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| Issue 1, 2008 |
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| Shades of Grey |
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Ephemeral SexualitiesAll is not black and white… and we want to explore the shades of grey.
Feminism is diverse and we don’t always agree totally with one another,
though we may share a similar perspective. While we don’t want to silence
other viewpoints, we want to focus on the finer distinctions between arguments
used by people who are on the same side of the table.
Alvin S. Concha Many online chatrooms are frequented by Internet users
because they are pick up venues for physical sex meetings
or for buying and selling sex. A couple of years back, a
popular online chatroom service had to disable its usercreated
chatroom feature due to controversies over
some chatrooms intended to engage minors in sexual
encounters. There have also been many stories about being
sexually harassed or denigrated in chatrooms. Yet there
are chatroom goers who believe in the positive effects of
online interactions on their sexualities, and that there is
little need to go beyond online life to attain self-fulfilment
and pleasure. Take, for instance, the following statements. "There are lots of reasons why people go to chatrooms: to meet other people, to have cybersex or sometimes, just to be entertained. Others are so bored and they visit chatrooms as their pastime… Many here in the chatroom don’t have webcams so I don’t know how they look like. There’s mystery to it and I love it. I love the feeling of always looking forward to know the person better as time goes by." bhakatbriefAs part of my graduate school thesis, I wanted to describe the creation and expression of male sexualities among those who self-identify as Filipino men in online chatrooms. To do this, I went to chatrooms in the Yahoo Chat system for over two years as participant observer. I chatted with chatroom goers who spoke Filipino languages, and who selfidentified as males. The online identities of chatroom goers are textual rather than physical. They go about in the technologically created spaces of the chatrooms, and their fleeting and changeable characteristics do not necessarily resemble those of their physical owners’, offline. Hence, online identities can be more appropriately referred to as cyborgs – hybrid products of humans and the technology that afford their characteristics, which are quite different from offline identities. After the ubiquitous ‘hi! asl?’ (short for “Hi! What is your age, sex and location?”) greeting between or among cyborgs, there is that conscious decision on the party being asked to determine what to declare as personal characteristics like age, sex and location, and then, later on, sexual orientation, life stories and whatever the conversations call for. In defining an online self, there is no requirement to be consistent with one’s physical attributes and personal experiences. It is a matter of self-option for a 38-year-olditself. bisexual male engineer in Dubai to declare that s/he is an 18- year-old straight female college student in Davao, for instance. Yet even before introductions and long chats, many cyborgs re-create their physical bodies textually by coining usernames or nicknamesa that have physical references. And so, in chatrooms, we may find cyborgs ‘hairy’, ‘muscular’ or ‘slim’ included in their usernames. Cyborgs who want to be a little more articulate about their sexualities may even coin a sexually loaded username. For example, the username ‘franco_hugetool’, as used by a self-ascribed male, may be taken in some contexts as short for saying that ‘my name is Franco, I am male with a huge penis’. Here are some other derivatives of usernames of self-ascribed Filipino males that I encountered while hanging around in chatrooms (possible translations in parentheses): hubadero_dude (male who often gets naked); jakuleroboy21 (a boy who often masturbates); leebog_dude (sexually aroused dude); palautoggg (somebody who frequently gets an erection); totnak_mo_ako (have sex with me); and tamodsaratbu (semen on penis). On a possibly more political air, some cyborgs seem to position their usernames as a challenge to hegemonic notions of sex, sexual orientations and sexual behaviours. Once, I encountered a cyborg named ‘kolboy_na_maldita’ (possible translations: ‘naughty woman posing as a callboy’, ‘feminine naughty callboy’; In Filipino language, a naughty woman is called maldita, while a naughty man is called maldito.) The feminine suffix ‘a’ in maldita, rather than the masculine suffix ‘o’ was probably intentionally combined by the username creator with the linguistically masculine ‘callboy’ to present at least two sexual identities in a singular name. We can take this form of creation of sexualities within the chatroom setting as a deliberate production of masculine+feminine identity that transgresses the hegemonic concept of categorical sexes. In the same way, the username ‘babaerongbading’ seems to ignore the common notion about gay erotics. Juxtaposing babaero (Filipino term for a male who pursues sexual pleasures with many women) with bading (gay) can be taken as a purposeful argument against the hegemonic notion that gays pursue sexual pleasures with men only. Then, there is also the practice of projecting more than one self online. A cyborg may project different selves at different times in different chatrooms, or even simultaneously among different chatrooms or within the same chatroom, while interacting with different cyborgs. One selfascribed male cyborg told me this: If I use the nickname parating_tigas19 (possible translation: ‘always erect’) I should be frank but happy-go-lucky. I also have a username ‘suck_na_ suck’ (possible translation: ‘I really need to suck’) who is too shy to talk about sex in the general chatroom but blatantly speaks out in private messages. ‘really_jazz’ is so musical... and a lot more. I also project different sexual orientations. I even have a female ID, a straight guy ID, too...’ parating_tigas19From the foregoing, we may notice that the chatroom setting allows cyborgs to select the textual elements for the recreation and re-presentation of the body and of identities. It would be easy to assume that the textual descriptions correspond to the physical features of the describer. But that is only one of the countless possibilities in the chatroom environment, where there is freedom to create, improvise, extend, and fictionise the textual elements of personal features, all upon the control of the cyborg. Chatrooms can really be utilised to put fluidity, diversity and multiplicity of sexual selves into practice. Webcams are important paraphernalia for some cyborgs who wish to present further to other cyborgs a sense of the body, and to put in a