Digital Deception

Digital Deception

When the Beard is to Painful to Remove

You have the Leave it To Beaver life – the perfect wife, adorable kids, a beautiful home in the suburbs. You drive a nice car, hold a good job and are respected by your neighbors. But deep down inside, you harbor a secret which -- if revealed -- could rock your whole perfect world: you are gay. “For gay men in heterosexual marriages, even after the status quo becomes unbearable, the pull of domestic life remains powerful,” writes Jane Gross in an August article from The New York Times.

Online support groups and internet chat rooms have become very common outlets for gay men in heterosexual marriages. These groups are bastions of deception – the individuals in them are not lying to one another, but they deceive nearly everyone else they know by hiding their sexual preferences. Within the subcategories of ‘hiding’ defined by Nyberg, their deception would meet the criteria for disguise – group members make their homosexuality unrecognizable by getting married to women and living as heterosexual males.

In some cases, technology enables them to find others in comparable situations. If online support group communication leads to an affair between members, then technology has allowed them to further propagate the deception. Interestingly, this runs the counter to the interactional goal of most support groups. While support groups usually focus on helping members cope with the truth, this would be a situation in which the group could further cement the lie.

Deception, for these men, is the result of role strain. Role strain, as described by Carlson et al, is the psychological state produced by stressors that occur when an individual is involved in multiple roles. Specifically, the men in these chat rooms are experiencing what Carlson would call role conflict: the men are conflicted by the roles of parent, spouse, and sexual human being.

Carlson cites outside research saying that the likelihood of lying for a role was related to role commitment. The research he cites finds that those with high level commitment are less inclined to lie. In this case, the converse is true: it is precisely because of a high level of familial commitment that homosexual, married men deceive those around them.

http://global.factiva.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu:2048/ha/default.aspx?ftx=deception

posted by Erica @ 10:48 AM