"OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on the Intarweb!!!!"

[Panky]

I received this link today from another female webmaster and I just to had to share. This article was written by a female gamer, but any woman who has spent any time online on boards, chatrooms, groups, IMs, and the likes, can relate to this article.

OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1
Whitney Butts

I am a girl on the internet. Yes, I said it. A girl on the internet. There really are quite a few of us. I can type. I can play games with the best of you. And you, my friend, are about to get owned by a girl.

I've been watching and observing the internet for quite some time now. It's like a science project with the usual control and variables. The control is: I am a girl. The variables are the medium through which this fact is expressed. The results all point to the same paradoxical conclusion: I am a girl, but girls do not exist on the internet.

Case 1: Adventures in IRC

[boy1] Teleios is a girl.
[boy2] omg, r u serious?
[boy1] yup, i heard her on vent.
[boy2] omg pics, now.
[Teleios] No.
[boy1] c'mon. you're not a girl if u don't show us pics.
[Teleios] I am a girl.
[boy2] then show us a pic.
[Teleios] no.
[boy1] teleios is probably a guy using a voice thing cuz she won't show a pic.
[boy2] ya, there are no girls on the intarweb.

The above is an actual log from an IRC channel I frequent. This isn't just a regular run of the mill IRC channel, this is the channel where a large number of the players from my World of Warcraft server spend their time when at work, or during weekly maintenance, or just to complain to the other faction when they are dealing with gankage.

This is the story of my internet life. (I'm not quite sure if it's a good or bad thing that I have an internet life, but internet life it is.) I'm a girl, I play games and I exist on the internet. Or so you think. Time after time, I get told I'm not a girl and that I don't exist. It's happened so much that I'm beginning to think that it's true.

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