[runsonmagic]

This is a very honest well-written piece where the author recounts have cyber-sex in early 90s chatrooms - at age 10. She later went on to discover that most of her adolescent friends did the same thing.

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sect...-cybersex/

Quote:

It was easier to be anonymous on the Internet back then, to flirt and wink and experiment behind purposefully misspelled, sexually charged screennames like seksikittee69 and bigboi17 that weren’t tethered to a public Facebook account. While technology like group video conferencing existed, it was painfully slow and not readily available. This veil of anonymity let an entire generation of young women like myself experience their sexual initiations in AIM chatrooms.

Quote:

But I later discovered that I was not the only pre-adolescent haunting the AOL adult chatrooms. Most teens of the early AOL chatroom era, or the mid-to-late-1990s, experimented with cybersex or had their sexual initiations online, in chatrooms with names like “Bored housewives over 30” or “Naughty wellhung surfer boys 18+.”

Quote:

When I surveyed my friends to see if they had had cybersex in AOL chatrooms, nearly all of them remembered having similar experiences, usually with friends.

I'll confess - I remember doing this. And I'd heard rumors of other kids who did as well. Cybersex was a safe way for sheltered kids too afraid, inexperienced, or monitored to learn about and experiment with sexuality, with zero real-world repercussions or physical ramifications.

Reading this brought back memories I had completely forgotten. It's easy as an adult with significant sexual experience to write off the impact of these early experiences, reading this article brought back the feelings I had then.

At the time, I felt like I was the only one who experienced this. Now, I'm not so sure. For those of you in your twenties and thirties now, did you experiment with cybersex in adolescence as the internet was just taking off? What did you experience? What effect did those experiences have on you?

...

The author of the above piece goes on to talk about how the new technology kids are experiments with is far more dangerous. It is picture and video based, easier to access, and a crime if used by minors.

Quote:

When I look back on my time cruising for cyberpeen in AOL chatrooms, I don’t think so much of the people like FrankZappy (her cyber partner) that I met, because honestly, what was there to know about them? I think about what would have happened to me had I done the same thing today. I think about Amanda Todd, the 15-year-old Canadian girl who committed suicide following years of blackmail and cyberbullying after flashing a stranger online when she was 12. The stranger had been a “capper,” a group of men who haunt the darkest corners of the Internet, looking for underage girls to bully into performing acts on-camera.

Had webcams and capper culture existed back then, I like to think I would have had the wisdom and moral fortitude to withstand such pressure. But if I’m being honest about who I was then—bookish, lonely, patiently waiting at a computer screen for a man I did not know to ask me how my day was going or what kind of music I liked or what color panties I was wearing—I am not so sure.

Reading this gave me a window into the girls growing up today. By changing their age, they can get Tinder on their phone at 12. They can experiment with snapchat at 15. I understand why girls are so addicted to their cellphones - they probably had their first sexual experimentation with one. And there is a digital record of it.

The next generation gives their babies an iPad to play with. How do you think these early experiences will impact the next generation?

---

One other thought - in the early 90s there were a million scare stories about sexual predators on the internet. No one suspected it might be the kids seeking out experimentation with adults online. This story confirms that was the case for many adolescents. What misconceptions might we have about the current scares of the internet?

[puckerman]

The main "danger" is the law.

[Dr. Howard]

The late 90's/early 2000's when sites like yahoo had unfiltered 'adult' chatrooms was the 'golden age' in my opinion. I smashed married women with impunity then based on the following positive variables:

1. Scams/scamming was low, so messages resulted in a real person most of the time
2. This was pre-craiglist killer. People were much more friendly/less suspicious
3. There was no facebook, texting was pretty new, having one picture was like a valid passport.
4. People were not as suspicious then, wheras now if someone is online all of the time or has strange vehicles coming and going from the house its easy to know what is up
5. Yahoo Chat, AOL, and ICQ were not designed for attention whoring. You couldn't post selfies or collect likes, it was a shameful thing to get busted on there...so you KNEW what was up when you found a woman on there.

Nowadays people are very suspect, chicks are overloaded with attention online and shit tests are rampant. Back then if you got a bite it was just fuckup avoidance game.

[teh_skeeze]

Guilty as charged. This was also the beginning of internet dating (think '99-'01). Back then it was so easy to get dates (granted I was 18 back then). You took the obvious precautions of meeting in a public place, but usually ended with you fucking. Now that I think about it, it was just about all internet game that I ran back then, and it worked just fine. What the hell happened?

[TheSlayer]

I remember those Yahoo chat-rooms when I was in high school. There were so many girls my age and even whenever I encountered older chicks I would lie and say I was 18 or 19 . A/S/L was the first thing you typed when talking to people lol. I talked to a lot of girls and remember this one girl in particular was into dirty talk and would regularly show me her tits on her cam. The best was when one day I logged-in and she was waiting for me with 3 of her friends in her room. 2 of them were making out and all 4 had their shirts off.

Now I can only imagine how full of trolls any chat rooms would be and everyone is probably paranoid. I believe Yahoo closed theirs a couple of weeks ago.

[RouteBackwards]

I remember it was a "funny" thing to do with my friends growing up to go on chatrooms and getting girls to talk to us. They would get sexual and we'd start seeing how far we could push it. No one would admit it, but we masked our deep interest in the mysterious other by cracking jokes and acting like this was just "fun." Then, as technology progressed, we'd eventually seek out online girls who were willing to show us their breasts on their over pixelated webcams, or get girls to send us provocative emails.

Shit, these chatrooms were memory lane. I remember I'd goto a friends house and I'd sit on the computer messaging girls on sex chatrooms, and I'd scream in excitement when a girl described herself as being "sexxii with big tits."

Now a days though, I can speak to some stripper slut for an hour and get her to send me nudes in an hour of speaking to her. That excitements gone, but it really taught me a lot about my own sexuality now that I think back to it.