sample (45%) reported that they thought there was no disadvantage to presenting as female. Perhaps as is to be expected, given the socially negative valuation of homosexuality or effeminacy, the majority of males who admitted to playing females did not agree with the common proposition that playing a female is a way of expressing a repressed or overt homosexuality. We can see here how the gender divide is so binary, that it is assumed that people who prefer their own sex, must somehow psychologically, or whatever, always be like the other gender.
Impersonation of males by females is less widely reported, but is perhaps less likely to cause shock, horror and dislocation when detected, or be of such concern - though why this should be so might also be a question for research. Suler asked several women who impersonated men why they did it, (a change from his apparent procedure of just giving explanations for men) and the answers were "to find out how other females act with men" (this was supposed to enable her to find if she was better at it than other women, despite her not being male to judge) - however she also concluded there was more pressure on men to be entertaining - to practice writing seductive males for romance novels ("I hadn't truly appreciated how much a guy has to constantly maintain the facade of strength. One slip of weakness and the women crush you like a walnut"), to gain game advantage, and to deal better with aspects of their personality that they felt unable to use as women (such as power, rational concern).
It is also possible, usually, on MOOs for people to assign to their characters other genders than male and female. Spivak, using the pronouns e, ier, eirs etc is one of the most common [check up, I've forgotten]. This seems to be relatively rare in other formats, perhaps because the MOO software can produce the pronouns automatically to help out the use.
As we have already said it does seem rarer for women to 'impersonate' males, however in anecdote it is fairly common for females to either not stress their gender or to use a non standard gender, especially on MOO. The usual explanation for this is that it is one way to avoid constant sexual harassment, or interrogation as to whether they are really female.
However, it may be that this 'freedom' to change the gender one presents does absolutely nothing to affect normal behaviour or normal expectations, as is frequently alledged (as in the Reid quote that this section started with). Although the occupiers of gender categories may be fluid, the categories remain as rigid as ever. Herring (2000) writes that: "Herring (1998b) found that nearly 90% of all gendered behavior in six IRC channels indexed maleness and femaleness in traditional, even stereotyped ways; instances of gender switching constituted less than half of the remaining 10%". McRae, who is an advocate of gender fluidity, points out that if someone plays a woman and wants to "attract partners as 'female' [they] must craft a description within the realm of what is considered attractive" (ibid: 250). Springer makes a similar point when, talking of cyberpunk novels and films; "despite the fact that people alter their sexual identities... the texts do not radically restructure relations between the sexes" (1996: 66). As Kendall writes: "choosing one gender or another does nothing to change the expectations attached to particular gender identifications", and no one "encountering someone using the [gender neutral] pronoun e is likely to believe that this expresses their 'true' gender... Some may respect this desire to 'hide' gender, but others probably will not" (1996: 217). O'Brien remarks that in her experience a person who maintains vagueness about 'real gender' is "generally 'dropped' from the interaction" (1999: 90). Clark describes the intensification of gender categories in online teenage dating (1998: 166-9). La Pin and Bharadwaj argue 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", thus implying the reinforcement or exaggeration of gender typical behaviour. Schaap writes "your character must be described and performed within a discourse that imposes quite strict [implicit] rules on what constitutes a convincing female character and what a convincing male character".
Suler, asked 30 women how they would distinguish males from females and received a list of nine questions mostly dealing with products directed at females (clothing sizes, jewellery sizes) or issues about the menstrual cycles. It is perhaps significant that gender should be so commodisised or reduced to one biological phenomenon. A similar discussion on Cybermind produced the idea of panty hose sizes, which seemed to fall down because of assumptions that US sizings would be universal. The final 'guaranteed' check is to meet someone offline, either by phone or in person. The offline is usally held to validate the online.
It is perhaps indicative of this importance of gender that the first questions often asked of a person in a MOO or on IRC is what is your age? What is your sex? And where do you come from? Presumably these questions are the most common predictors of identity and commonality in the West. They help to identify the other and give guidelines as to what to expect from them.
