I am he as you are he as you are me

...and we are all together.

That's me remembering "I Am The Walrus" by the Beatles. But really, I want to talk about identity and the internet. Coincidentally, after I made the last post about online identity, I read a chapter in my Women's Studies textbook about gender. One of the sections in the chapter was about gender swapping online.

So I did a little looking around for more articles and I found this. This study was done mainly with participants in MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, so it's not representative of the whole internet population. In the study, though, over half of all of the male participants reported swapping genders at some point through a gaming avatar, while about two thirds of all female participants reported swapping genders.

Participants were asked about why they swapped genders when establishing an avatar, and there were many different reasons cited, a few of which I'll quote here:

"Extract 22: I just felt like it, really. Mostly my characters
are female, but I think I made my male character
because I was tired of creepy guys hitting on
my female characters. It’s utterly ridiculous, very
annoying, and not the reason why I play the game.
(P39, female, age 32)"

"Extract 23: Because if you make your character a
woman, men tend to treat you FAR better. (P49,
male, age 23)"

"Extract 25: If you play a chick and know what the
usual nerd wants to read, you will get free items . . .
which in turn I pass them to my other male characters
. . . very simple. Nerd + Boob = Loot. (P65,
male, age 20)"

"Extract 26: I mostly play female characters, but
sometimes I make a male character and don’t let
anyone know I’m female in real life. It’s interesting
how different people treat you when they think you
are male. Kind of like a window into their strange
man universe. (P117, female, age 23)"

It's interesting to note that the female participants who played as male characters said that they played as males in order not to be hit on, or to be respected more in the game. On the other hand, the male participants said that if they played as females, men treated them better and gave them more items within the game simply because they were male characters. Obviously, the viewpoints vary on the difference between friendly interaction and sexual advances.

This study is just one example of one area of online communication in which a person's actual gender may not be consistent with their online gender.