Oizys In Lesboland

One of the things that I absolutely love [read: doing it purely enriched with my attention and focus, no part of my brain woolgathering at the back] is excavating old blogs and reading them, pinpointing random events of the ol' internet. I think I have spent hours deep in the night with teas and scrunchy eyes trailing bloggers and their dusty blogs.

Whilst wandering in the trenchy threads of Reddit, I discovered some of the best phases of lesbian blogospheres. All those well-intentioned hoaxes, talented sockpuppets from the early 2000s, and some even dating back to the 90s. People are tracing those lies while communicating with each other on discussion boards and forums. For the past few days, I went down the rabbit hole of old-school blogs of lesbians and came across so many unimaginable (retrospectively speaking) things. Starting from the Acanit, which was followed by a great literary experiment of Plain Layne to the most famous one that catfished the entire internet, Gay Girl in Damascus, the old internet is nothing but a big, beautiful museum of hoaxes (which is, by the way, a legitimate website called "Museum of Hoaxes"). Liz Henry, whose blog became the ground for investigations and unmaskings, made a beautiful and hitting-right-at-the-spot slideshow—Fake lesbians all the way down. 

Oh, dear screen, the opaque yet magic mirror, I can sit in front of you and scribe my own image for others' eyes. Fleshing out a cyberhuman with intricate lies, labyrinthine personas, and a web of communities around it, trapping all kinds of bugs.

When I was on a reading spree of these webbed diaries and blogs, there was a tinge of nostalgia. Now, it has become crowded. It has become easy to track down people and even easier to create an entire clan just to hide behind a screen. We are all reflections of our own lies (or fantasies...?).

When you reflect on these digital masquerades, you will not be able to help yourself but marvel at how the early internet was a rotating stage for genuine connections and an elaborate theater of deception. From the experimental narratives of the early 2000s to today’s hyper-connected digital personas, the idea of every online avatar being a meshy tale of truth and fiction is crafted in our heads. We believe what helps us sleep at night, and the rest washes up to the shores of forgetfulness, but not before deeply staining the fabric of modern society and its proactive characteristics with its impunity.

I think this made me ponder about anonymity.  Anonymity, often misunderstood as a refuge for the repressed, a channel where the silenced could release their truth, is, in actuality, a battleground. What was meant, in the book, to be a mode for unfiltered expression has always been overrun by fakers, those who steal the voices of the vulnerable. They cloak themselves in false superiority, assuming martyrdom to justify their acts but end up furthering the oppression, turning the space into yet another arena where the real voices are drowned out by the noise of deception. 

Maybe Virginia was right: Anon is, almost always, a woman.¹ That's why, in the digital world today, anonymity has become both a shield and a cage. What is sold as a tool for liberation, for those silenced by society’s rules, is actually wielded by those who hide behind masks of false bravado. The true voices, fed with ideas of empowerment by the safety of obscurity, are drowned out by a cacophony of fakers who steal their place and reinforce the power structures the victims have always hoped to escape.

- Oizys.
1 A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3.^↩