Eventually, my psychology degree finished, and I left the world of cyber-interaction, and made many new, real friends. These new pals were formed mostly through my return to DJ'ing (it sure beats Austudy), and here I was, playing records to drug-fucked twenty-somethings, who talked mostly of “wicked beats” and “phat tracks”. It was hardly stimulating - but at least it was real. There seemed something refreshing about that.

This was sufficient for a while, but something was missing. Not only was I a newfound darling of a straight scene (in Newcastle, a very straight little city) - combined with the talks of “phat beats” (that admittedly left a hole, after a while), I found myself missing something more… intimate. I had quite consciously left a life in Sydney where I had practically overdosed on the social politics, and the extreme change from being someone surrounded by people (and quite often, in a pivatol position of those circles) to my relatively isolated life in a city where I arrived knowing not a single soul had been a deliberate one. But now, I found myself longing for the interaction – and though I didn’t find a great deal in my walk into the cyberworld and my initial return to the modern university, the need, sometimes, is an idealistic (and determined) phenomenon.

Apart from my club buddies, my other friends were mostly academics (I had now begun more university study as an English post-graduate - much more in my realm than the stale scientists of the psychology degree), and a 40 year old mother I had befriended in a psychology lecture. There just weren’t many options, and I was feeling that terrible need to combine mind and flesh. In other words, I was lonely – and, yes, two years into my isolation after being quite a playful member of the Eastern City scene of Sydney, I was a little bit horny. I do try, but I can’t help being human, sometimes.

So, one night, I sat down at my red jellybean Mac (by now, quite a retro model in the speedy world of computer innovation), and mouse met hand in a magical – doomed – unison that would lead me into the chatrooms and meeting pens (“meat markets” is a better term, but hey, I wasn’t to know) of cyberspace. Hello, I’m Aaron. What’s your name?

Mostly, their names were things like “I_Luv_2_Give_Head”, or “CockJockey”. I later ventured into straight spaces, simply to observe the difference. Admittedly, their names are less “overt”. I imagine some would think, “Well, that’s what you’d expect in a gay chatroom”. But I think that whilst certainly the mainstream gay culture is a promiscuous one (but keep in mind what these boys have gone through, and what that does to a sense of self), it’s not really that different. It’s just honest. The ideology of gender division – that idea prowling heterosexual men have of how they must “appear” to women in order to get them into bed, just has no need to exist in the gay world. And so, it doesn’t. In the straight room, you’d be meeting “Handsome&Sweet”, but truth be told, he wasn’t going to be that different to “I_Luv_2_Give_Head”.

Everything happens very quickly in this part of cyberspace. In places such as forums, where “hooking up” isn’t an acceptable agenda, things can remain incredibly superficial and impersonal. Even where there are collectives discussing things on a more intellectual level, there’s still no real intimacy. But when the game is on, this completely reverses, and things can move at lightning speed – though admittedly, it’s a shallow sort of intimacy, where one quickly finds out the body proportions of a complete stranger, without knowing very much about their mind.

Of course, the difference here is also that the intention extends to real, in the flesh interaction – and I mean that quite literally. It’s a very different game. Instances of forum members meeting up is still very rare, but there are anxious single people sitting in cafes all over the country, nervously waiting to lay eyes on Handsome&Sweet for the first time. The turnover is incredible.

I was quite stunned – and felt most uncomfortably cornered – by those who would ask for my phone number, or even my address, to arrange a meeting after an exchange of no more than twenty lines of dialogue. Some didn’t even take this long, and many simply browse user profile photos, as if they’re window-shopping in a mall, and require nothing further than your arousal from their photos, in return. Ironically, these were easier to handle. I still had a terrible sense of guilt when rejecting them – I just don’t like having to answer something as blunt as “Do you think I’m cute?” with an equally blunt, “No”.

But this is where I again didn’t fit in with the modern cyberspace psychology. Empathy is passe, darling; this was (at this time) the beginning of the new century, and apparently nobody’s been feeling empathy since the late 90’s. This was one thing this world shared very much in common with my previous experiences. The annoying presence of consequence had been removed, and therefore, any consequential emotion had vanished, too. Dead easy. I realised that this new space had opened up a completely different human struggle for love and sex. It had accelerated the turnover, not only of contenders who made it to the meeting phase, but also of rejection. You simply can’t afford the emotional reality of rejection in cyberspace, because you will face it so very often, as you batte your way towards your true love or a quick shag. I chose to be passive, and only ever responded to advances made first – but if you’re going to be like most, and actively seek it out, you’d want to be prepared for that “User not online” message suddenly cutting you cold. At some stage, you’ll ask someone if they like your photo, and at some stage, someone will say “no”. I told literally dozens – at least – and I can honestly tell you I felt bad for every single one of them.

