I have noticed the most amazing thing. I actually noticed it a long time ago and it seems to be the same no matter where I go. There are usually more males than females and the males drool all over and pay lip service to the females all day long simply because, well, they are female.

If you are male, most men seem to have no interest in you what-so-ever. They have made up their mind about you and already decided to ignore you before you have even opened your mouth to speak.

If you are female you get the benefit of the doubt and lots of positive attention and, dare I say ass-kissing; in hopes of what I still have yet to discover. Net sex? Flirting? hopes that they will fly out to you and fuck your brains out? what? To this day it boggles me.

Men and women on-line are the same as far as I am concerned. Often men are too busy trying to suck up to girls and girls are often too busy trying to get men to suck up to them to be very interesting, but other than that they have equal potential to be interesting or uninteresting in my eyes. I have counted the people that I consider my friends on here and to be quite honest, the male/female ratio is quite equal. I have counted my nodes about females and my nodes about males on here, and they are exactly equal.

None of this makes me any better than you, and in fact I am sure you have noticed this same phenomenon as well. You go to a new site; you are a guy. You don't know anyone and no one will even acknowledge your existence because they are too busy playing the respective rolls of sucker and suckee; but if you happen to have a female nick name, well then, you get all but dragged into the conversation kicking and screaming.

As much as I love courting and am facinated with sex, I often times think that even people who think its sinful or bad and don't have it, let it run them because of it. It has a time and place.

You know, I'd never realized before this just how attractive moJoe is. Suddenly I find I am no longer able to ignore him, and wonder if perhaps he will consent to Net sex with me.

Of course, there are plenty of women using ambiguous or male pseudonyms online, to avoid being besieged by men, so they can do whatever it is that they are on the Internet to do in the first place. (This probably contributes to the amount of attention those who are willing to admit to being female have. But presumably those who continue using identifiably female names don't object to the attention.)

There is a small but appreciable number of men who think that being female and saying anything remotely sex-positive online constitutes asking for all sorts of propositions. No one from Everything has done this, but I've gotten mail from guys who saw my web site and sent me propositions for group sex, or who started conversations and then were angry and offended when I said no, I wouldn't go out with someone I only know from a total of two e-mails.

So I approve of moJoe's strategy. Let the jerks be deceived; maybe if they find out the truth they will learn some manners.

I'm with Segnbora-t on this one. Damn, it must be nice to have actual conversations with people online without having to pull out your intellectual penis and making it clear that you know how to use it.

I suppose it doesn't help those poor sods that I use my real name (Lillith) or a definitely feminine name (such as amelinda) and that I am pretty openly sex-positive. Somehow, I don't get a lot of propositions, but that could be because I intimidate them.

To the original noder: Yes, I would be willing to bet that those males whereof you speak really do think that they might eventually get those women to fly out there and fuck them silly. Procreation urges are at the base of a very large percentage of all human interaction.

See also: using your real name on the internet

Though it is an interesting idea, I'd like to see if you could actually pull it off. It surely isn't as simple as changing your alias and saying you're female. It's not like the only differences between males and females are whether they have an innie or outie between the legs.

Personality is rather gender-based, I believe. And many personalities are rather clear on if they are masculine or feminine, and it seems like it would be difficult or impossible to hide it. Of course, it depends on where you are - an online game full of hormone-crazed teenage boys will go nuts if you just say you're female, without really giving it any analysis. A more balanced forum, and especially a place such as Everything, where it's all about writing and that's where our personality is most evident, is more likely to be able to construct a realistic image of who's on the other end.

Our lives create who we are, and the life of a person is very much affected by the gender.

I don't know why the heck I did this so seriously. Oh well...

I'm sure you could pull it off. Yes, there are cultural differences in male / female personalities, but the average amount of "distinction" between male and female is smaller than the potential range of distinct personalities within either gender just due to the wonderful variations of individualism. Once someone's gender has been announced online, most people will happily continue with that assumption unless provided with evidence to the contrary - and the presence of ostensibly "male" or "female" writing traits will almost always just be chalked up to the person's individuality, unless they're really overdoing it, like in the case of a boy pretending to be a girl and discussing his hypothetical breasts endlessly - but even then, they're more likely to just be tagged as an irritating girl with low self esteem rather than someone lying about their gender. If you're serious about it, you can pull it off. I've successfully gone as a boy - not just the assumption that I'm male, which all girls with ambiguous handles get, but like, with the tacit expression that I was male - and no one noticed my lack of a Y chromosome. This was in an online community where everyone knew my writing style and knew me in person - a new handle and a concentrated effort not to break character was all it took. I've also seen boys successfully be girls, and weirdest of all was the tracker who got a sex change operation - his/her posting style didn't really change, but once it got out that he was now a girl, everyone suddenly started to notice the "girly" aspects of it. All it takes is being serious and in letting people know somehow what your gender is supposed to be.

