Modern times

What is really interesting about living at this moment in history is how easy it is to stand next to a friend and have a conversation, from thousands of miles away.

Last night, from the comfort of my bed, I was chatting with a friend from college whom I had not actually talked with in 3 years. She was in Hong Kong. I was in my bed. She was wearing a beautiful dress and I was in a black t-shirt. Just a few years ago, if I had wanted to have a conversation with my friend and see her facial reactions, I would have had to put on pants, get on a plane and fly to Hong Kong. Of course, she could have flown here, but that has never happened, such is our friendship.

This modern thing, the ability to communicate, the ability to chat and talk and seduce online is something that is such a new thing and so completely without historic perspective, that my sense is, it is out of control. See, in the past, there were rules and those rules were enforced by others in society. If I had flown to Hong Kong and met my friend in the bar of her hotel, and I said something incredibly mean and disgusting and she threw her drink in my face, someone would have noticed, and if my reaction to her thrown drink was overly aggressive, someone would have called the police, or stepped in, and then all hell breaks loose. Online, there are no friends, no one else is watching, there are no internet police you can call to complain about unruly behavior. In some ways that is a good thing, no third party means there are no rules. It also means that people have to actually be adults and be kind, which means unkind people have a whole new playing field to bully, cheat or just be sketchy.

I was thinking about this recently as I was looking over some internet personal ads. These are always funny because they are written by the individual posting them, for others to read and judge and hopefully find them enticing enough to respond to. Here is the given catch in any profile advertisement, everyone lies. Everyone. I have posted a number of such internet personal ads over the years and I can honestly say, in each and every one there was something that was a stretch, almost always my age was at least a year or two, or a decade lower than reality. Now, in my mind, I justified this by knowing that I was much more immature than my actual real age, so I figured I should estimate my age in my level of maturity.

My friend from Hong Kong is a single woman and she has an online dating profile that lists her age as 41. This is not true, nor are her breast size, her education level (she dumbed it down, men don't like smart women) and her income (same, men apparently don't like women with cash). So I asked, when you go on a date and people can kind of tell you might be a little older than you promoted, or that your breasts a little smaller, do you ever get called on that. The answer was no. "It's not the same as in the gay world."

Oh, the gay world. I had forgotten.

Gays lie in profiles on pick up sites all the time. Sketchy the addict had the funniest profile ever. Sketchy is this psychopath I met many years ago who appeared to be a somewhat healthy person, but soon came out as a scary monster. One day Sketchy left a laptop open to a Manhunt (gay online anonymous sex pickup site) open, with his profile left flashing. I sat and read it and one of the descriptions was penis size. Sketchy had somehow stretched this description to 7 inches, which is larger than the national average and at least twice the size of Sketchy the addicts actual penis, at least according to rumors, legend and the current gay blog posts of "I slept with Sketchy The Addict and all I got was this disease" blog. Which always begged the question, if you were unlucky enough to actually sex it up with this pathological liar and ended up having inadequate sexual relations, how long would it take to notice that instead of an above average American penis implement, you were instead being met with some sort of Eastern European micropenis?

So my question to my friend in Hong Kong stood out there. When you lie to someone about something they may soon see or experience, a breast here, a small penis there, what do you do when you don't measure up to your profile promise? She laughed from the hotel room on the other side of the world and said, "when someone is finally in the position to judge, they never seem to care."