But you know, what I wasn’t realising was that I don’t think they actually cared as much as I did! Even though this space differed in that there was the intention and likely possibility of real human interaction, in cyber-romance, this line is clear, and anything that falls under it is quite deliberately exploiting this idea of being “unreal”. It’s functional. It allows the human being to fight through a jungle of rejection, whilst remaining emotionally equipt to keep battling. It simply can’t work any other way. Human beings, generally speaking, are not creatures who withstand rejection very well. Shrinks’ couches all over the world are full of broken, depressed, dysfuctional people who are thrown off course for years by just a single rejection. And yet here are human beings, modern creatures with such fragile esteems on one level, being rejected countless times in a single evening. Something has to change psychologically, for that to take place, and to be normalised in order for it to work. This is why I say that in cyberspace, human beings are actually adapting to a new emotional state of reality. When that state of reality is the predominant context for people (as it is increasingly), this simply has to involve some very new adaptations – evolutionary, in some sense – in the psychological realm. Human beings, as we’ve known for decades, are incredibly adaptable creatures who can psychologically – even physically, sometimes – adapt to environments, in order to function and survive within them. This is a very new context, and every time we go online, something in us shifts, and we partake in an experience that did not exist at all until only a flicker ago in human evolution.

I just couldn’t adapt. And the more I drudged through it, the more I realised that perhaps I didn’t want to. I still felt bad rejecting them, and the couple of times when I would be chatting along only to see “User not online” pop out of nowhere, it would well and truly ruin my night. In the real world, there is no equivalent. If you were chatting to someone you were interested in at a bar, you wouldn’t suddenly, mid-conversation, get up without saying a word, and just walk away. It’s unthinkable. And yet, in cyberspace, this rude, gutless behaviour is perfectly normal.

Eventually, my guilt became worse, compounded by a sense of hypocrisy, because in my sense of guilt, I had myself acted quite gutlessly. When a few boys suddenly asked for my number, I felt far too cornered, and reacted quite impulsively by simply giving them the wrong number, because I couldn’t bring myself to say something as blunt as, “No, I don’t want to.” But then, I would lie there, thinking about these poor boys – none of them particularly evil fellows, after all – happily dialing the number, anticipating our future (however brief they had in mind), only to fall, upon realising what I had done. I felt cruel. They weren’t user names, they weren’t off my empathetic radar the minute I pressed “disconnect” – they were real people, and I was a real person, and we had interacted. The consequences of that interaction, to me, were no different to anyone I met at a bus stop or a nightclub.

Even when I managed to find someone I could chat with quite happily (a very low hit rate, to say the least), when the moment came to take the interaction further, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was a cyber virgin, I felt logically uncomfortable with the idea of sitting in a café, waiting for someone wearing a blue shirt and Levis. I tried to picture it, and I just couldn’t. What would I say? How could I just pick up where I left of? I had effectively just met the person for the first time, regardless of how long we had cyber-chatted. Something didn’t gel for me. I would later realise what this was.

Around this time, deciding to quit DJ’ing (remembering I had left the "dance scene" behind in Sydney for a reason), I again found myself a poor uni student on Austudy, and was forced to take in a flatmate, to help with the rent. She was a young psychology student I had met earlier through a tutorial, and she became like a little sister figure, someone who actually seemed to understand my displacement, and was more than happy to help me assimilate.

She concurred that “everyone” was using online dating now, and that I should simply get over it, and do whatever it is I have to do. My neighbours felt the same way, and actually chastised my reluctance to meet up with any potential suitor. I knew that “everyone was doing it” - I just didn’t really know how. After some lengthy encouragement (and peer pressure), I decided to take a deep breath and arrive in the social world of tommorrow.

One night, Dan-81 took quite a liking to my user profile, and introduced himself. By this time, unfortunately, my selectiveness was forced to downsize somewhat, and simply the fact that his username was normal and that he was honest enough to use his actual name, for some ridiculous reason, became grounds for serious consideration. But I was that determined. And yes, probably a little bit desperate. But the need does funny things to perception, as we will discuss, later.

 

He asked me if I liked his photo, and yes, I actually did. He was a reasonably cute looking boy. Admittedly, he looked a little young - but when I inquired of this, he told me that he was 20, and that the photo had been taken three years earlier. And yes, this made me a tad suspicious. But in cyberspace, there's an answer for everything, and when I asked about why he’d be using a three year old photograph, he explained that he didn’t own a digital camera. Considering I was by now mildly resentful of technology – even in a conceptual manner like this (but hey, I’m a conceptual kind of guy) – I was more than happy to add this to my list of ticks for Dan_81. Î didn’t own a digital camera, either. Wow, Dan-81 and I have a lot in common. Maybe we should get together?