Gender Freedom and Suspicion
This supposed gender freedom is often coupled together with a commonplace suspicion of gender, which is revealed by the many tales of intimate betrayal in which a person turned out not to be the gender they portrayed themselves as. This could lead to two further questions: 'How often, and where, does gender impersonation occur?' and 'Why are people apparently bothered about it?'
Firstly it appears that gender impersonation occurs more commonly on MOOs or IRC than it does on mailing lists. Certainly I have heard of only one case of 'gender impersonation' on Cybermind, and the precise circumstances surrounding that are unclear - though the indications are that the person, though born male, thought of themselves as female. As far as I know this only became a problem when several female list members attempted to set up a women's only list and this person joined that list. On one occasion when Alan once wrote to the list asking about gender impersonation it appeared that there was not much interest in doing this on lists, but some people claimed they had tried it on MOOs for experimental purposes. [[dates etc]]
Herring (2000) writes that "claims of widespread gender anonymity have not been supported by research on online interaction". This seems to be a comment on mailing lists where "users are not necessarily interested in exploiting the potential for anonymous interaction-the use of one's real name lends accountability and a seriousness of purpose to one's words that anonymous messages lack. Accordingly, most participants in computer-mediated discussion groups interact in their real-life identities.... without attempting to disguise their gender".
Most obviously on mailing lists, gender can often be read from the address which may give a common male or female name, or because over the course of time people will sign their posts with a common male or female name. This name visibility perhaps correlates with the lack of pseudonyms used on Cybermind (especially among frequent posters) and perhaps is true on lists in general, whereas on MOO, pseudonyms are standard. All the mailing lists, of which I have experience, tend to be places in which people attempt to manifest their 'real identity', rather than play with identities.
There were cases of gender unclarity on Cybermind, which did cause some members of the list surprise, as when, on different occasions, certain people first realised that dobie and amethyst were male - but in both of these cases neither dobie or amethyst had been actively pretending to be a particular gender, and indeed one of them frequently mentioned his maleness. It is probable that gender is read from styles of post, as well as from straight ascription - indeed one of the people confused about dobie's gender remarked that he had assumed dobie was female because of his habit of putting terms expressive of emotion between asterisks, as for example with *smile*. This again indicates that there are relatively few overt, and probably cliched, ways of reading gender from posts, and of assuming a person's gender, even if one is not particularly concerned. [[There is a further possible case, in which the gender confusion may not be real, but I was told that a person, who most people thought was male and some thought was gay, was actually female. However this did not seem to cause any ructions on the list, and I am not sure of the person's offline gender at all]]
Moving to the second question as to why people are so nervous about the gender of others, we can note that incidents described in most reports of inaccurate gender becoming a problem, suggest that it usually gains prominence when intimacy is involved, and it usually involves tales of males being taken for female, rather than vice versa. It is not actually clear that more men than women impersonate the other sex, indeed (as already stated) there is a large anecdotal body of evidence to suggest that on some Internet forums, females either choose gender neutral names or give off other cues that indicate maleness in order to avoid harassment. However, I know of few cases in which the impersonation of maleness by a woman has produced the same kind of distress which is associated with the impersonation of femaleness by a male.
It is probable that these factors are connected with the role of gender in the construction of intimacy in the offline world, in which it is women who are particularly connected with closeness and exchange of intimate relations. Thus, it appears that most intimate or open relationships for men involve women, and the same may also be true of women - given the indignation with which the offline male gender of a female 'psychiatrist' was taken in a famous case (Van Gelder, Stone). Finding out that a person you were intimate with was not female, almost automatically changes the relationship from intimate into a betrayal.
