The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] The Glory Days of Online Sex

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on social-networking site Twitter, a tool that allows you to tell everyone you know about how you’re doing your laundry and/or having a gangbang, as long as you can do it in 140 characters or less.

In theory, Twitter is not unlike blogging or LiveJournaling, but using Twitter feels nothing like using a blog. Whether you’re reading or posting — and it’s impossible to effectively use Twitter if you’re not doing both — it feels, instead, exactly like a chat room.

But there’s something that makes Twitter totally and completely unlike a chat room. It consists, for the most part, of real people. To dedicated users of chat rooms in the early days, this is all wrong — all wrong. To devotees of “cyber,” short for “cybersex,” circa 1998, this means that Twitter is as unlike a chat room as it is unlike the Space Shuttle. It might feel like a chat room — but where are all the 18-year-old submissive girls wearing French maid’s outfits, and the built, cut, 6′4″ gentlemen with ten-inch dicks?

I was there in the early days of chat rooms, and I can tell you, that’s who was there with me.

I went to chat rooms looking for sex, which is what everyone seemed to be looking for. And the anonymous nature of chat rooms allowed people to completely blow off any pretense of reality. Why tell people you’re 40 when you can tell them you’re 38? Why tell them you’re 17 and get iggied (ignored) when you can tell them you’re 18 and get all the hot online stud sex your brain can handle? Why tell them you’re 5 inches long when you can tell them you’re 8 inches? Why disclose that you’re brunette when you can be a slutty blonde, or admit you’ve got any measurements other than 38DDD-24-34? Why tell them you’ve had profoundly conventional sex all your life when you can blather on about how you fucked your cousin, did your dig or smoked twenty-seven cocks at a church social and that’s how you learned you were deeply submissive, especially when the pastor spanked you?

That last observation actually grows from another fundamental fact of online sex — for some reason, when the invention of the chat room allowed people to make up any old bullshit about themselves, half of the men around decided to be women — particularly submissive women. Hence, any horny crossdresser savvy enough to locate a photo of a porn star suddenly became a blonde 18-year-old slut with a penchant for double penetration. “That’s really me!” you’d be told, if you were one of their chat partners, and this while you were staring at a picture of Debi Diamond. “And here’s my sister!” Teri Weigel, wearing bunny ears and holding a cream pie.

For the genetic males who were “pretending” to be themselves, or idealized versions of themselves, and were looking for sex with women, there were a couple of years there where, I could swear, we believed absolutely everything we were told. Webcams were not yet ubiquitous; digital cameras weren’t that common. The first demand of the online sex session wasn’t “Give me 30 photos of yourself and/or turn on your webcam.”

No, it was so easy back then! Got an old photo of your Mom in high school? What the hell, send it to the guy you’re having online sex with, and he’ll believe it’s you. Then send him a pic of Vanessa Del Rio with her legs spread, and — yeah, that’s me, too! I don’t know if straight men were actually less intelligent in 1998, or if we were so busy thinking with our dicks that there was no blood left for the more rational parts of our brains.

But it was a short window of opportunity. Eventually, males online who wanted to have sex with women began to get more savvy, i.e. paranoid, to the point where it was almost impossible to fuck with them any longer. Digital cameras became common; webcams got cheap and most laptops came with them.

And for the gay men, chat rooms seemed like paradise. The gay male credo that “on AOL, everyone’s eight inches,” comes from these heady days when you could log on to AOL or Yahoo chat room s and discover a list that ran on for what seemed like miles. There wasn’t just “M2M” or “M2MNorCal” or “M2MSanFran.” There was “M2M94102,” “M2M94110,” “M2M94117,” and when it came to “M2M94114″ — a single chat room didn’t cut it, so there were sometimes several. I have it on good authority that every guy was, as promised, eight inches — until you showed up at their house and they were four and a half, and that picture they showed you? Probably from Spring Break 1980. But hey, that just proves my point: why tell the truth when you can tell a lie? That’s the gift of chat room s: Freedom from the constraints of reality.

It wasn’t, er, quite as easy to have free, random, no-strings-attached real-time sex based on zip code for straight people, but it certainly happened, and straight guys in chat rooms seemed to spend almost all of their time looking for it. Five minutes of chatting, without fail, would yield the time-honored query “when are you flying out from California/ Washington/ Florida/ Alaska to be my gimpslave in Cleveland/ Atlanta/ Montana?” This almost never works, or, more accurately didn’t work back then. But having a full-time barely-legal blonde piss slave with a face like Liv Tyler and a body like Asia Carrera was, apparently, an important enough goal that guys would spend almost unlimited time looking for it, and become complete assholes when they realized that the girl they were chatting with wasn’t it.

As it dawned on the general population of straight males that chat rooms did not generally yield real-time sex, that five minutes contracted. Guys online reeked of terrifying desperation, and turned instantly into assholes at the slightest provocation. Meanwhile, chatbots took over the chat room s; visit a Yahoo chat now and all you’ll see are “bots” — automated programs that post entreaties to “come look at my pics!” at an offline porn or pay-to-chat site. It’s bullshit.

But it’s not the pleasant kind of bullshit; it’s commerce, not fantasy. That was the great thing about chat room s — it was all completely made up, sure, but it was all completely made up.

Twitter is similar to a chat room filled real people, or something that looks damn like. I’m telling you, it’s weird.

Thomas Roche blogs about twittering at Thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 5 May 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.