The Cyber Effect (5 page)

Prior to the invention of the Internet, finding a willing partner or a group to participate in a BDSM scenario wasn't so easy. I have been working on a theoretical construct I call
online syndication
, which is really about the mathematics of behavior in an age of technology. It works like this: If I'm a sex offender in a small town in North Dakota and you are a sex offender in a small town in rural Georgia, what are the chances of us meeting each other in the real world?

This used to be capped or bound by the laws of probability and domain. In other words, it was restricted by chance and proximity. Two sex offenders who lived so far away from each other had very little if any chance of ever meeting. Now that has changed—not just for sex offenders, but for girls with eating disorders, cybercriminals, and people with fetishes. All of these groups can easily syndicate to socialize, normalize, and facilitate their particular interests. I hope I'm wrong, but I believe this cyber effect could result in a surge in deviant, criminal, and abnormal behavior in the general population.

You can join communities like FetLife, a dating site like Alt.​com, or domsubfriends, a BDSM education and support group. There is also Tabulifestyle (also known as TLS), a matchmaking service for people with taboo tastes. Describing itself as “a service that caters to sexually adventurous couples and singles,” TLS claims to offer “a secure and discreet community for ‘REAL' members who are sexually open-minded. Tabulifestyle's comprehensive set of profile features, unlimited picture galleries, robust search functionality, members and swinger clubs calendar, advanced blocking and filtering tools provides a FUN safe and secure environment.”

How FUN? How safe?

You don't have to look far for sad and disturbing examples of people
whose paraphilia escalated and amplified after they found cohorts on a social-networking site. In 2012, a child-care worker in Ireland, Elaine O'Hara, disappeared, and the media began to closely follow the case.
Several unusual things were found at the single thirty-six-year-old woman's apartment, including a latex bodysuit and images of two hunting knives. O'Hara, who suffered from suicidal thoughts and depression, had a history of cutting herself. Her father's partner, a psychologist, had assessed
Elaine's emotional age as equivalent to a fifteen-year-old's. Elaine had told her father that she had met someone who enjoyed tying her up and that
she had asked him to kill her.

A year later, in 2013,
her remains were found in the underbrush in the Dublin Mountains by a dog walker. Not far away, submerged in the muddy bottom of a reservoir, her mobile phone was found—along with a rusted chain, a bondage mask with zips over the holes for the eyes and mouth, a length of rope, knives, and other BDSM paraphernalia. Retrieval of her text history revealed O'Hara had a relationship with a man who declared himself a sadist.

In exchanges, he and O'Hara expressed an interest in stabbing and being stabbed for sexual gratification. One message to her read: “
My urge to rape, stab or kill is huge. You have to help me control or satisfy it.”

Graham Dwyer, a forty-two-year-old Dublin architect and father of three, was arrested and charged with O'Hara's murder. In 2015 he was found unanimously guilty by a jury and jailed for life.

So how did the murderer and his victim find each other?
O'Hara left behind a notebook containing the name of a lifestyle community she was involved in: FetLife. Dwyer was reported to have used FetLife, Alt.​com, and other BDSM websites to indulge his fantasies. Over the course of the couple's online/offline relationship, thousands of profoundly disturbing text messages passed between them, which were reportedly backed up on her laptop. In the master-slave language they used with each other, O'Hara revealed the mental distress she suffered throughout their BDSM affair.

He was disinhibited enough to indicate his profession in his online alias, “Architect77.” Their text messages show escalation, from discussion of BDSM to talk of murder. O'Hara had other partners she had
met online, and their perceived anonymity was shattered when they were summoned to give evidence in the trial. But mostly the story of Dwyer and O'Hara is about online syndication—outliers clicking to connect. A master was looking for a slave. A slave for a master. A woman with a history of cutting herself met a man who had a fetish for stabbing.

O'Hara was a fan of TV crime dramas, like
CSI
, and ironically she had warned Dwyer of the dangers of being caught for murder through DNA and cellphone logs. “
Technology is a killer now Sir,” she texted him, more than a year before she was killed.

As bio-psychologist Bruce King has written, when it comes to sexuality, what's “normal” depends on where you are. In cyberspace, we know that people may do and say things that they wouldn't do in the real world, due to the effects of anonymity and online disinhibition. This environment plays a significant role in socialization as well. All geographical barriers are removed when we connect with others online. And with limited social cues, as I've discussed, in cyberspace we make friends and meet new people without the help of our real-world instincts.

This has both positive and negative results. The magnificent upside of the barrier-free connection is that we can make friends with people we'd otherwise never know—gain insights into other lives and situations. This is socially broadening and educational, and also generates empathy and understanding. For individuals who are socially isolated—due to distance or personality issues—there's now a place to reach out and find meaningful relationships. For young people anywhere who might feel lonely and curious about their sexuality, the Internet offers a way to explore. Adolescence is an age when experimentation occurs anyway, so some would argue that curiosity and experimentation online could be better and safer than in the real world. (I'll be discussing this in greater detail in chapters about teens online, and again in cyber-relationships.)

The downside: We can blindly fall into dubious friendships and social
connections. Online syndication isn't just about finding other people who share your interests. It can ignite a process of norming and socialization that, I believe, when it comes to deviant or criminal behavior, presents an enormous threat to society if not recognized or mitigated.

The
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology
defines
socialization
as “the process, beginning in infancy, where one acquires the attitudes, values, beliefs, habits, behavior patterns, and accumulated knowledge of one's society…and modification of one's behavior to conform with the demands of the society or group to which one belongs.”

Here's how it works: A group or community assimilates new members by familiarizing and educating them in its ways. Online, familiarization can be formal or informal. Norms and rules can be communicated explicitly or implicitly. Successful socialization is marked by acceptance. In social psychology we call this “norming.” If you have been involved in a group of any kind, you probably noticed that as members start to bond, a group identity forms. This is part of the norming stage of group development, which is a natural part of socialization.

