a/s/l

The internet entered my life in middle school via AOL dial-up. My house had one computer in my parents’ room and we were granted 10 online accounts after installing via disc. Initially, I had no care for it because I didn’t understand it. But, that changed when a friend asked if I was available to chat online. WHAT’S THAT?!

And those individual DMs quickly moved to age-inappropriate chat rooms, making the internet a major teacher of sexuality. Shockingly, this wasn’t a healthy education.

Time really does move fast. Talking on the phone was my main form of communication with friends. You would call the house phone, ask for them, and then discuss a range of topics for minutes or hours. Then I was scheduling AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) sessions via phone with those same friends. Eventually we got cell phones, and phone calls were made primary again, with texting being a novelty. And now, my husband is not in the minority when he says talking on the phone gives him anxiety. Then our phones got internet and everything is all grouped together, keeping us connected and separated all at once.

My friend had to walk me through setting up AOL chat, which was tricky because we couldn’t talk on the phone, so I wrote down foreign instructions and, along with my step-dad, we finally managed to send an instant message to her username from his account (which was his full name). For probably too long, my screenname was WilliamSmithII. You know, just your typical, girlie AOL username.

Once I learned about instant messaging, the internet became a major part of my young, daily life. Eventually, I filled up the remaining 10 accounts with various usernames (at the time, you couldn’t just change the screenname on a whim like you could in subsequent years), trying out different personas as my understanding of internet lingo expanded. Numbers could replace letters? Letters could be repeated for stylization? You could capitalize every other letter? My parents were not thrilled with this outcome as apparently every time you created a new account, you had to pay for it.

My internet time was limited because it did tie up the phone line and my parents also didn’t have any visibility into what I was doing, so they were concerned. At first, they had no reason to be, but as with anything that comes without education, curiosity takes over and the internet has literally no bounds.

“Have you gone into any chat rooms?” Queried a friend. “No, what’s that?” I asked.

Quickly, I learned. It was a virtual room where people just type things to each other, from all over. I watched the messages pouring in, taking in the random information about the topic at hand. I type out “poop”, wait a good minute, and then hit Enter and run away cackling. I can’t believe I just did that!

From chat rooms, you could direct message people individually, creating a more private atmosphere. This would happen, occasionally, mostly people reprimanding me from my juvenile behavior; but once I started entering more adult-themed chat rooms, the nature of those conversations changed quite a bit.

As young girls who are taught to not talk or ask about sex while being human and insanely curious about it, my group of friends swiftly found ourselves on a knowledge quest, sharing with each other everything we found out and how we discovered it.

In these rooms, I sent nothing. I voyeuristically absorbed line after line, talking about hard cocks, wet pussies, and other terms I’d never seen or heard of. Dildos, anal plugs, lube, blowjobs, fingering. After a couple minutes, I would get a direct message from someone in the room.

“Hey, cum here often?” A pickup line that unfortunately crossed the digital threshold. At the time, I knew nothing of this as a come-on, and definitely didn’t understand his purposeful misspelling. I just filed it away as another entry in my internet slang dictionary. I never responded when I was by myself. With the encouragement from friends and the privacy of their computer living outside of their parents’ room, however, we would write back excitedly.

“a/s/l” we respond.

Age / sex / location. It was a question to ask when chatting with strangers. A conversation that starts with this gets sexual, very fast. We knew that, so that’s why we answered that way.

Our information was never fully accurate. We were always 18 or 19, F, and in CA or NY. The next question would typically be about how big our boobs are. “DD”.

Even at 11 years old, we knew what men wanted us to be: A blonde, busty, thin, white girl who was barely legal and down to say and read dirty things. If these men were actually men and not boys (or other girls), then they definitely would have known that we were younger than we pretended to be. And they were probably okay with that.

Because the internet was tied to the phone line, a lot of our online time was late at night when parents weren’t expecting phone calls. This boded well for sleepovers where we could chat with our friends and strangers without interruption or consequences.

I never knew what we were talking about. My friends always seemed to know how to respond or what the messages meant, but in hindsight, I don’t think they were informed either. Our group really got a wild variety of shared knowledge, accurate and completely made up, and I took all of that with me to my many sexual encounters. But, reading “Wanna cyber?” or “Cybersex?” from these faceless typers was still the most thrilling experience of my life up to that point.

Eventually, the internet became independent from the phone line, so my time at the computer increased dramatically. My friends and I rarely spoke on the phone. Instead, we would IM to each other, and to people that we knew of or met online without any actual physical introductions. The relationships were genuine, even if the people were not always around in real life.

At one point, a friend of a friend and I became internet buddies. We spoke a lot, despite never actually meeting or seeing what the other looks like. Eventually, scanning pictures into the computer became a thing and we swapped photos. He also sent one of his brother and his then girlfriend, probably just because it was on the computer and he could. New technology was always exciting to use even if it didn’t make sense. The nameless girlfriend was pretty and exactly how my friends and I described ourselves to strangers. This photo became my ticket into prolonged conversations and online relationships.

I have no idea who this girl was. I look back and feel bad that I sent it to so many people, but I couldn’t even apologize if I wanted to. The internet was a lawless place back then (and still is). We really didn’t understand anything.

But, because of her, when I would talk to men, I wouldn’t have to stop the conversation when they wanted to see a pic. I had one at the ready and I sent it off without hesitation. The response was perfect: “UR so fucking hawt! That really U?” “ya it’s really me! Y wud i send a pic of sum1 else?”

I am very fortunate that nothing terribly bad happened to me because of my internet behavior. Yes, I engaged in inappropriate conversations and who knows what they were getting from it, but I never met anyone in person after meeting online or provided any real information about me that would create issues down the line. And this was our outlet for things that we couldn’t find elsewhere.

Recently I learned that the abstinence-only sexual education wave hit in the mid-90s due to the federal government providing compensation to schools that followed that teaching method. This is why we didn’t have condoms on bananas (see Condom consent) or realistic rape scenarios (see Call it by name) and that’s why I (and others in my millennial age group) had no real understanding of sex or my own body or comfortability with the topic even as I explored it.

But the internet filled a part of the void. I did not understand the internet being a tool for research until maybe college. For me, it was just a communication form and that communication form taught me how men thought about sex. And not just men, but men behind the veil of anonymity. And since that was my only resource, I took it as fact. Women were objects, they needed to look a certain way, they needed to be knowledgable but also not slutty, they needed to be there for men’s enjoyment in any way that they desire. And that’s how I understood sex. And so, that’s how I had sex.

Despite my many efforts to love myself and understand the person I am, these roots still hold strong. I am not attractive unless I’m thin. I’m not attractive unless I’m showing cleavage (but I can’t complain if I am harassed for it). I take too long to orgasm, so just focus on my partner. He doesn’t want to hear your complaints about the sexual experience, so just tell him it was amazing. Stay silent, but make enough noises that parrot porn stars so he knows that he’s rocking your world. It’s awkward to realize these things and to try to change them. I feel so uncomfortable and in my head when I have sex. It’s rare that I can just be. And this is one of the most natural human experiences we can enjoy, and yet, I can’t chill the fuck out.