liaisons are typed out by participants. Most of this is done in the form of live, real-time private chat in which two or more parties engage in a mutual fantasy - a collaborative erotic story that may involve role playing and essentially, imagination.
             To participate, therefore, in this disembodied enactment of life's most body centred activity is to risk the realization that while it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double, the bodylike self representations we carry around in our heads.
             One claim of Net commentators is that the body and other concepts we take for granted are irrelevant to virtual communities on the Net. This has to be qualified by the fact that nonetheless cyberspace continues to be conceptualised by physical metaphors - another factor marking it as overwhelmingly postmodern. Often, members of virtual communities and chatrooms act as if the community met in a physical public space, and as if their conferences or interludes were inhabited by physical bodies. Here physicality is the appropriation.
             For the most part, the actual physical bodies of participants are invisible unless revealed, and thus the subtle social cues, which we might have been programmed to exhibit in deference to unexamined assumptions regarding, for example, gender roles, are nonexistent in a virtual community.
             One result of this is the high incidence of cross-dressing on the Net where males pose as females and vice versa. As a consequence, (though gendered modes of communication remain stable) who uses which of the two – masculine or feminine - becomes more plastic. While there may thus continue to be designated masculine and feminine psychological characteristics; detached from the ability to know for certain the real life genders of people with these characteristics, the designation masculine and feminine may become merely nominal and they may become no different from other...