Like many of you who’ve been around since before the internet was but a twinkle in Al Gore’s eyes, I recall the good old days of the ‘net.  Back when you hopped on your AOL account, punched in your screenname and password, and were greeted you warmly every time you signed on.  In the mid 1990′s the internet was like one giant anonymous playground, filled with GIFs of dancing hamsters and slow-loading pornographic websites.  And chatrooms.  Oh, man.  Chatrooms.

Back then all you needed was a screenname like tweetybird22 and you’d be sure to make plenty of “friends” in chatrooms right away.  “if ur looking for a good time, im me”.  Oh yeah.  Sure, you might be a 40 year old guy in Omaha, but when you sign in as xX_californiagurl_Xx what fratboy420 doesn’t know can’t hurt him, right?  Right?

And we were all forced to be "friends" with some asshole named Tom.

Yep, everything was fine and dandy until one day, from the depths of hellfire and damnation, spawned a little thing called Myspace.  Suddenly, the internet started transforming from a land of …

Click to continue reading encoding the gender binary into today’s social networking sites