OneAndOneIs2

A piece linked from Slashdot says that most bloggers are female.

The way they measured this isn't the best - measuring how many people who comment on blogs have their own blog - and of course, Slashdotters have also pointed out that on the Internet, there's often a big difference between what gender people SAY they are and what gender they ACTUALLY are. My favourite comment on the subject puts it as: On the intenet, men are men, women are men, and little kids are fbi agents.

And there's a lot of truth to that claim, but IMHO much less so when it comes to blogging. Most bloggers talk about their personal lives, which include dating etc. It would be quite a chore to maintain a readable blog that lied about something as fundamental as your gender.

IM and chat clients, however... Now THERE it pays to be skeptical. I remember when I first discovered Yahoo chat had "Adult" rooms - this was about ten years ago when you accessed chat through a browser and it still had user-created rooms.

It's not often that I'm shocked. But I was shocked.

It very quickly becomes a habit to ignore blatantly "sexy" IDs - if they're not bots, they're men pretending to be women.

Or so popular perception would have it. However...

Final year at university. I was living on-campus in one of the posher halls of residence - we had permanently-on access to the Net in our rooms, quite a luxury back then. And one day, I was in one of the UK chat rooms (All the other rooms were invariably full of Americans, which you can get tired of after a while.)

I forget who I was talking to or why the subject came up, but somebody asked where I was, and I said I was in a university west of London.

Suddenly, one of the other occupants in the room pipes up with "What University is that?" Their Yahoo ID was "sexy_london_gals" (I kid you not) and so I had paid them no attention whatsoever up to then - a name like that was surely either a bot or a bloke..?

Slightly warily, I told them. And "Hey, what a coincidence! That's where WE are too!"

Cynicism overload? I was halfway expecting an offer of companionship in return for a small fee, but we chatted for a while. Nothing dodgy in the conversation - they claimed to be three first year girls who were bored and chatted under that particular ID for laughs, and they knew enough about the layout of the campus to be convincing.

(I later learned that they had an even-worse ID name than that as well, I might add)

So I was fairly convinced that he/she/they were genuinely student(s) at my university.. but surely not really who they claimed?

Since they were living on-campus as well, they offered to drop in and say hello. Intuiged, I said OK, and a short while later, there was a knock on the door. Upon opening it, I duly said hello to three genuine 18-year old girls.

Definitely one for the books. We chatted for a while, and it must be said that I got some very jealous looks from my neighbours the next day - what they saw & heard was three girls come into my room and quite a lot of laughing, after all...

The truth was far duller than fiction - we were just talking, and they were quite a laugh, I must admit. I met them a couple of other times, and saw them around occasionally, but that was all it ever amounted to. I was a very boring student really..

But it was quite an eye-opener, I must say. Prior to that meeting, I never would have even considered believing that a screen name of "horny_women" really was three actual women.

Yes, that was indeed the other name they chatted under