What changes online?

Cyber-socialization
happens much more quickly because we are hyper-connected. Online communities and networks are built on the foundation of individuals, or
actors
, as we call them in cyberpsychology, online contacts who are friends, close friends, collaborators, or colleagues and connected by ties—that is, relationships or special interests. Gardeners find each other on gardening forums. Cooks find each other on food sites. Their “tie” is their special interest in gardening or food. But that tie can become very specific almost immediately—and you find yourself in a community that's interested in cooking with parsnips or the spice fenugreek. The more specific the tie, the stronger the bond. In terms of atypical sexual preference online, the fetish is the tie.

While the popularity of a book like
Fifty Shades of Grey
normalizes bondage, dominance, and sadism—so it is no longer a taboo or forbidden subject—an online Web community devoted to this practice will socialize these fetishes. In other words, the popularity of the book makes it “okay” for you to show an interest in BDSM and feel comfortable browsing the various websites devoted to the subject. Once
you begin interacting with members or join a community, you are brought into a belief system. This means that you might adopt the attitudes, values, beliefs, habits, behavioral patterns, and accumulated knowledge of the society you've joined. In social psychology this is called one's “reference group.”

This norming process can encourage further explorations and adventures too, which are more likely to happen given the powerful force of anonymity online. Sharing your stories in a community like this can be competitive and may lead you to behavior that is even riskier, almost as if you were dared.

But let's apply curiosity and experimentation to paraphilia, some of which can become quite compulsive. Say you're curious and searching online—and come across communities and practices that are new and interesting. Over time, as you are cyber-socialized in this community, you can adopt the belief system of the group. What may be initially troubling, or make you uncomfortable, can seem normal over time.

The common theme in the BDSM scenario is pain and discomfort. A person with a masochistic disorder is sexually aroused by the act—real or simulated—of being beaten, humiliated, abused, or tortured. Sometimes this is just verbal humiliation, but for some it means self-inflicted cuts, burns, and piercings. Masochistic sexual activity can involve simulated punishments, like spanking, or rape. The problem with these behaviors is that they can become escalated—more and more extreme versions and scenarios are required to cause the desired result. There are aspects of BDSM that are compulsive, even addictive and destructive, and some people may be more susceptible to the cultlike trap of escalating behavior. I can't help but wonder if this could happen more quickly online, due to the combined cyber effects of socialization, syndication, escalation, and online disinhibition.

And what about individuals who are suffering from sadistic behavior disorder? Does the mainstream popularization of BDSM encourage and normalize more extreme behavior? Does it mean a greater pool of willing experimental partners? It doesn't surprise me that the U.K., which has taken a progressive role in online governance, has amended its regulations for paid-for video-on-demand films and
now bans images that depict abusive, violent, and sadistic behavior—such as caning,
aggressive whipping, spanking, and face-sitting, as well as life-threatening acts such as strangulation. I believe if there were more such consideration of ethics in cyberspace, greater governance, better education, and, if necessary, appropriate regulation, it could spare many vulnerable individuals from harm and pain and prevent susceptible people from going deeper into behaviors that may ultimately be destructive. Great societies are judged not just by how they serve the strongest but by how they protect the weakest and most vulnerable. We need to collectively focus on creating the best possible cyber society. Pursuit of the greater good should never go out of fashion.

The Internet is like a catalog of desire begging people to flip through it. Think of the laboratory experiment in which the men watched an erotic slideshow and wound up with a fetish for boots. Now think of the erotic slideshow that is the Internet, and what sorts of new desires, and new behaviors, are being created.

It's hard to forget Anthony Weiner, the skinny, superambitious American politician who posted photos of his genitals to a selection of different women online while engaged (and later married) to Huma Abedin, a talented and attractive woman with a highly visible political job.
What is wrong with this picture?
Weiner, an otherwise accomplished individual—serving the 9th District of New York for thirteen years—was forced to give up his congressional seat following a sexting scandal that consumed the United States for weeks in 2011 (the same year that
Fifty Shades of Grey
was published, interestingly enough).

Exhibitionistic disorder is a mental health condition, a paraphilia that centers on a need to expose one's genitals to others, typically strangers caught off guard, in order to gain sexual satisfaction. Men make up the vast majority of people who participate in exhibitionism. And nearly all targets of exhibitionism are women, underage girls, or underage boys. Usually the behavior begins during the first decade of adulthood, although some individuals do start later in life. Roughly one-third of all men arrested for sexual offenses in the United States are exhibitionists.

Flashers are a subject of lots of jokes and humor, cartoons and comic sketches. But exhibitionism is a real disorder, and it would be compassionate to remember that people may not choose this way of life. Some psychologists believe it is driven by profound feelings of personal inadequacy. The exhibitionist may be afraid to reach out to another person out of fear of rejection and is led to exhibitionism as a way to somehow involve others, however briefly, in an intimate moment. Logically, if contact is limited to just the opening of a raincoat before dashing off, or the quick snapshot of one's private parts sent to the in-box of an unsuspecting woman, the possibility and pain of overt rejection are minimized.

Some men expose themselves looking for affirmation of their masculinity. Others may simply seek attention they crave. Anger and hostility toward people, particularly women, may drive some exhibitionists. In this case, they expose themselves to cause shock and frighten.

Like many paraphilias, exhibitionism is difficult behavior to give up because it's typically a source of great excitement and pleasure. Most people are motivated to continue, which is why treatment for exhibitionism, as well as many other paraphilias, is a complex process, and several methods are usually tried without success. Exhibitionists have the highest rate of rearrests of any sexual offender.