But why bother? Despite all the hooha, there's not really all that much difference in how people are treated online, except when you're talking about sex. That's the great thing about being online. No one has to know what you keep in your pants and it doesn't really matter.

Way back in my AOL newbie days, I did this. "ModernAngel" started out as the screenname of an assumed persona, "Brandy Leigh McLeod". It was educational. Since "angel" seems to equate to "female" in many virtual arenas, I still get the occasional "Wanna cyber?" query, or (much more often), an unsolicited, private "hi." that I am supposed to pick up and run with. On several occasions since I dropped the pretense of femininity, I've had people say to me "dude, get a more masculine nick" - because the nick screws up their expectations of how they might want to interact with me. It starts with a sweeping generalization of who I am, and a nick is supposed to somehow encapsulate everything of interest about me...
It is ridiculously easy to pull off, but the novelty wears thin quickly. (Or did for me, anyway.) Contrary to Saige's theory, I think gender cues determine a lot of what we read into a chat/post author's personality/style, not vice versa.

Two years ago, I programmed an artificial intelligence bot for mIRC (famous IRC client), which now has become quite known in Spain (despite it consists on few more than a bunch of well-placed ifs).

In order to test it, I made the bot join some channels in the Spanish network and open some queries (an easy way to implement a Turing test). Everything went normally. Some people soon ignored the bot while others had quite long conversations with it.

When I was about to release version 2.0 and my bot was getting quite famous, someone suggested he could make a female personality for it (it's modular, so you can select between several possible "minds" and add more). He took the original bot AI, changed all adjectives to their feminine equivalents, modified some (but few) sentences from its databases, and added lots of sentences related to sex, so that it could recognize most sex-related words and give different responses.

Before including it in version 2.0, I wanted to try some Turing Tests with this new personality, so I gave the bot a female nick (Silvie) and made it join channel #amor (#love in Spanish). I didn't have to open any query. I counted thirty-six queries in a minute. And I'm not joking. I repeated this test several times and I got an average of twenty queries by spending just a minute on the channel, while with the male personality I got none. But there is something even more pathetic: many times, after repeating the experiment two or three men had sent the bot their phone.

What else can I say? We are dumb. I like to think that I'm not, but... what if I'm wrong, and all men, including me, are dumb?

Experiment
Given that it must be common knowledge to anyone with half a brain that all nubile young girls in cybersex chatrooms are in fact men or boys of varying ages, a scientific test was needed to measure exactly how much people cared.

Process
Logged on to an IRC server and joined a few cybersex channels using the nickname PretendingToBeAGirl.

Outcome
At first there was silence. Then a bleep. A private message, contravening the channel rules about asking before messaging but, hey, I didn't really care...

(namewithheld) so ur a guy?
(PretendingToBeAGirl) yep. hello. wanna cyber? ;)
(namewithheld) sure, okay.

I. Kid. You. Not. I pretended to be a busty female future-cop in an all-over rubber uniform (his idea) and he was a criminal that I was to - ahem - interrogate. I haven't laughed so damn much in ages.

I got a few other messages as well. Some just curious about my nick and some didn't mind a bit of cybersex. Sure, it got boring after a while but, still, it was hilarious while it lasted.

Conclusion
In conclusion, it is common knowledge to anyone with half a brain that all nubile young girls in cybersex chat rooms are in fact men or boys of varying ages and, to be honest, there are people that really don't care, so long as you're willing to be what they want you to be. And, to be honest, why should people care? It's not as if any long-lasting relationships have emerged from online cybersex. Most people are blissfully aware that the woman on the end of a sex phone-line looks nothing like the woman on the sex phone-line advert but still, somehow, people get off to them. Just as long as people get what they want, I don't see any harm in that.

update: i have also tried the same 'experiment' with the nickname PretendingToBeABoy and considerably more successful results. boys would message me and think it 'kinda cute' when i told them of my plan and then they'd pretend to be a girl.

Whenver I go to the sex chat rooms on Yahoo I am a 26 year old Japanese girl. I have a couple of pics on my harddrive that look quite amateurish and when I am (invariably) asked for my pics, I dutifully send them off, much to the jubilation of the recipient.
I first did it because of the immense competition to get anybody's attention in those rooms. The change was instantaneous and profound. At first I wasn't quite prepared because I hadn't developed my new character yet and wasn't sure who I was going to be. However after a while it all came together.

I guess the attraction is that you can be the fantasy girl that you desire, and say exactly the stuff that you want to be told. I suppose that you sort of fall into the mind of the unwitting guy on the other end.

And it's true, even after it's all said and done, the guys are really nice to you. I actually feel a little guilty because it turns out this guy seems like a really nice person. He still thinks there is this hot chick in Japan who talks to him online and is willing to show her naked body to him. If I'm not careful he might fall in love.

Uh-oh, I have a sinking feeling that I just shared way too much.