Session 7a: Virtual Intimacies, Casual Sex
Chair: Lorna Savage

Love "Bytes": Internet Infidelity and the Meaning of Intimacy in Computer-Mediated Relationships
Kat Hertlein and Shelley Sendak
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

The Internet is viewed as a quantum leap in human communication. As it is increasingly a part of everyday life, people are using the Internet to develop online interpersonal relationships, with over half of users reporting “increased intimacy” while online. Some of these relationships breach the trust and commitment of previously existing assumedly monogamous, romantic relationships, constituting Internet infidelity. But what exactly is it that they are experiencing?  How can a partner be unfaithful when s/he may have never seen, let alone touched, another?  Is it possible to share one’s soul in consciously timed, sometimes carefully scripted encounters?  How does the disembodied sexuality of cybersex constitute a betrayal?  Is the experience just a private fantasy, no more harmful than say reading a Harlequin romance? By examining how computer users and couples therapists understand Internet infidelity (or the breach of trust through computer-mediated relationships), we can better understand how intimacy is constructed.  
Online relationships can offer greater benefits than face-to-face relationships. They can be seen as approximating Giddens’s concept of the “pure relationship” in its promotion of authentic communication untarnished by the distractions of everyday life. Rather than judgments on physical attractiveness, those in computer-mediated relationships feel close to a partner based on emotional exchanges. However, their dialogues can be carefully edited, reflecting varying levels of “authenticity.” Further, these relationships are easier to maintain in absentia as people can carry on the relationship at their convenience, but less a part of an individual’s quotidian experience.
This presentation will explore various definitions of intimacy through computer-mediated relationships and Internet infidelity. We will draw upon interdisciplinary research related to computer-mediated relationships and Internet infidelity to discuss how intimacy is constructed and experienced in these relationships. Finally, we will discuss the implications of these constructions for (1) real-time relationships (2) researchers across various disciplines.

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Intimate and Invisible Practices: Intimacy for Women Seeking Casual Sex via the Internet
Suepattra May
Program in Medical Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley & San Francisco,San Francisco, CA. USA

The internet has profoundly transformed the social fabric of human lives in the modern world, serving as a site of meaning making and contestation, reconfiguring public and private spaces and vastly broadening the options for intimate human relations.  This paper explores contemporary meanings of intimacy among women in the United States engaging in casual sex encounters facilitated by the internet. In particular, I examine the meaning attributed intimacy when one engages in a physically intimate act that is often devoid of emotional intimacy. By asking “What is sex?”, “What is love?” and “What does it mean to be intimate?” when a computer screen serves as the conduit by which one communicates and engages with a potential sex (or love) interest, we reveal a far more complex and contested social space than ever before.  
Using ethnographic field data to illuminate these practices, I consider what ‘going online’ entails: from how the women create online personas of themselves in the virtual realm to how they situate themselves in a real world physical sexual encounter. In particular, I attend to the subsequent implications the encounters have for individual subjectivities and social worlds. Despite popular media depictions of women openly engaging with sexuality and intimacy on their own terms, for these women, casual sex facilitated by the internet remains a secret and transgressive act that straddles complicated spaces of public and private intimacies, and demands negotiation of societal pressures around sexual freedom, desire, and self expression.  By analyzing ideology circulating at the level of discourse and within the individual, I reveal how these women are thinking about sex, sexuality and intimacy, and how they integrate that discourse into their every day activities and experiences. The convergence of internet technology and women’s sexuality serves as one lens through which contemporary conceptions of intimacy may be critically examined and understood, and through which a new economy of intimacy is being produced.