COLUMN: Lesbians, Aryans and N’SYNC, oh my.
I consider myself somewhat computer savvy – meaning I am an average typist and can find ESPN.com or CNN.com without rupturing brain cells. But until a few weekends ago, I had never explored the world of Internet chat.
Sure, like almost every computer user, I had watched movie trailers on the Web, saw streaming news footage and had even stumbled upon freakish Marilyn Manson fan sites, home pages of Timothy McVeigh-esque terrorists and some really psychotic Roswell/Anal Probe/UFO therapy pages. However, chatting via Yahoo! Messenger is an entirely new, freakish and drool-inducing experience. In fact, my foray into the world of chat has reaffirmed my belief that most folks we see everyday, if we knew what they did behind closed doors, would be locked away in the nuthouse, forever.
Let me give you a brief travelogue of my adventure.
Friday afternoon, my wife left town with our daughter – not for good, but for a tiny, husband-free vacation. Same with my friend’s wife, too. She was going to visit her parents for the weekend. This made us bachelors for a few days, and as most married men can affirm, no wife plus loads of time equals only one outcome. Mischief. Oodles of mischief. Oh, and weight gain, but that’s another article.
So, with a heap of love-handle-promoting snacks, troughs of caffeinated soda and a cable Internet connection, we logged into Yahoo! Messenger and began exploring its vast boroughs of chat “communities,” which, I should mention, go from one end of the civilized spectrum to the other.
There are innocent chat rooms like business and finance, music, schools and education, hobbies and crafts, health, and government and politics. However, with one click of the mouse, you can find yourself in the red-light district of chat, on the wrong side of town, navigating your way through rooms like “Pagan Lake,” “Vampires,” “Hot Phone Sex,” “Adult Breast Feeding,” “Men Who Wear Women’s Underwear,” “The Lesbian Bathhouse,” “Women Who Hate Men” and, well, you get the picture.
We tried the “Utah” room first, and all we discovered was a smorgasbord of 12 to 17-year-old morons arguing and conversing over which Salt Lake City area high school was the best, who got drunk last weekend, who wanted to meet and make-out and, obviously, this being a predominately Latter-day Saint-based state, who was Mormon and who wasn’t, and which of the two were more likely to go straight to hell.
From “Utah,” we moved to the “Boy Band Chat” page and discovered how incredibly sensitive young ladies can be about N’SYNC and The Backstreet Boys. I was told – or typed, rather – to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine and to stop being such a “Justin-hater.” I should note here, while in the teen realm of chat we snuck into the “High School Sleepover” room and listened to girls giggle, belch and fart, although not necessarily in that order. I can’t believe girls really fart. I thought it was a lie.
Next, we visited the “Osama bin Laden Must Die” room. As near as I could tell, from all the aggressive typing and shouting (we have voice chat, too), this was a hateful room of men and women decrying the Sept. 11 attacks on America using every disgusting racial epithet a limited and shameful vocabulary can utter. It was sad, but predictable. So, without further ado, we made stops at the surreal “Lesbian Bathhouse,” the redneck-filled “White Supremacist Room” and the glory-filled, praise Jesus room of “Born Again Christian Chat.”
While each room was full of loonies, the “White Supremacist Room” had to be the most thought provoking. Instead of the normal, rag-tag assemblage of different user-names, this room was divided into chat “gangs.” The “Angels of Darkness” versus the “Angels of Hell.” There were two predominant voices in the room which kept hurling insults and threats, berating each other for stepping on their “turf.” While entertaining at first, this “cyber-fighting” between faceless Information Highway biker gangs was becoming redundant and boring. Trust me, the f-word can only be creatively used a few times.
But it made me think. First, how each person in this country desires for their voice to be heard, even on a platform so simplistic and juvenile as Yahoo! Messenger. And last, despite the overwhelmingly psychotic and troubled state of almost every person chatting that evening, it was comforting to know we live in a country where our voices can be heard. I wonder if those folks chatting realized what a privilege and honor free speech is to this country.
I wondered if I did, as well. I wonder if you do.