Online and In-Person Are Different
The online and in-person split matters because those spaces feel quite different to me. Online, I’m a bit more anonymous, no longer attached to any conceptual model of a body or personhood. A lot of it comes from roleplay experience. Here, roleplay means informal text-based play, not necessarily acting, gaming, or sexual roleplay. It can be as simple as typing an action between asterisks, like *hugs you*, to create a playful gesture in conversation. Roleplay is the way to play pretend, and in online spaces that often looks like texting back and forth and even describing actions or scenes with narrative style text within a conversation. Writing something like *pats your head* means that the person on the other end of the internet conversation feels that gesture based on my roleplay message.
When I say online, I mean the internet generally. I wouldn’t mind being seen as more feminine in any space that I occupy online. Even here, on this website! Though I share real pictures of myself in Original Newsletters, I still like the feeling of being unbound by perceptions. Sorry if that “breaks the magic” for anyone, but I really do prefer or at least skew more feminine online.
In person, the situation changes. As this paper is an extension of “Clothes Are Clothes,” it indeed is my in-person interactions. My gender, and parts of my presentation like posture and vocal inflections, are masculine or sometimes agender, without gender, in person. Sure, I dress feminine, or as the paper identified, specifically skirts and dresses, but in person I lean more “he/it” than anything else.
I’m not sure the split would be about authenticity. I am switching masks when I go online. I have quite a few masking techniques, some of which I’ve purposefully distanced myself from, others I will do depending on the crowd I am surrounded by, and even more yet that I do because I enjoy the safety they bring or the persona I’m able to adopt when using them.
I feel authentic as a virtual girl, but that is also because I’ve put a lot of time and effort into adopting, embodying, and otherwise envisioning myself as this peppy, optimistic, playful feminine aura when on the internet. The online conversations I’ve had with people have been influenced by the dialog I use on the internet, and that is tied to this side of myself that I have grown. It feels natural, but maybe to an outside observer, it could look like acting. Let’s call it “method acting,” where I really do get into the mindset of that virtual girl and hear my internet voice in a different way than my real world voice would speak.
My online self feels freer because it’s not attached to my body. Lots of users on the internet feel that anonymity because it’s the internet. That can lead to good things, to bad things, all things, really.
@katsumi_maki
Names
- Dan
- Katsumi Maki
- Katsumi
- Maki
When an online-only term crosses into real life, the feeling depends on who is in the room. Especially if they know my online self, then I wouldn’t really be upset by it. My mind would more likely turn to think about how others would react, especially those who don’t know my online self. That’s the divide. If I was in a room completely with people who knew me online, and that happens, then by all means, they can call me “Katsumi Maki,” sometimes because they just don’t know my real name or it doesn’t come to them as quickly. But that’s a different space to be in.
In this day and age, it’s not really that strange to see online conversations as different from in-person ones. Heck, people speak differently over email than they do text or voice. It’s pretty well known, so even though being “a virtual girl” has its own specificity, I don’t think it stretches too far beyond the imagination when I tell people that I act differently online than I do in person.
For the most part, even the most casual internet users could still be able to picture that “chronically online” people have their own way of navigating the internet, even if it flies a bit over the heads of a casual user. I do not only mean “online too much” as an insult. Chronically online users are ones that are enveloped in internet-specific language, humor, roleplay, fandom, and social habits. Basically, they’re easy to identify because they use the internet in a much greater capacity (and thus with higher levels of devotion to or knowledge about topics on the internet). If people try to treat my online self in the same way as they treat my real self, then I just assume they are trying to be respectful. I’ll probably tone down my playfulness, because I’m not forcing play on anybody.
That distinction also explains why she/her is online-only. Some people reached out to ask my pronouns after they saw my social profile go from no description to a very short, three-word description (A Virtual Girl), which was nice, but most of the people reaching out were in-person friends that I would just tell them my same preference for he/him in person. She/her in person is just the wrong term. It would confuse those who know I use he/him, it could confuse those who assume I use he/him, and I don’t make any effort to present myself in any culturally feminine way other than wearing skirts and dresses (and fashion changes quickly).