Virtual Cross-Dressing??

Sherry Turkle has become just another author in a long list of authors that has failed to convince me that the Internet is not the home of the social outcast of the world. In her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, the chapter titled “Tinysex and Gender Trouble” only proves to me that the Internet is where all of these misfits go to try to find an “identity,” a word that has been tossed around quite often in our class. In the past, I have been hard on the people who use the Internet as an escape. After reading this chapter, I have realized that I have not been hard enough on these virtual nerds, who in “real-life” are also nerds. Which begs the question, what are they actually escaping?

Turkle documents her efforts as she tries to construct her own online persona and along the way notices some very disturbing facts including virtual cross-dressing. The weirdest part, is that Turkle tries to defend these cross-dressers by saying things like “Boys, after all, were not called prudes if they were too cool to play kissing games” or “In Shakespeare time, there was yet another turn because all women’s parts were played by boys.” After all, boys are never too cool to play kissing games and if they were, they would be called gay, not prudes. Also, in Shakespeare’s time, men played the woman’s characters because women weren’t allowed to play any part, which hardly makes those men cross dressers. I digress though and want to focus more on what I find to be the most confusing aspect about this new epidemic. The part I am most confused about is how people think that for a second that skills used online will be able to correlate into the real life situations. Maybe one is not sure about their gender, so they explore it online to they point where they think they are ready for the change. They then get this expensive sex change that takes years to fully complete and when they get into the real world they realize that people still look at them oddly, driving them back to their lairs where they continue to play online games trying to escape their own reality.

I am sorry if this offends anyone, but sometimes the truth hurts. A 35-year-old hiding behind a computer screen in his mom’s basement is pathetic. Lets face it people, the behavior that is seen on MUDs challenges everything that society views as weird. I hear people say, “Well, maybe society isn’t right, who are they to judge?” Society is the purest form of democracy, where opinions are not just stated but have to go through hundreds of millions of people before they are accepted as a societal norm. So I leave all the Internet losers with this message: You have two legs and a heart so you can go outside and do activity in the REAL WORLD. You have a penis because you are supposed to have sex with REAL PEOPLE. You were blessed with natural forms of communication so you can interact with REAL PEOPLE. It is pathetic that people live their lives in fear of themselves, especially when they have all the tools they need to succeed in the REAL WORLD. So stop cross-dressing online because you guys are not the only ones who cannot handle the stresses of the real world, your just the only ones pathetic enough to resort to changing who you are. We all have problems, get over it, that’s called life in the real world!