Post by Hollis Griffin, Denison University

Two recent events in the world of sex-related Internet services underline ongoing problems that Americans have with intimacy and digital technology. A recent data breach resulted in the release of personal information of those who subscribe to Ashley Madison, an online service that facilitates extramarital affairs among subscribers. Just this week, federal investigators shut down the website Rentboy.com, which posted profiles of gay male sex workers for perusal by clients seeking those services. In both cases, the Internet provided safe harbor for sexual practices that many Americans consider distasteful and/or dangerous, even though so many people are engaging in them.

One of the tenets of U.S. citizenship is the right to privacy. But as Ashley Madison and Rentboy make plain: where sex is concerned, privacy is only ever sacred when the sex you are having is deemed to be respectable. It is interesting that both events took place online if only because the pleasures that people pursued on the two sites can never really be public. Outside of swingers’ parties and Las Vegas, adultery and prostitution are—with a few exceptions—largely verboten in the United States and pushed beyond the range of privacy’s purview. Never mind that people were arranging this sex as they sat hunched over their personal computers. They were looking to have dirty, dirty sex! Hypocritical sex! Dangerous sex! A quick scroll through social media networks and comment threads on news coverage of the two events reveals a just-beneath-the-surface moral panic about sex outside of marriage and sex for money. While there has been an outcry among sex workers and other queer publics about Rentboy’s closure, those charges are nestled amidst much applause about it. All of it makes me question where the line is, exactly, between “proper” and “improper” sexual activity.

Furthermore, Americans tend to think of intimacy online as “less than.” If people were “normal” and “healthy,” they would be able to find it in the real world. In fact, so many people think the Internet is home to pedophiles and perverts that the sex facilitated by Ashley Madison and Rentboy was suspect from the very beginning. It isn’t monogamous or procreative; it doesn’t often cement a long-standing bond between the people having it. It’s carnal and criminal, forbidden and filthy. If the sheer volume and variety of pornography one can find on the Internet is any indication, it’s the kind of sex that many Americans wish they were having.

What both events cover over or hide is more difficult to parse out. Alongside the drama associated with the Ashley Madison hack and Rentboy’s closure are much more mundane truths. The first is that the physical remove of the Internet allows people to engage in the kinds of intimacy that are harder to realize in public life. The second is that those intimacies can sometimes meet needs that more valorized ways of being and wanting do not. If the bodies and acts that people so often desire run afoul of social mores, it raises questions about the viability of the norms that govern intimacy and sexuality in the contemporary United States. Where Ashley Madison sheds light on the lies people tell one another in the name of love, Rentboy underlines the lies people allow to be written in the name of the law.

The Ashley Madison hack and Rentboy’s closure are part of much larger patterns in the United States, where the comforting fictions that so many Americans cling to about sex and intimacy are revealed to be as juridical as they are romantic. The stories we tell about sex and intimacy become the rules that we inflict on one another in the name of propriety. These laws result in punishments ranging from raised eyebrows to jail time, depending on the severity of the offense. In all cases, these laws—the formal ones and the informal ones—shoehorn people into social norms that attempt to govern sex and intimacy. Alas, they inevitably fail. Ashley Madison and Rentboy are news stories because adultery and prostitution are not new stories. Rather, the two events are flare-ups in a perennial debate about whom and how people should desire and be.

The two events also provide an interesting rejoinder to the joy experienced by many on the Left after the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Barely two months after the Court declared that United States could not deny marriage licenses to people of the same sex, the Ashley Madison hack and Rentboy’s closure underscore how very traditional that ruling was. It seems that marriage is the only way Americans can ever really condone sex and intimacy. To stray from that script is to be deviant. Rather than bemoan still more instances of dirty, dirty sex online, it seems that another, perhaps more useful way of thinking about these events would be to question the sexual norms that render them “dirty” in the first place.

