PUT YOUR PANTS ON, DEMONBOY

By Barbara Ehrenreich

EVERYONE WANTS TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN FROM the online kiddie-porn creeps, but who's going to protect us from the children? At least I assume my harasser was 14 or under, given the tenor of the conversation in the America Online "chat room" I wandered into one afternoon. Typical contributions were typed entries like "Cockle Doodle DOOO" and "Hey Hoo HAAAA," or, as a topic for serious discussion, "What's the craziest drug you ever took?" So when someone we'll call "Demonboy" flashed me an invitation to accompany him into a "private room," I assumed he was just hungry for a higher order of chat. A few clicks of the mouse, and we were alone on the screen, where DB announced his topic of choice: "Can we undress?"

It took me a few moments to process this request. What could it matter to Demonboy, was my first and touchingly naive thought, whether we were naked or dressed in full suits of armor? The whole point of cyberspace, as I understood it, was to escape from the body, with its nonstop announcements of age, race and sex. "Could we just talk?" I typed lamely, or something to that effect. "I'm taking off my pants," Demonboy typed back, "and running my tongue inside your thighs."

Naturally, I clicked out of there as fast as I could. But I could have done anything, I realized later. I could have turned him over my knee and spanked him (which, sadly, he might have liked) or poked him in the eye with a sharp stick. I'm not even sure whether to call this sexual harassment, since it wasn't actually me being subjected to his fantasy but only my screen name, Barbeh. And it was my own fault, wasn't it, for picking an obviously femme handle, one that I see now must sound like some Stone Age stripper's stage name.

But how could I have known it would be so easy for me to be propositioned online for sex? Well, not real sex, which to my old-fashioned way of thinking still involves tangible saliva and sweat, possibly leavened with some actual affection. I'd heard about those kinky Internet newsgroups with names like alt.sex.bondage. I'd read about the use of online services to transmit pornography, including illegal kiddie porn. But no one had warned me that I might log onto AOL for the innocent purpose of, say, perusing the online encyclopedia and wander off for a minute, only to be enlisted in a hot-and-heavy bout of thigh licking. And I've learned it doesn't go on just in AOL. You can find plenty of onscreen panting at tonier sites on the Internet, including multiparticipant orgies.

Now, I have no moral objection to cybersex. It's the ultimate in safe sex, and maybe the only form of sex available to the average 14-year-old boy. I don't even believe that conversation is somehow "loftier" than sex, since sex can get pretty lofty too. But in my experience, which probably outweighs Demonboy's by at least three decades, sex is a lot easier to find in this world than good conversation.

See, I actually believed in the promise of cyberspace--that we could reach out over the barriers of age, race, geography and gender, and truly connect. No one would ever be lonely anymore. Writing would become a mass art form. Democracy would flourish as millions of people logged on to the vast, bubbling, uncensored online debate. I didn't know that much of what goes on online would turn out to be "utter drivel," as disillusioned cyberpioneer Clifford Stoll now concludes in his book Silicon Snake Oil, or "flame wars" of crude and escalating insults, or, of course, cybersex with Beavis and Butt-head.

Maybe the problem lies in the very anonymity that I had hoped would so liberate our spirits. A Swarthmore psychologist found in the '70s that if you put a group of total strangers together in the dark, they do things they wouldn't think of doing with the lights on--like grope. This is a result, apparently, of sexual repression. Put us in cyberspace wearing masks like "Demonboy," and an awful lot of us become gropers in the dark.

Maybe it was silly to expect that we'd turn on our modems and suddenly rediscover the joy of good talk. When is the last time you participated in or even overheard a thrillingly deep conversation? On TV, sitcom families have little to say beyond one-line put-downs, and the braying of pundits passes for political debate. In the movies, a few cliches and grunts, punctuated by gunshots, suffices for a two-hour screenplay. Maybe cybertechnology just came along too late, after we had already entered what postmodernists call the postword era. Which would mean that we have no more use for our supersophisticated communications technology than a chimpanzee has for a volume of Milton. If you can't eat it and you can't squish fleas with it, you might as well use it to masturbate with.

But could it really be that all the centuries of scientific discovery and technical ingenuity that led to the computer and modem were just laying the groundwork for someone to transmit messages like "Cockle Doodle DOOO" and "Can we undress?"?

Ah, Demonboy, it isn't your tongue I desire, but what is far more precious--a glimpse of your mind.