The organisation of chatroom sexualities requires practical organisation and discretion management. Virtual sex may mirror some aspects of realworld encounter, but appears largely free of social constraints, physiological and health risk. However, where the actor graduates to engaging newly developed sexual desires into their sexual activities there are a number of issues that concern the constructions of health and social risk.
This paper will report on research on men\'s use of internet chat rooms as a means of exploring and testing out erotic desires and fantasies, and whether these rehearsals remain online or begin to be developed in their ‘actual’ offline sexual repertoire. The research is primarily concerned with men\'s discretion management of online sexual experiences and embodied activities. It also concerns how social and sexual health risk is constructed in relation to their social roles and sexual identities.
The study draws on the increasing literature on cyber-research, particularly ethnographies, and focuses on chatroom users who identify as married men. Using real-time electronic or telephone interviews, the paper will explore how these men learnt and developed their use of the chatroom and the management of their social roles within this public/private sexual arena. Analyses suggest that despite offline social and sexual identities as ‘straight’, men utilise chatroom for a variety of purposes.
This, admitting to hitherto secret transgressive fantasy, exploring habitual desires in a newly discovered \'safe\' territory or may be strategic. The chatroom users engage with a pedagogy of the cybersexual, a process of learning how to create their virtual biographies and the script of the sexually charged arena. The paper explores whether it is merely a means of confirming orientation through developing social networks, the management of discreditable identities or the means of meeting others to leap from cybererotica to realworld sex
Conflict of Interest: None disclosed
Financial Support/Funding: None disclosed
Sydney, Australia, April 2007
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