O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott
Some of my readers may be familiar with The Real Princess Diaries, the blog of a supposed escort and sex educator named “Alexa di Carlo”. The blog was very popular (over 2 million visitors in its lifetime) but also quite controversial due to the fact that many of “Alexa’s” posts were…well, creepy. “She” advocated unsafe sex practices, said a lot of things which revealed an astonishing ignorance of our world and attacked and tried to discredit sex and/or prostitutes’ rights activists. The reason for all these things is that she was, as many of us suspected all along, a dude pretending to be a woman. On October 22nd a blog called Expose a Bro revealed that “Alexa”, an escort hobbyist named “Matt” and a precocious teenage girl named “Caitlain” were all aliases of a civil-service computer programmer named Thomas Bohannan who played his various online personas off of one another in order to excite himself, manipulate escorts and solicit nude pictures from teenagers. I cannot possibly tell the story as well as you can read it directly from the source, nor could any commentary I might make on the downfall of “Alexa” be remotely as brilliant and dead-on as that written by Furry Girl in her blog of last Wednesday (November 10th).
But the whole tawdry affair got me thinking about the larger issue of why so many men like to get up in what I call “cyberdrag”. Obviously, as I discussed in my column of September 20th there are plenty of men in real life who like to dress in drag for one reason or another, but on the internet it practically constitutes an epidemic. Since I cannot believe that every guy who pretends to be a woman in chat rooms is a transsexual, a transvestite or even a closet homosexual, something else must be going on…but what the hell is it? I suspect the major reason is attention; women get more attention than men, so an easy way for a lonely geek to stand out in a crowded chat room would be to present himself as female. The fact that he’s not homosexual might be immaterial for the same reason trolls delight in sowing discord in order to provoke angry replies: to the immature psyche all attention is good attention. Just as the troll values insults equally with compliments, so the heterosexual gender-bender might value male attention equally with female. And just as the troll may find a sense of power in being able to manipulate others’ emotions, so too perhaps the gender-bender relishes the power an attractive woman has over men. This theory is supported by the fact that female personas adopted by males are always claimed to be sexy and young; I daresay no chat-room gender-bender ever pretended to be a fat old grandmother!
Another possibility is plain male horniness; if a heterosexual man wants to create an interactive pornographic story with someone else to wank himself to, the game will require one participant of each gender. And since vastly more men than women are interested in “cybersex”, the chances are highly in favor of any willing parties he meets being male; he therefore needs to create a female character in order to get a two-way interaction going. If this theory is correct such a man isn’t really identifying with his adopted female persona; he’s just writing words for her character to create a porn story. Some other practitioners of “cyberdrag” are certainly homosexual or gender-confused; still others may be cops or reaction-forming perverts pretending to be young girls in order to entrap men in sexual conversations. It puts me in mind of a signature line I once saw: “The internet: Where men are boys, women are men and children are cops.” And also, this video.
So, which of these, if any, was Bohannan’s motivation? It appears to have been mostly about attention, power and sexual gratification; his “Alexa” persona gained him plenty of attention from fans and allowed him to function as a sort of uber-troll messing with people’s reputations offline as well as on, and his pose as an “expert” perhaps gave him the respect he could not command in his dead-end job. Also, as “Alexa” he could forge his own escort referrals to “her” favorite client, “Matt”, who was a fan of the sort of misogynistic porn activities I discussed in my column of October 28th. In the final analysis, though, I have to agree with the writer of Expose a Bro: The man was a sociopath and needed to be “outed” in order to protect people from his malevolent manipulation.
I’m going to cut the column short today to give you more time to read Expose a Bro and Furry Girl’s Feminisn’t, but I want to leave you with one more thought: Please notice how this genuine predator was exposed. It wasn’t by an expensive multi-state FBI operation arresting hundreds of women who were just trying to make a living and feed their kids, nor by sleazy cops pretending to be hookers and/or clients, nor by neofeminists or trafficking activists working to “rescue” people, nor by crusading journalists courageously fighting “for the children”. He was found out by a number of perceptive members of the sex worker community, working to remove dangerous vermin from our midst. Similarly, a group of prostitutes in Dayton, Ohio recently helped to catch a serial rapist (paraphrased from Brandy Devereaux’s TCAA site):
A tip from an outraged prostitute led to Friday’s arrest of a suspected serial rapist, one of whose alleged victims was a 15-year-old girl snatched off the street on her way home from school. “We received a call from a ‘lady of the night’ who was appalled that the girl had been raped,” Sgt. Tom Flanders said following the arrest of Billy Balidbid, 26, of Fairborn. “She said she’d seen the sketch of the suspect and said he had contact with him…She got the ball rolling.” That led detectives to other prostitutes who said they had been beaten and raped by the suspect. Though police did not have a name, they had enough information on the suspect’s behaviors and patterns to set up a sting. Friday morning before dawn, when Balidbid pulled up to an officer disguised as a prostitute, detectives swooped in for the arrest…from the information that Balidbid gave detectives, they have connected him to at least five other rapes dating back to early this summer.
