Blurt! You have a unique perspective.
What do you think about dudes pretending to be women online over the course of years?
What do you think about dudes pretending to be women online trying to catfish unknowing dudes?
What say you?
Well, for starters, I think
everybody's perspective is unique. Except maybe Aryan's. He's just a toothless mouthpiece for the
lederhosen fetishists over at Stormfront.
As for those men pretending to be women online, if the cyber-masquerade isn't executed with the intent to engage in criminal activities such as fraud or sexually motivated harassment and stalking, I can't see the harm. In fact, quite the opposite. In many ways, in real life, men are subject to many more gender role expectations and restrictions than are women (just look at the horror and revulsion expressed here on a daily basis at the thought of a person with a penis actually highlighting their own physical beauty, as is done by the male of the species throughout the rest of the animal kingdom).
Sociologists who study this "virtual transgenderism" will tell you that the effect of donning a persona that is removed from the wearer's actual reality is liberating and allows individuals to access and to connect with parts of their personality that usually remain dormant or untapped. It's one of the great aspects of the internet that it allows people to socialize with others regardless of anyone's physical appearance or gender. The content of someone's character becomes more important than its vessel.
Catfishing is fraud, in my view. If you disguise yourself with the intent to swoondoggle someone else, that's just plain dishonest.
Of course, in a community where creative people engage in a game of sometimes good-natured sometimes mean-spirited oneupmanship, catfishing is just another weapon in a mediocre player's arsenal. To me, it ranks right down there with [blank]-laming, chronic no-you-ism, and rote retorts. Catfishing, like the aforementioned "flaming" strategies, is used by those people whose lack of wit and whose limited intellectual capacities make the practice one of first resort. Sorta like delivering a platitude (a cardinal sin in the arena of the ridiculous) and appending to it a "PWN3D!" or a "*BOOM*" (uh, no offense, Benz) to anything and everything.
Hey, you asked.
