Men that pretend to be women, professors that impersonate goblins, confusion between reality and virtual worlds. The number of men with a second life (on the Web) is ever larger.
The number of Internet sites to engage in blind dates (without revealing one’s identity) is booming. And there is a boom of double identities. To hide in the web is too easy. There are people who do it as a game, others to express passions otherwise unspeakable, others do not have a clear motivation but still seem to not be able to live without two or more identities.
There are even sites where a double identity is a rule and a conditio sine qua non (http://extremelot.leonardo.it) , one of the major communities of fantasy role play in Italy. This is how it works: each one creates his character with the aim of letting him interact with other ones in a virtual medieval town.
G.P., 70 years old, ex university professor in Milan, invented the goblin Barbagian. He explains to us that “Not everyone understands that being a goblin (in a virtual world) is not a symptom of insanity, therefore I prefer to remain anonymous” and that “In the imaginary city of Lot I live a carefree childhood, after having lived my real one curved on books”. What is important is to be able to mark the boundaries between a game and the real life. “Barbagian is cheerful and gallant”, tells us G.P. “therefore it has happened to me to receive sentimental advances from teenagers, who were convinced that I was also a 14 year old. In that moment I had to return to adulthood and warn them about the risks they were taking by engaging in such behavior”.
The confusion between imagination and reality had severe consequences for M.R., 28 years old, from Bergamo (Italy), creator of a ruthless vampire, very popular on Extremelot, where the Evil make adventures become more compelling. In his real life he was about to marry a sweet, caring and smart girl, but in his virtual life he fell in love with a virtual lady. M.R. confused himself and his character and ended up with dumping his real fiancée. He destroyed two lives: on the internet he became a boring clone of Twilight, avoided like the pest by other players. In his real life his angelic woman got married to an other man.
If a professor-goblin, or anyone else, fears to be misunderstood by relatives and colleagues (especially with original, even if harmless, sexual fantasies) they can express them on the net.
This is particularly the case of M.O., irreproachable lawyer from Bari (Italy…. And yes, the city of Berlusconi’s escorts!), who is attracted by women with casts. M.O. looks for women who have had accidents and asks them for a picture of themselves with the cast, to add it to his personal collection. He is not a sadist and he would never wish a fractured bone on anyone. In fact, he explains “I love casts even if they are fake, sometimes I amuse myself by putting a cast on my wife. In the beginning she was perplexed, but now she finds it relaxing”.
Until discovering the forum Gesso&Stampelle (in italian: “cast&crutches”) he felt alone: “I thought I was the only one to have this passion and therefore I did not talk about it and I tried to get rid of it. Thanks to the internet I found out that there are a lot of people like me. Sometimes I even manage to convince the women I meet online to put a cast on by themselves and to send me a picture”.
So what is the internet? A place still wild enough to be creative and free or simply and sadly a way to escape the life we should instead live and create? Is it possible to bring these two different worlds together in a constructive way without letting the easiness of this second life bring us to neglect our real one? Isn't this indulging in a virtual world, with virtual relationships and even virtual sex only feeding the dissatisfaction and sense of inadequacy that brought us to consider a virtual dimension of ourselves in the first place?
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