"OK, well, one time the group that I'd met online -- we were all online buddies at this point, all talking about sex but not the S/M stuff -- we were all in our chat room and this new woman came on. Her name was TrackStar, and she was a runner at the University of Tennessee. Really serious competitor, apparently. And she was very friendly and outgoing and everyone really liked her. She started sending me private messages, and she was very flirtatious. At one point, I'd mentioned I wanted to buy these new running shorts that I'd seen at the Nike store, and she went to a mutual friend who lived here in the city, and said, 'Buy those shorts for Jemma, send me the bill, but make sure you get a picture of her in them.' Very flirtatious, fun girl. To make a long story short, it turned out she wasn't a girl at all. A bunch of the women in group figured out she was actually one of the guys in the group, who was playing this role. They trapped him -- got him on the phone while luring TrackStar to type something to one of them."

"A cybersting," I commented. "How do these people find the time to do all this? I can understand masturbating -- well, I can understand the idea, anyway -- but doesn't the phrase, 'Get a life' ever occur to them? I mean, not you, necessarily." Oops.

"No, it's OK. I was bored. They were bored. But -- that TrackStar episode, I have to say that it was disturbing. I don't know why he did that, because we trusted him. Stuff like that happens all the time." She collected her little fur balls and walked to the kitchen. The cat watched her, looking supremely annoyed.

"Another time in our little group," she continued loudly from the other room, "one of the women and one of the guys exchanged photos of each other. They lived in different states, and that happens all the time too. She was attractive, he wasn't, apparently -- he looked like Mr. Magoo. She started not to e-mail him as much. He got mad. She cut him off, and he sent her a vial of his cum in the mail."

"Aaarrgghhh." I put my hands over my eyes. "Helen Mirren, here I come."

"Next thing she knows, she's looking out her window of her office, and he's down there on the sidewalk, staring up at her. She had to call the police. But you hear the bad stuff all the time -- there's some good stuff, people making friends, getting married. I've read about that."

"Are you still friends with that online group?" I called to her.

"No. It got too twisted and time consuming." She came back in the room and plopped next to me on the sofa. "But back to masturbating -- I liked doing that. It was fun, for a while. I still think it's a great idea -- very liberating. Maybe it's also liberating to change genders, but it seems that only the men do it. I had a male friend who would pretend he was a female, and I'd get these instant private e-mails from him saying, 'Help! Help! These women want to know what size of panty hose I wear! What sizes do they come in? What size would I be?'"

"Maybe the women he was talking to were all men too," I said. "Yikes. Life is too short. Give me a visual porn site any day of the week over all this intrigue and deception. I think I'd find that much more of a turn-on, anyway. I like looking at Playboy and Penthouse in real life."

"Very vanilla of you," said Jemma smugly.

As if on cue, we both looked over at her computer, sitting in a corner of her living room, with its own special ergonomically designed desk and backless stool. "A friend of mine used to call the Web the World Wide Wank," I said. But now I felt sorry for the boxy, clumsy desktop, looking as if it too knew it had fallen by the wayside. "Poor neglected thing. If you had a laptop, maybe you'd still be doing cybersex."

"I should probably sell it," Jemma said with some wistfulness. "At one time it was my life. Now I couldn't care less. But -- I got very good at typing with one hand."
SALON | June 24, 1998

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