Back when I rode a dinosaur to school and The Internet was brand-new and dial-up cost approximately six-thousand dollars a month, as young teenagers, we used to dick around in chat rooms. My girlfriends and I were morons, so what we’d do when we were looking to fuck around with people was to try and see if we could get anyone to cyber with us.
I don’t actually know if people have cyber sex anymore because I haven’t visited a chat room since 1996, but the way you’d start is to randomly go in and be all, “you wanna cyber?” Or if you were REALLY fancy, you’d say, “a/s/l?” That was for “age, sex, location.” The people on To Catch A Predator would have had a field day with us, except that none of us were serious and no one drank Zima.
Most of the time, people realized that we were probably about 14, so they ignored us, but occasionally we could flush out an Uncle Pervy to be stupid with and it was pretty fun. As a bonus, it taught me to talk really dirty, which is something you can really never learn too much about.
Also, I’m sure some of you who HAVE 14 year olds are probably flipping out right now, so let’s just pretend that I said that I was actually 24, okay? Or 34, if that makes you happier. As much as people were all “THE INTERNET IS SCARY” no one certainly ever showed up to our houses with a butcher knife OR a twelve-pack of condoms and lube.
Later, came internet dating, something I didn’t actually know much about. I’d never really had much of a problem getting dates (SHOCKING, I KNOW) so I’d never considered trying to find one online. Maybe I would have had I not been married young, I can’t be sure. Anyway. When internet dating first made it’s debut, I remember it being a big fucking deal.
Like, if you were going to meet someone From The Internet (always said as though they weren’t a real person), you had to have a twelve-step back-up plan and all sorts of check-in points along the way: “First, I’ll call when I get into the car, and then if he doesn’t have a knife or an axe in his back pocket, I’ll call again. Then YOU call and FAKE an emergency and I’ll tell you if he has a sadistic gleam in his eye and looks like he’s about to chop me up into a meat pie tonight. Dinner should take an hour at the VERY latest and after that, I’ll pretend to need to call my mom to check in on my dad and if I’m still alive after that, I’ll call you on the ride home.”
If you found someone off the NEWSPAPER Personal Ads, you were golden, but the very second that it was from The Internet, well, boy, it must be a SERIAL killer you’re meeting. Don’t get me wrong, I know The Internet can be creepy, but so can the newspaper. Luckily for all the online daters, it became more socially acceptable with time and people stopped acting like meeting someone from The Internet was akin to drinking formaldehyde.
The Internet has made parenting ‘tweens and teenagers tricky, I’m learning, because according to the FEAR MONGER segment in my local news, there are a lot of Uncle Pervy’s out there. I’m not denying it because, hell, I write a sex column and my own blog, and you should SEE some of the search terms I get. MySpace and Facebook have made many parents very nervous because, well, you can sort of pretend to be anyone, and the thought is that some older people can pretend to be younger people and then somehow trick them into revealing their locations. No doubt, it happens. Of course it does.
I can’t really get too up in arms about it because at some point I have to just teach my children how to handle these sorts of things and hope that I’ve taught them well. It’s not that I don’t -or won’t- worry, it’s just that I can’t really stick them in an airtight box for the next thirty or so years. Mostly because they’d die because I’d forget to water them and stuff. I get it, though. You don’t want your kids exposed to that sort of scary stuff unnecessarily and The Internet is rife with weirdos and horse porn and weirdos MAKING horse porn.
The first time that Your Aunt Becky has actually raised slightly concerned eyebrows at something on The Internet, though is when I found out about this new site called Chatroulette. It’s a video instant messaging site sort of like Skype, that hooks random people up to chat with each other via web cam. Either participant can leave the chat at any time by pressing a key. In theory, that sounds sort of fun, I guess, although by “sort of fun” I mean that I’d rather shove a fork in my eyeball than do that, but if I squint, I guess I could see why OTHER people might want to do that.