Another problem arises because of the tie between gender, intimacy, and 'impersonation', is the problem of portraying any gender including one's own. As we have already noticed, on MOOs, where people are able to describe the appearance of their character, character descriptions tend to increase gender stereotypes. Thus males tend to be well muscled and well hung, or intellectual or poetic, and women tend to fit in with our characteristics of the beautiful, or the sexual. Such gender clicheing is often apparent even when the characters have neutral genders, or are cartoon type animals. [[example]] This can lead to a constant kind of worry about the authenticity of the other: do they look as they have described, are the photos they send genuine or recent and so on. This further leads to the issue of when people use sex characteristics during netsex, which often functions as an attempt to prolong intimacy, does their possible use of faked behaviours and descriptions (which they are using to make the situation charged with sexuality) actually delete from the demanded authenticity of their experience?
Male and Female Communcation Styles
Gender is also deduced from other conventional factors which may or may not be accurate. It is frequently alleged that women, being 'more in tune with their emotional side' may use emoticons, which are graphics or terms indicating the state of the writer, more commonly than males. Sudaweeks et al. claim that it could be expected that as AAA female discourse is supposed to be more emotional than male, women online would make more use of graphic indicators of emotion. They found this to be the case (1998: 6, 9, see also Witmer who remarks that in her study it appeared that neither males nor females used emoticons very frequently). This kind of expectation obviously contributed explicitly to some people's confusion about dobie's gender above. I suspect that when words are used to indicate emotional states then it is more common for males to use pointed brackets, as in , rather than asterisks.
It is also frequently alleged that men are more prone to 'flaming', that is to overt hostility, than women, and that therefore lists which have a large proportion of women tend to have less flames- with the implication that people might be genderable by their propensity to flame, or that people might be interpreted as flaming depending on their gender (cf Baym 1995: 158). Colyer writes that (nd) "more female than male respondents commented that they felt uncomfortable in 'flaming' situations". Herring (1994) writes "the simple fact of the matter is that it is virtually only men who flame". "Women and men have a different communication ethic, and male ethical ideals can be evoked to justify flaming". However, in her research, in general both men and women state that they do not particularly like flaming - and there is no indication as to whether the scores she gives are being bent, by people of one gender or other being particularly pro or anti flame. Witmer reports that in her samples of messages from newsgroups or bulletin boards in a variety of settings it was the case that more females used flames than males did. On Cybermind, women were perhaps as prone to flame as men. However at the end of one such dispute in which all the major participants were female another women (probably a new list member) wrote in asking "Are women netters less likely to be flamethrowers? Are we marginalized on the net?". It may also be that what constitutes a flame is different between different people, as Herring goes on to argue personal flames may be generally stated to be unacceptable, but non-personal flames may be acceptable in general to more males than females.
At times having a large proportion of females has been given as a reason why Cybermind tended in its early years to have a relatively low flame environment. However following the vagueness which makes what counts as a flame different among different people - we might note that it is usually *other* people who flame, not oneself, and given the apparently subjective nature of flaming, it is fairly difficult to determine whether it is, as people might expect given our models of males, actually more common among males than females. Some research suggests that it is, and some suggests that the difference is negligible (refs).
Differential Importance of Gender
To some extent these issues indicate that gender is important online, even though people may claim that it is not. In a discussion about the relevance of gender, conducted on Cybermind after this book was announced, several males apparently claimed that gender was not relevant to their experience of online life. Many of the female members then argued that their gender was relevant to their experience. Unfortunately an attempt to get people to discuss their experience was almost completely derailed by the persistent attempts of one male member to argue that gender should not be relevant online because no one could ever be sure as to what your gender really was. Several people commented that this was the kind of behaviour that could be expected from males and so on. To some extent one of the problems in this study is that by stating you are interested in factors of gender, you make gender actually more salient than it was previously and increase the probability that people will categorise themselves or others by their gender, and make the behaviour more structured by gender than it was previously. This is not a problem that can be dismissed lightly, which is why, though often considering these explicit discussions of gender, we must also consider gender when it appears to be irrelevant, and when it is being portrayed outside such a discussion.
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