visual dimension to their textual sexualities. There are cyborgs who show their faces, but it is also possible to encounter those who deliberately focus their webcams on only a portion of their bodies, such as the chest alone or the penis alone. Cyborgs might also want to incorporate voice in their chatroom presence. Thus, another appendage that cyborgs use would be a headset with earphone and microphone. It is possible to witness cyborgs masturbating in front of webcams while they are being watched by others and/ or while they are watching others’ webcams. Mutual masturbation between or among webcam performers constitute cybersex. This can also involve the use of headsets for exchanging audio stimuli during cybersex. And while all these are happening, cyborgs may also exchange text messages in the chatroom. Some webcam performers do a striptease, much like the way it is being done in bars, by showing body parts in quick strokes, without necessarily getting fully naked. This can lead to a lot of comments in the chatroom, including requests for the performer to assume certain positions, do sexier moves or get naked all the way. One cyborg I chatted with told me: "‘I enjoy getting naked and masturbating in front of the webcam, especially when, as I do it, people talk about me in the chatroom. It feels good!" tigas_toy2006 These chatroom events propose a certain social mood in chatrooms that is a bit different from physical spaces with many people. Because the more common medium of communication in chatrooms is the written text and because cyborgs are compelled to articulate themselves through words, sexualities have a tendency to be expressed in ways that may constitute ‘explicitness’, or even ‘vulgarity’ to some. Simultaneously, because being ‘explicit’ and ‘vulgar’ surface as the ‘norm’ in chatrooms, such vivid, graphic and uninhibited ways of referencing sexualities become accepted and legitimised. Hence, within the range of possibilities that chatroom technology affords, the expression of sexualities in the chatrooms may be described as unconstrained and free of legal, religious and moral checkpoints, which are the common off-putting forces of behaviour in the physical world. The ways that male sexualities and genders are being talked about in chatrooms are appealing, as well. I have talked with some cyborgs who refuse to recognize classifications of sexual orientations. Here are what two self-ascribed male cyborgs told me: "I am a postmodern male, liberal in my ways of thinking. Sexual preferences are not requirements for me. I am male, but that doesn’t entail the usual nuance. I have no sex preference regarding partners. I will love whoever meets my own requirements to become my lifetime partner" pare_tripmo "I believe people should learn that, when we deal with other people we should not base our terms of socialisation on the other’s sex. If we look at others in terms of whether they are males or females, we always wind up having wrong notions about them, wrong ways of knowing them more and wrong actions towards them" kambyo_buratHence, it is possible to find good signs of a certain social milieu in chatrooms that is against stereotyping. For one, the anonymity and pseudonymity afforded by chatrooms effectively make online and offline identities almost, if not totally, mutually exclusive. Some cyborgs I talked with told me that they feel comfortable in chatrooms because of the presence of like-minded cyborgs, who are non-judgmental, and who recognise that social categories, statuses and roles may be ineffective terms of socialisation in the chatroom. They enjoy the equality that chatrooms allow, and they feel liberated in that space where they can celebrate their individualities according to their self-ascribed identities, without being apprehensive of denigration or rejection. They can also multiply their identities to cater to the many selves within each individual. And they can create, re-create, dispose of or change a multitude of identities, including sexualities. There is no requirement to be consistent, coherent or complete. All these can happen in a context wherein everyone recognises that indeed, identities are multiple and to shift among different identities is alright and commonplace. Since these observations were based on interactions with selfascribed males, it is worthwhile to flag them as good practices of masculinities. It gives us hope that, under certain conditions, the practice of masculinities can become a promising power that can engender egalitarian, emancipatory and non-oppressive ways of socialising. Cyborg sexualities remind us of the diversity, malleability and multiplicity of sexual identities. They teach us about the powerful and empowering exercise of determining for ourselves the identities that we want to put forward in particular situations. They also demonstrate to us the importance of a social ambience that is lenient and that consciously undermines the forces imposed by social categories. It is everyone’s hope that, just like online chatrooms, our world can be a strategic space of ephemeral sexualities – transient selves that are fielded to attain sexual pleasure, to resist abuse and silencing, and to make liberating and self-fulfilling political assertions. a All nicknames or usernames in this article are codes. I coded the actual names as I got them from chatrooms in such a way that the codes would closely resemble the original, but would be syntactically different so as to exclude the possibility of using such codes to communicate with their owners. I also checked the Yahoo profiles to verify the uniqueness of the codes. Alvin Concha is a medical doctor specialising in Family and Community Medicine. He works in Davao Regional Hospital in the Philippines as a research consultant and Head of the Human Resources and Training Unit. He also teaches Gender, Sexuality, Reproductive Health and issues of Violence Against Women and to medical students in Davao Medical School Foundation.
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| Issue 2, 2008 | |
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| Issue 1, 2008 | |
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| Issue 4, 2007 | |
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| Issue 3, 2007 | |
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| Issue 2, 2007 | |
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| Issue 1, 2007 | |
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| Issue 4, 2006 | |
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| Issue 3, 2006 | |
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| Issue 2, 2006 | |
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| Issue 1, 2006 | |
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| Issue 1, 2005 | |
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