• Religious sign offs (e.g., “M2AF: It’s been great playing with everyone but I need to focus on my life for awhile. I’m selling my Xbox and giving the money to the church. God bless.”);
• The promise of adult pictures or encounters (e.g., “M2AF: Send me a spare XBL Gold membership and I’ll send you a special surprise.”);
• Insider deals (e.g., “M2AF: Microsoft points available at [URL]”);
• Complaints about another player (e.g., “M2AF: Why is [gamertag] so mean to me?”);
• Existential pronouncements (e.g., “M2AF: Anxiety, God help me. Don’t let me mess up again.”);
• Well wishes (e.g., “M2AF: Have an amazing Valentine’s Day everyone ~ <3.”);
• Community maintenance (e.g, “M2AF: I’ve been having 360 issues. Be back when I can.”);
• General announcements (e.g., “M2AF: Mass Effect 3 demo on the 14th of February! Best Valentine’s Day everrr!!”).

What I find surprising about gaming M2AFs is how often they quickly turn intimate, even if the only connection between sender and receivers is an ad hoc one established to gain an achievement (e.g., the “With friends like these…” achievement in Team Fortress 2). It is not uncommon to get a highly personal message of one kind or another.

One reason for the willingness to broadcast—or in this case, “ludocast,” as the messages are playful in origin and delivery—what are often revealing details or requests might be explained by Richard Lingard’s notion that “If you would read a man’s Disposition, see him Game, you will then learn more of him in one hour, than in seven Years Conversation, and little Wagers will try him as soon as great Stakes, for then he is off his Guard” (39). Play often creates extreme closeness, or at least the conditions for such intimacy to develop. This is due to the nature of the play act itself—something Johan Huizinga would contend—and the player being “off his Guard,” but also because play functions to obviate or smooth over difference (in player, personality, prejudice, penchant, and so forth) by a common rule or logic set (i.e., something everyone must adhere to in the play sphere). With game play, there is the possibility for instant common ground, instant shared experience in the learning of and adherence to the game’s demands, which is probably one of the reasons folks friend each other so quickly in all types of games.

Of course, rapid electronic game-based friendship also comes from respect (i.e., from the admiration of talent displayed openly), distance (and the desire it can foster), time spent online and in the company of like-minded souls, and the construction of the avatar—all of which can help foster and intensify a sense of intimacy.

Getting back to Lingard’s analysis, even games with minimal stakes have the power to crack open masks of decorum and decency and leave a deeper self exposed, raising a host of issues. For example, what is the difference between a gaming M2AF and a message sent to gaming friends via Facebook? Is the gaming M2AF drawing on the power of play to disillusion social personae while the Facebook message is relying more on the general power of internet connectivity and anonymity?

In addition, a gaming friend may well be one of the truest friends users have in an online social environment.Games’ power to strip away social pretensions means that anyone who has gamed with another person has likely seen some of his or her worst qualities: unbridled aggression, hateful thoughts, poor decision making, and so on. Only a true friend would keep playing with such a person (or so say my Xbox Live friends).

Finally, it is curious that no matter the stakes a game will likely unfold. If I want to see if I can throw a rock and hit a sign, I may bet you $20 that I can. If you respond that you only have a quarter, it’s likely that I will take the bet. This illustrates the power of play—the urge to play is often far greater than greed. Maybe this is one of the things professional gamblers learn to control: how to say no to play. At any rate, the application to the gaming M2AF is that such messages take advantage of play’s seductive power to motivate discourse that may not actually be game-oriented.

Not surprisingly, game companies seem aware of the importance of ludocasting to the creation and maintenance of playful communities. Microsoft not only recently redesigned the Xbox Live interface to prioritize the social and communicative components of and surrounding play, but created a new way to broadcast one’s availability and desire with the Beacon. It is as if the company now sees more value in game talk than in game play. The thing about beacons in general, though, is that they not only attract (e.g., a black box on a downed aircraft) but can also repel (e.g., a lighthouse). Perhaps the Xbox Live Beacon is an expressly corporate M2AF, one with the same dual power as the siren’s call to stay away and come closer.

It may also be the case that game companies understand that when play is applied to a message, it becomes more tantalizing. Indeed, perhaps it is not that Microsoft and Valve value talk over play necessarily, but rather that the game complex is made dearer still by the pillow talk it enables. Could this be the Eros of play?

Anyway, I would very much like to hear about some of the gaming M2AFs you have received or, better yet, the ones you have sent.