But my internal radar is going all “DANGER, DANGER, DANGER” because that just sounds…well, bad. I’m sure that this is a mark of me getting old and boring and (more) crotchety than normal, but damn if that doesn’t sound like a bad fucking idea. There is a “you must be 16 to use this site” disclaimer, but even then, who abides by that?
And what kid who really can prepare themselves for the onslaught of naked penises, men beating off and high school-like rejection at a click of a button? There are some SCARY penises out there. Certainly at 29 years old, I am pretty immune to people rejecting me, but I can’t imagine how that would have bothered me when I was younger.
But maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me at all. Maybe I’d have laughed off the Uncle Pervies who asked me to show them my tits. Maybe I’d have done it and laughed about it later. I’ve always liked how The Internet connects people from all over the world, and this is about as personal as it can get, so maybe I’m just overreacting. Maybe this is the New Internet Frontier and I’m just an old fart who is scared of change.
Either way, I’ll be sitting at home, eating my pudding, watching Matlock and cursing at those damn kids on my lawn. OH WAIT, those are my damn kids.
I’m officially screwed.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Kids will discover sex however they can. Being (apparently) slightly older than you, the internet didn’t actually exist for me until I got to college. As a young nerd with no social skills, having a short buffer to edit my foolishness made all the difference in breaking my paralyzing fear of girls. In the end, I met my wife over the internet.. so yay!
Being younger and without internet there were still 1001 different ways to discover sex however. The encyclopedia Brittanica had a lovely 2 paragraphs on deviant sex acts that I’m pretty sure I’d memorized. The 4th book of the otherwise PG-13 Elfquest series had this great orgy scene. The romance novels that my mother got from the library would always open up to the two sex scenes of the book. They always had two sex scenes.. the ‘bad sex’ at the beginning and the healing ‘good sex’ scene later on.
Ahhh.. Memories.
I was right with you with the progression of OMG INTERNET! to “OMG I heard that so-and-so is on match dot com tee hee what a loser freak!” to eventually me getting naked and fucking myself on cam for 1,500 international viewers to see. Point is: You can get used to anything.
Also: Chatroulette = Best Night EVER.
http://yourenotthebossofme-jsn.blogspot.com/2010/03/chatroulette.html
Hey, I’m not much older than you, Aunt Bex, and I didn’t really have the Interwebz until college either. But I’d already been warned (by my grandfather, nonetheless) about the dangers of boys on the internet and in bars (the man watches too many daytime talk shows), so I was a little apprehensive at first about the chatting creeps. Of course, I was too ‘busy’ on campus…grin.
I think as long as you’re open with the crotch parasites when they’re old enough to get on the Interwebz that not everyone is full of The Light with rainbows coming from her ass like you, you should be safe.
And the interwebz can be a fucking scary place. I’d earned myself a stalker when I was in the college. Fucker.
Having a 17 year old daughter at home, makes me freak out about scary internet creeps. Our computer is in our living room, so anyone can see what websites anyone is on. My daughter has wanted a computer in her room since she was like 10, and I just couldn’t do it. Too scary. I’ve watched to many episodes of “To Catch a Predator” on Dateline….
I guess making her watch those shows with me has probably helped, because if she does things where she chats with strangers she calls them all kinds of names, and asks if they are Chester Molesters…and then does a virtual hang up on them.
@Bill – What about National Geographic? My older brother was always fascinated with the oh so topless women of the Pygmy tribes.
Looks like I’m about two years younger than you AB, and I totally remember getting in the chat rooms when I was around 11 or 12. Some of them were even that creepy green font on a black background that you only see nowadays in movies where the interwebz is a super-skeery monster that is going to slap a “Perverts and serial killers, check ME out!” tag on your forehead. But really, it was no big deal. I did not cyber, as my mother provided a reasonable level of supervision, and because I was a goody-two-shoes being raised in the bible belt.
But if I had? So what? Even at that age I wasn’t stupid enough to give out my full name or address to some unknown person. I don’t have kids yet (the day is coming, once my hubby FINALLY finished grad school) but when I do I certainly won’t be afraid of them being on the internet with a certain level of autonomy. I don’t think I’ll allow computers with internet behind closed doors until at least 16, and I will teach them that IT IS STUPID TO GIVE OUT YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS TO UNKNOWN SOURCES ON THE INTERNET!!! I mean, DUH?!?!? My philosophy is: Don’t be scared, just don’t be a total freaking moron.
