My screenname was WyldChica9. I tell you this because if we’re going to talk about what teen girls were doing on AOL Instant Messenger circa 1999, we should probably get the humiliation out of the way up front. When I think about using the messaging service, I think about being 13—a deeply embarrassing age, and AIM was, spiritually-speaking, the most 13-year-old app of all time.
In its heyday, it was beloved by the middle- and high-schoolers who came of age in the narrow gap between widespread middle-class home internet access and the omnipresence of what we now call social media. But when AOL announced in October that the service would be shutting down December 15, after 20 years, no one seemed particularly surprised. And why should they be? We have a million ways to conduct digital conversations now, most of which are tethered to services like Google or Facebook—companies that have gained a foothold in broader American life in a way AIM never quite did. We don’t need AIM now, but we did back then, and some of us more than others.
I was not wild, let alone wyld, but if you were a teenager between roughly 1995 and 2005, you already knew that. In 1999, I played the viola in the middle school orchestra and I included the “9” at the end of my AIM handle because that was the number I wore on my youth soccer team. I was a “chica” in that I was a girl, but I was definitely not Latina, and I’m not sure it ever crossed my mind that using the word might lead internet strangers to assume I was. The wide berth between my actual identity and my delusionally optimistic self-portrayal didn’t matter, though, because I was born in 1985, which means I didn’t really learn how to be embarrassed by my behavior on the internet until college.
At that point in digital history, you could be anonymous in ways that now seem unthinkable.
The halcyon days of AIM were a time before easily disseminated screenshots, so unless someone you knew in real life was mad enough to print out what you said in an IM and bring it to school, it was a receipt-free existence. And when teenagers are given communication tools, relative anonymity, and the opportunity to self-identify as cool, no parental controls on earth will stop them from immediately finding willing partners with whom to talk about boning.
When I was spending unsupervised afternoons and late weekend nights glued to AIM, Jason Biggs was famously copulating with desserts in American Pie. Though boyhood horniness is enshrined in cultural narratives so well-worn that it has its own cinematic lineage, when it comes to teen girls, sex is almost always characterized as something that happens to us. It’s either through pressure, force, or the type of perceived parental failure that didn’t instill the ways in which sex is something we should deny exists until we receive third-party approval. According to the stories we tell ourselves about how sex functions socially, teenage girls are never horny; they are merely horned upon by others.
In reality, my hormones were off the charts—and I was very much logged on, where I sensed these curiosities might be more satisfyingly explored than in real life, among my virginal peers and the older men I had no actual drive to be touched by just yet. At that point in digital history, it was possible to be anonymous in a way that’s pretty much unthinkable now. Google wasn’t even a company until late 1998, Facebook was years away, and the iPhone was still just a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye. No one had the binding, cross-platform identities we all have now, and it was generally considered normal and safe to keep your full name, face, and personal details a secret. It would have been difficult to show anyone my face anyway; digital cameras were rare and very expensive, and messaging services didn’t support photo-sharing.
Teenage girls rarely get to be the narrators of their sexualities.
Plus, I didn’t want anyone to see my face because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing what I was doing: Searching out random people with whom I could potentially talk about sex over AIM, both in AOL chatrooms and via searching user profiles for the two horniest keywords my 13-year-old brain could think of, “sex” and “cyber.” (I told you this would be deeply embarrassing.)
Teenage girls rarely get the opportunity to be the narrators of their sexualities. In these conversations, though, my total anonymity and physical safety gave me the cover I needed to venture my best first guesses at what I might be into. Looking back, I very obviously had no idea how sex worked, despite regularly trying to get pornographic image galleries to load on my very slow internet connection and reading the entirety of Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice! archive. I wanted to understand how people thought about sex and, by extension, how I might think about it. I also wanted to masturbate, which I had learned how to do only recently. It seemed like I could kill these two birds with one stone.
I did most of the searching and chatting alone, but occasionally it took on the form of a group activity, often during a sleepover or lazy summer day in the finished-basement of my most-unsupervised childhood friend. We’d huddle around a single desktop computer and see if we could rile up anyone in an AOL chat room, taking turns at the keyboard. The results only veered sexual sometimes and, as a group, we never made it past giggling hysterically over tricking a grown man into wasting his time being gross with a room of kids. We didn’t acknowledge that finding and flirting with these people (or, to use the ignominious term of the era, “cybering”) was a pastime we never had to teach each other how to pursue, even though we all knew to feign shock at the results. Of course, this was only a silly party trick.
The sexualities of minors is always a tricky subject, even when you were the minor in question. But much to the relief of my current self—a woman in her 30s who worries about the safety of children—I found that not many of the men I contacted as a young teen would talk to me if I told them my real age. I tried that at first, of course, because I didn’t quite realize there was some big social gap between me and the people I wanted to talk to. By my reasoning, we weren’t doing anything mattered; back then, the internet seemed like one big video game, and the interactions we were having just about as real as blasting someone apart in Duke Nukem. But usually, only other admitted teens would talk to me when I told them I was 13, maybe because the adults had better instincts about the situation’s stakes. In any case, getting anyone calling themselves a grown man to flirt with a 13-year-old girl online was a little bit tougher than To Catch a Predator would later make it out to be. By the time I was 16 or 17, old enough probably to have seemed worth the attention to a wider variety of internet randos, boys in my own range seemed like the better objects of my internet overtures.
It never occurred to me that the people I talked with were also reinventing themselves on the internet.
And so, because I was also watching plenty of Cinemax After Dark during this era and knew the tropes pretty well, I became other people: A divorcée looking to have some fun for the first time in years, a curious college girl, a bored wife, or someone with no backstory at all beyond a fibbed A/S/L. It took no effort, because my account wasn’t a traceable part of my real-life existence.
In hindsight, a lot of the conversations I had about sex didn’t exactly track with how I now know it to work—and not just on my end. I was reinventing myself daily, but it never occurred to me that the people I was talking with were doing the same, or that, for instance, AIM generally couldn’t be installed or used on the computers at people’s workplaces. After all, I had never had a workplace. While some of the people I spoke with were undoubtedly adults, it seems likely that a generous portion of them were my fellow minors, bored and horny and intensely curious during summer vacation or before mom got home from work, looking to play-act their burgeoning sexualities at a safe distance and with people who had to know more than they did.
Whether this was an ultimately successful pursuit is beside the point; AIM was an open door to an internet that felt like an opportunity, or at least a place that we didn’t fully inhabit quite yet, or maybe somewhere we weren’t so trapped in the purgatory of adolescence. That internet is gone now, for both better and worse. And so is the messaging service that first gave my generation an entry point to it.
Any eulogy for AIM is really just an In Memoriam of the internet as a separate place, one which didn’t overlap and intersect with real life enough to become it. Now online and offline are the same thing, which was probably already inevitable by the time men were lying to me about how big their dicks were on AIM. But still, I can’t shake the feeling that I was lucky as a teen girl to have an internet that felt like an escape instead of just more of the same.
More:
—I Went on a Month-Long Quest to Achieve Multiple Orgasms
—My Disability Made Me Dread Going to Weddings Alone. It Shouldn’t Have.
—The Best Sexy Gift Ideas for Someone You Love—Like Yourself