What the prohibitionists refuse to recognize is that if we were allowed to, we could do this ALL THE TIME. If prostitution were decriminalized we could report those who rape us, attempt to manipulate us or give our honorable profession a bad name by exploiting young girls. If you really want to fight “human trafficking”, lobby for decriminalization so we can work with the police and root out the predators where they live.
I hate that somebody was doing what you do, only fake. If somebody read one thing here and something else at “Alexa’s” blog, that person might not know better than to go with whichever “first hand statement” agreed most with his own preconceived notions.
Well, the thing which made so many people suspicious of “Alexa” was that a great deal of what “she” said flew in the face of every other escort’s experience and known facts about sexology, and that “she” made ad hominem attacks against those who dared to question “her”. Sex-work bloggers all disagree with one another from time to time about one detail or another (for example Ingrid and I disagree about the safety vs. need of Gardasil, and Amanda and I on the relative safety of BBBJ), but those are small issues and we tend to be all in one camp about the big things. With “Alexa”, that was not so, hence the widespread doubt.
“She” could still have taken in a newbie, and probably did. I’m glad that he has been exposed.
Oh, yeah, “she” fooled lots of people, including a number of young escorts. Many people just tend to roll over for authority figures (including teachers, which “Alexa” claimed to be). Remember this experiment?
Oh yes I do. And like everybody else who ever heard of it, I want to believe I, surely I wouldn’t keep pushing that button. Oh sure at first; the other guy volunteered after all. But once the screaming started, surely I would stop, whatever the guy in the lab coat has to say about it.
But I can’t really know that, can I?
I can be pretty sure that I wouldn’t have, but that’s only because I have authority issues; my natural tendency is to disobey and question authority, even when it would be healthier for me not to (for example, during a police traffic stop). I have been yelled at by boyfriends and husbands about it for thirty years, to no avail; if somebody who has assumed authority over me without my consent (such as a bureaucrat) tries to exert that authority, I instantly turn into a haughty princess. I’m sure I had a reputation for it among cops in my home town, which probably was the main reason I was targeted for the brutality which was inflicted on me on Memorial Day, 1995 (and which I talk about in tomorrow’s column).
So yeah, I can be reasonably sure I wouldn’t have obeyed, but I’m a cuckoo clock who doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up.
Well maybe you wouldn’t, and maybe I wouldn’t either, for similar reasons. The leader, the guy in charge, the boss, isn’t always right, and that’s the truth.
There is one thing in what you’ve said, though, which causes me doubt, for both of us: “if somebody who has assumed authority over me without my consent (such as a bureaucrat) tries to exert that authority,”
By agreeing to be the “teacher” in this experiment, you (or I) have consented to follow the doctor’s instructions. But you know what? Just being aware of the Milgram Experiment makes us less likely to do something similar in real life, should either of us (may all the Gods forbid it!) find ourselves in such a situation.
Actually, from what I hear the Milgram Experiment probably couldn’t be done today, because of the adverse psychological impact on the “teachers.”
You’re absolutely right, which is why I’m only reasonably sure rather than dead certain. 🙁
For the record, “Cathy”/”Caitlain” wasn’t ever “really” a teenage girl. She was almost 20 when she first “came to be”. She was a young adult personality who took advantage of teens through lies, deceit and false authority.
Yeah, I noticed that upon rereading “Expose a Bro” last night, but I figured it was better not to edit the post. Thanks for pointing it out, though; I’m not sure if that’s better, worse or just different from his pretending to be a high-schooler. 🙁
“The internet: Where men are boys, women are men and children are cops.” I’ve never heard that before but once I stop laughing, I’ll be using it!
Why on earth is a cop not using the phrase “sex worker”? “Lady of the night”??? Was my mother heading that investigation?
XX
😀