Around the time of the LC2 demise, I was spending increasingly more time playing on a MOO. Some of you have probably heard of these, and many of you maybe have not. It was big before the internet was even really resembling anything like the internet we have today. Ironically, LC2 was the one who introduced me to it, and then I ended up staying late in the lab, playing on the MOO so that I wouldn't have to go home and be in conflict with her. I didn't really know what I was doing on there. I was not a programmer, and that type of world was really confusing to me. I did make a couple of friends on there, though. And mostly I would just use it for chatting. I met one woman with whom I had a brief long-distance relationship. I met another woman, who was local, with whom I became friends. She, in turn, introduced me to yet another woman, who I'll call EB, who has been "present" in my life, in at least some capacity, for the last 17 years. But I will come back to her in a moment.
After playing in the MOO for some time, it occurred to me that it was possible to "be anyone you wanted to be". I didn't need to be "me". Up until that point, I had been myself. But this was a role-playing game, of sorts, and this occurred to me in a fleeting moment of bored arousal. I could be a woman character. And I could be a smoker. And then, I would be writing my own fantasies, to an audience of... zero. Well, actually an audience of one, myself. Because obviously none of the characters with whom I interacted would either a) know that I was not a woman, and b) know that I had a smoking fetish that I was exploring. And it was not like I was doing anything erotic or kinky, either. I was just talking about it from the perspective of this being a female who smoked, but the key was that I had control over her smoking. I think that was the allure to it. I had control over it, because she was me. I didn't think of it at the time that way. I just was role-playing. But in hindsight, that's the only logical reason why I'd do such a thing.
So I had my character, who I'll call Veronica, for sake of keeping my pseudonym anonymous (it's pretty bad when your aliases need to have aliases, isn't it). And I would chat away with people, who just befriended me as if I were the woman I claimed to be. Actually, it was interesting from that perspective, to observe the way supposed men would interact with me, and how supposed women would interact. So there was that added bonus of the psychology experiment. It's kind of cool seeing how differently people talk depending on what gender they think you are. But that's off-topic, a little.
Drop that subject for a moment, and let's talk about EB. We were acquaintances on MOO. We eventually met "IRL" because she lived locally. We talked a lot, and became very good friends. Maybe could say we even sort of dated a little bit over the course of a year or so. At some time during our acquaintance, we were out having dinner and drinks, and she starts talking about smoking. It was odd, and tangential, and I cannot even remember what it was. As far as I knew, she was a non-smoker. But she was talking about it in a very bizarre and probing way. I perceived her line of commenting and questioning in such a way that it made me uneasy, so I was evasive.
Some days or weeks later, on a subsequent meeting, she says to me, if I recall correctly, something like "So who is Veronica?" To quote Fight Club (which is a great movie for the smoking fetish, but I'll talk about that some other time, perhaps): "We have just lost cabin pressure". She knew about Veronica. God. It turns out that my alias, Veronica, was talking one time with her alias that I didn't even know existed. And I was doing my role-playing thing. She was curious as to who this Veronica person was, so she did some sort of look-up, of which I knew nothing. It turns out that regardless of what aliases you used, your character ID would be the same for a given login. So she knew that I was Veronica. Which meant she knew that I was pretending to be a woman and talking about smoking with strangers on the internet. I was so mortified that I wanted to die. I felt like my privacy had been invaded, even if it had been my own fault, and completely incidental. And that caused me to feel a lot of shame, and a lot less acceptance of myself. Though I don't want to put much blame on EB, because I did a pretty good job of being ashamed and unaccepting without that episode.
So even in its infancy, the internet was already getting me into plenty of trouble!
We'll come back to EB later.
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