Way back in my
AOL newbie days, I did this. "ModernAngel" started out as the
screenname of an assumed persona, "Brandy Leigh McLeod". It was educational. Since "
angel" seems to equate to "
female" in many
virtual arenas, I still get the occasional "
Wanna cyber?" query, or (much more often), an unsolicited, private "hi." that I am supposed to pick up and
run with. On several occasions since I dropped the
pretense of femininity, I've had people say to me "dude, get a more
masculine nick" - because
the nick screws up their expectations of how they might want to
interact with me. It starts with a
sweeping generalization of
who I am, and a nick is supposed to somehow
encapsulate everything of interest about me...
It is ridiculously easy to
pull off, but the
novelty wears thin quickly. (Or did for me, anyway.) Contrary to Saige's
theory, I think
gender cues determine a lot of what we
read into a chat/post author's personality/
style, not vice versa.