In the essay “Tinysex and Gender Trouble”, I thought the changing of roles online during role playing was very interesting. You always hear about people pretending to be someone their not online, but I never really considered it to be a research mechanism to understand the opposite sex. The changing of roles seemed to be done mostly to try to understand what the other gender is thinking.
I also found it quite interesting how they figured out how to tell when a person was lying about their gender. You never really think about the differences in speech between men and women until you have to trying to do the opposing viewpoint on your own. The fact that several characters in this essay were able to play up their role of the opposite sex for over a year was rather interesting.
I also found it interesting that some of the identity changes happened by mistake, and then the person just went with it. For instance, in the beginning when the first person didn’t choose a role of gender at all and was asked if she was an it. This lead her to think about playing as a reverse gender. Some of the other reasonings behind why people chose to virtually cross dress where interesting. It seems that both genders seem to think the other gender has it easier, which I find to be very interesting. Girls feel that men can act however then want,, without having an consequences to their actions; at the same time, men think woman have it easier because they can be more emotional and let out more about their selves and their personality
I really liked how the author of these piece compared virtually cross dressing to “As You Like It”, which is probably one of the most famous cross dressing, gender confused works today. The detail of how confusing the gender roles in “As You Like It” do bring out some very interesting points in virtual gender bending. For instance, in the early days when a man had to play all of the roles on stage, their was so much confusion in the roles that it was hard to keep straight when he was suppose to be a man and when he was suppose to be a woman.
Taking this argument and putting it with the virtual cross dressing is interesting. Why has a person gone too far online with changing their identity sexually and have much of this is actually left online and what part of it begins to evolve into part of the person’s real identity. Eventually, the things a person is pretending and learning to do online as a different gender are going to come out in their everyday life.