Girl Online A User Manual

by Joanna Walsh

My experience as “girl online” was inadvertant and brief. To find it, let us jump back to 1999, when the pre-“identity-verified” internet meant users could disentangle themselves from, well, themselves; anonymity was a huge boon for people and communities that were historically marginalized or othered by the mainstream,

I was pretty definitionally mainstream—white suburban high school kid that worked part time to buy bits and bytes to keep my old Circuit City computer chugging along. I had been pestering people in AOL chatrooms since 7th grade: I was comfortable—I felt welcome—on the brightly lit main streets of internet town.

In those halcyon days of 1999, some of my online dial-up time was spent playing the original EverQuest as an elf wizard who ran around in a bright blue robe and died kind of a lot. He looked like an old man, with silver hair and a square flat jaw. At some point near the end of my time with the game—I’m pretty sure I maxed out around level 14, which is not very impressive—I made a slew of new characters; one of these was Jodi, a wood elf lady bard. Having never considered making a girl character before, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go.

It went differently almost right away.

After a few months of playing my elf guy solo in this always-online game, Jodi didn’t even make it out of the starting town before she was set upon by chatty strangers. No one I didn’t know IRL had ever talked to me in Everquest before. Someone gave Jodi an enchanted axe, a weapon better than any item I had ever found for my main character, just for, I don’t know, existing.

Perhaps 1999 was just before MMOs standardized female avatars as falling under the casually insulting acronym g.i.r.l. (guy in real life), but nearly everyone was freakishly nice to me. Jodi didn’t last long as my tenure with EQ was about to end, but one of my foundational memories of playing video games online was that people lined up to be kind to me when my character was a girl.

Now that it is 2023, it doesn’t seem like anyone cares whether your gravitate toward male or female avatars. When given the option, I tend to split pretty evenly between male and female characters, depending on: the game genre; my mood; general aesthetic design; reddit opinions on the voice cast; how much dressing up they get to do; etc—I think I may be the only person I know that not only played all three Mass Effect games as the male Shepard, but also didn’t use the default face (I intuit this because when ME3 was released, there was a bug that didn’t allow you to import your created character face correctly and no one seemed to care but me). The FromSoft Souls series is pretty split; FF14 is mostly women; Elder Scrolls mostly men. I think player insertion is more of a young person’s habit—I don’t pretend to be anyone, but I know that I used to name my jRPG guys after myself. They are, now, to me, their own little people.

So it is that I need to look beyond online games, beyond my own experiences, to fill the the massive gaps of my understanding of what it means to be, well, more than half of the population of the planet engaging with this global network of incorporeal minds.

Girl Online posits that the internet runs in the opposite direction of my experience of a world smoothed of difficulty. Enchanted axes that come gratis just for parading around cloaked in fine Elven features is non-standard. However, after some consideration, it appears likely that if I had continued playing as Jodi things might not have seemed easier; I expect that those gifts of digital resources—crafted exclusively from time wrenched away from a player—were not offered from kindness, but from expectation. When I was old man elf wizard, other players gave me agency, allowed me freedom. Jodi was approached solely because she was a girl. She was level two, I wasn’t bringing much gameplay to the table. Had I continued to log in and play, I would have likely had to pay for those items with attention.

‘Exploited as you may be, you are not that work,’ wrote Silvia Federici: name your occupation and you can knock off at the end of your shift.

There is no ‘end of shift’ to looking like a pretty wood elf bard. There is no “just let me adventure on my own” when you’re a girl character online in 1999. Does this speak to presenting as female out in this wide world of reality? Is this the sense of female dread that I have read about, that even when interactions are not malicious, they are incessant? You cannot inhabit a female form in an MMO in 2023 and be “treated like a girl” because it is known that players are not their avatars. Did I get as close to seeing the cage of “pretty girl IRL” as a cishet boy can, and just not see it? It is simply sad that it requires the possibility of “being male” to allow female characters free rein in online games.

Girl Online is written in such a way as to dredge up these ancient memories and odd thoughts from its readers. Part One was an onslaught of words and ideas that scraped across a landscape built from non-standard structuring–wild, to me, that we open with a section that pummels the brain only for Part Two to return to an approachable essay format about pop culture. Part One offers a challenge to the reader, and if you rise to meet it it may elucidate the irony of my reliance on metaphors of physical violence–onslaught, pummel, challenge–with a deft exploration of Le Guin that I wish I had in a college lit class:

In ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula Le Guin questions such hero narratives, linear tales, usually focused on a single man, whose storyline involves violence and power. This is the same story, she writes, that structures and reinforces the story that tells us the first tool was a knife, a spear, a club.

Le Guin did not find that these stories cast her as a subject as, for her, a knife, a spear, a club were not objects of use: ‘If that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.’ ‘Wanting to be human too,’ she writes, ‘I sought for evidence that I was’, but the hero narrative was full of holes. ‘It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero.’

I am reminded constantly of my own footprints on the internet, my own self-imposed Hero’s journey, of the ripples that lap against my mind when names like Edith Wharton or Lauren Berlant come billowing on the page. “Hey, there’s history there, I’ve added to the discourse, I know what I thought when I read those.” I am grateful to myself, though unsure why–content creation that behooves no one, just to remind myself that I exist? 

It is hard to fight past the self-reflective and unanswerable when Girl Online positions itself to ask questions only; there are no answers, here. More, more questions—What is it to be a girl? Online? Have I found the answers by reading women as they write about Fandom? Relationships? Nostalgia? Is it inextricably linked to labor and capital, to class and race, to environment and mutual aid? 

Dr Julia Mossbridge, who defines love both as a ‘resource’ and a ‘sophisticated and efficient evolutionary hack,’ wonders if, to develop more ‘loving’ AI, ‘The more time male theorists and developers spend with their kids and the women they know, the better their AI ideas become.’ She doesn’t say whether a male developer should imitate the love shown him by his ‘two natural slaves’, or the love they conjure in him.

What is this book? Who should read it? What does it do? I, surely, cannot answer you. If those mysteries alone are not enough to intrigue you, ask yourself what do you know about women, about the internet, about the times and places where women and the internet collide. Ask yourself if you care about the male default; if not, why not? Ask yourself what identity you carry with you, what you want your time online to say, and what you want things online to say to you, about you, and about identity.

Try your best to remember that no matter what happens in the end—here, in the book, the end is clever, ciphered, remixed, remitted, so that the final four pages make perfect sense but only after submitting to the prior words, themes, and ideas'; drawn out across rambling and inchoate fever dreams of digression and pull quotes, but succinct and appealing when compacted and expressed neatly—a girl online is never simply online, but is, and always will be, a girl.