In the wee small hours of the morning, they do not sit alone in a bar weeping into their beers. Typing away on their computer keyboards, sending and receiving messages on their screens, they are in a place beyond meditation. Untethered from the usual social restraints, Internet chat-room devotees of all genders, ages, races and sexual proclivities or hang-ups give free rein to their disinhibited ids, getting in touch with their inner deviants.
A Freudian analyst's dream, they are the electronic talk therapy patients. of the 1990s. They are also part personal ad interviewers and interviewees, part seducers and part religious.confesees. Unlike conventional therapy patients, these cyberchat addicts don't need to waste hours of time and thousands of dollars trying to overcome their "resistance." Pressured to produce a shocking, witty, outrageous or perverse persona lest they become cyberwallflowers, they regress on line instantaneously and seemingly universally. As one participant explained: "You have to keep a person interested. Otherwise they move on."
Out of this often-kinky culture arose the celebrated cybersex trial, New York's first Internet-related sexual assault case. Last May, Oliver Jovanovic, a Columbia University doctoral candidate, was sentenced to 15 years to life for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman he had met and corresponded with on the Internet.
The verdict came as a shock to courtroom observers who, unlike the jury, had access to the uncensored, and highly titillating, e-mail exchanges between Jovanovic and his accuser, 57 pages of exchanges that took place both before and after the alleged torture incident that marked their only off-line date. By ignoring 'Net dynamics and accepting his e-mail postings as pure representations of truth rather than admixtures of fantasy, the verdict exposed the failure of many traditional institutions to grasp the psychological upheaval wrought by cyberculture.
Legal maneuvering stripped the victim's e-mail of its many references to her interest and participation in bondage and domination experiences, experiences that in themselves commonly turn gender roles upside down. The unexpurgated e-mail, however, is not only key to the case, it is a great prism for viewing the new havoc in relationships playing out on-line.
The most important facets include blurring of male and female identities, cocktails of fact and fantasy, sharp disjunctions and free associations in thoughts, and the fluid assumption of new personas, all aided and abetted by hyperfast communication in the absence of verbal and visual cues to behavior. If the cybersex trial tells us anything, it is that in the free-wheeling interplay of these elements, which it encourages, cyberculture has turned yesterday's pathology into today's ordinary sex chat.
Handles with Care
The then 30-year-old Jovanovic and his accuser, a 20-year-old English and philosophy major at Barnard College, met in an America On-line chat room at the end of her freshman year. In standard chat-room protocol, they signed their email with their screen names, personas which, as with most chatroom users, reflect hidden or unexplored aspects of their IRk (in real life) personalities.
Jovanovic called himself Gray, a handle--the term went unused during the month-long trial--that he explained in his first communication with his accuser: "I generally wear black and gray, if you haven't guessed already." His choice of screen name may have had a deeper meaning. "Oliver believes in bringing together the black and white extremes of opposite points of view," observed a later girlfriend, a Belgian woman named Marinza he also met in a chat room. "It's his life philosophy. He believes in harmony, not war."
His accuser, whose real name, like that of other sexcrime victims, was withheld, called herself Zutzut5, a screen identity that also seems to have reflected deeply personal interests. It is a play on the French word zut, reflecting ZZ5's interest in French, words and phrases of which dotted her e-mail. Zut is a French euphemism for shit, and her handle Could be taken to mean double shit or bullshit. ZZ5, who claimed interests in art, public speaking, writing and politics, was so proud of her ability in BSing that she had noted it on a high school information card. "By the way," she wrote. "I can BS really well. Should I (also) put this down... ?"
A Date to Remember
Jovanovic was just two weeks away from defending his doctoral dissertation in molecular biology when he wound up in court defending himself against horrific torture charges. The prosecution claimed that the cybersex victim was a naive and vulnerable young woman who was lured to her torture by a man whose e-mail was thai of a dangerous sexual sadist. The defense argued that she was an emotionally confused woman who had consented to kinky sadomasochistic sex that the two had discussed in their e-mail, and that she fabricated the charges against Jovanovic to absolve herself of guilt after she found their sexual encounter unexpectedly disturbing.
During the trial, ZZ5 testified that after Jovanovic drove her from her dorm to have dinner on the night of November 21, 1996, she willingly accompanied him home to his small New York apartment. They arrived around midnight. She sat next to him, looking at photos in an art book and watching a video that they had discussed in their e-mail--works whose imagery included still lifes of cut-up corpses, and scenes of hideously maimed live people in various stages of torture.
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