The internet is a scary place? Hmmm, Drama Queen and 2 of her friends were followed out of a department store a few weeks ago by a 60+ perv, she had texted He Who Loves All Things Wicked because they had realized pervy was following them, so when He showed up and Dram Queen turned and pointed pervy out, He found security and gave them a good description. Pervs don’t just cruise the interwebz. Simply put, just gotta teach our kids about safety in all situations. Period. Also, if you people don’t quit talking up this damn Chat Roulette I am clearly going to have to don last year’s Halloween wig and give it a spin.
Bah hahah! I remember doing the exact thing with all of those creepy themed AOL chat rooms. Hello, entertainment!
i remember the old chat rooms too. cyber sex was incredibly hot and safe from all things STD, preggars, and commitment.
but i wasn’t prepared for the cyber sex cowboy! i got all worked up with this one guy and actually felt the emotions. and don’t ya know he up and went, never to be heard from again, after our cyber marathon. how do you get cyber hurt? leave it to me.
so anyway, in many ways the internet is safer than being at the mall, a club, a park, a concert, in public. we just have to be internet savvy like we are street savvy.
@CatPS Oh, those chat rooms with the green font and black backgrounds still exist. You also have to reload them manually to see if anyone responded to you. I had my first chatroom experience in one of those–on a 14.4 modem, no less. (Took forever for loading to happen, as you can imagine) It was the dawn of the internet age–at least as far as my father was concerned–and I surprisingly never got talks about giving out my information or anything. Considering what a shockingly stupid kid I was, this is interesting. Still, I managed not to get anyone stalking my house and as I’ve gotten older…..I’ve come to just plain dislike chatrooms. It’s so much easier to find people these days that you don’t really need them to communicate with people now. Now all the creepy people show up on Facebook, but it seems to me that they’re kind of obviously creepy. (Had some random stranger send me a message propositioning me for a threesome with his wife once, actually. O_o) But really, perverts just seem to be fairly obvious about their motives and they just seem to expect their tactics to work–and I guess they do often enough or it wouldn’t keep happening.
Still, I don’t think the world has gotten much scarier, it’s just gotten easier to find international perverts instead of just the homegrown ones.
@Ebby – OMG 14.4 modems and we were fascinated.
That picture looks shockingly like I did at that age. And perverts still kinda make me giggle. Like a lot.
Not having cyber sex, but with a girlfriend nicknamed The Phone Sex Operator, what do you think we have???
Great job Aunt Becky!!!
Cai… so what’s pre-dinosaur then? I am 43 and our version of cybersex was the old telephone tie-lines. No idea if you had those in the US but in Montreal, where I grew up, we had those. I can’t really recall how it worked but I think you would dial a certain number and you get connected to a whole bunch of other people—or sometimes just one person. (you know, with the rotary dial telephone—took a long time to dial and usually I’d break my fingernail in the process…) I used to call when I babysat because I shared a room with my little sister and had no privacy at home. I vaguely recall not having a clue what I was talking about and tried to wing it best I could to wing it. I don’t recall ever speaking to anyone who seemed older than a teen though (based on their lack of general knowledge also)… Our adult pervs seem to sit in cars near the convenience store and flash us on our way in to get our junk food fix.
Anyway, the web cam thing does worry me—for my kids that is; the idea of myself on camera is ludicrous—I’d shower in clothes if I could swing it without looking insane… But I subscribe to fully disclosing the danger, in black and white, life and death terms… In other words I advocate scaring the shit out of your kids. Better for them to get therapy later vs. end up in a bad situation now.
Becky, those were the days. Your fingers whizzed across the keyboards like a woman of at least 16. The color of your font, the slant of your italics, the way you always misspelled “Cleveland Steemer.”
Oh, to be young again…