Last time, I mentioned one of the chat situations where the "submissive" guy is actually engaged in roleplay but does not tell the dominant guy. I've talked about roleplay before, too, in that same context—guys who are roleplaying (faking) without telling the other party.
Over the years, I've become quite good at spotting fakers. I thought about posting some tips here, but decided not to because I don't want to help fakers to avoid detection. Remember, I'm not talking about guys who are explicitly roleplaying—I'm talking about "submissive" guys who want the dominant to believe they are obeying orders when they are not, who are roleplaying while pretending not to. That's not kosher.
It becomes even less kosher when a secret roleplayer takes it someplace that you don't want to go, like fantasies involving minors. Note carefully that I am talking about adults pretending to be children, not actual children.
One reason I mostly chat on gay.com is that they require members to be 18 or over to chat in the adult rooms. I understand that there is (or at least used to be) a different set of chat rooms for those under 18, but I don't see them, and I don't know about them, and I don't care. I avoid Myspace and Facebook and all those places where kids hang out because while I understand that teens have this horny-hump-everything drive to find out about sex, I'm not interested in them.
Really. I've seen both Porky's and American Pie, and that pretty much took care of that curiosity.
As an older member of the BDSM community, I answer questions about BDSM and safety, no matter who asks. But I never have "hot" chat with anyone under 18. This has pissed off a number of guys who have identified themselves as under 18 but tried to chat with me anyway, but that's not really my problem.
(It's kind of amusing, though, when they get all indignant and point out that the age of consent around here is 16. My rules say "18," and I look for more qualities in potential partners than "wouldn't be illegal." It's quite amazing how many younger guys cannot comprehend the idea that someone older wouldn't be interested in them.)
I don't think it's anyone's business to judge the sexual proclivities of consenting adults who aren't hurting other people. If I'm not into what you are, that's your business, and more power to you as long as it's not hurting other people and you know what you're doing.
You can argue that roleplay is useful because it allows people to explore fantasies that would never be permissible in real life. I have absolutely no understanding or patience with snuff fantasies, but I would rather that those guys roleplay them than actually do them.
Nonetheless, it's way out of bounds for someone to start roleplaying in a taboo area without telling the other guy that's what he's doing. If some guy asks you to talk to his little brother, and you don't know that it's really still the same guy typing, then you're going to freak out when he starts talking about brother-on-brother fantasies.
(Even if you've figured out that he's secretly role-playing, it probably doesn't thrill you when he starts pretending to be his little brother who wants to watch his big brother jack off, but you might stick with it to see where he's going in case he can be salvaged.)
I guess that sometimes, roleplayers get tired of other roleplayers, and want to see what it would be like if their fantasies met a real person. These guys who are into scenes like the one above, or being teen friends who all torture each other, or being guys who are "hypnotized" and ordered to go outside naked, apparently want people to believe those things are really happening.
They also then want it to get intense, like being "caught," or someone really getting "hurt" (in the roleplay), and see what the dominant will do—or, just as often, they'll get themselves off by that point and then make a quick excuse and log off. Majorly, majorly uncool.
Can you imagine what it would do to an unsuspecting and inexperienced dominant, chatting with a submissive whom he thinks is following orders and has gagged himself, to read "I have to throw up" and then have the other guy disconnect? (Puking with a gag in place is a really bad idea; safety rules don't allow gagging people in situations where they might puke because the gag could make the vomit bounce back into the lungs.) In reality, the faker has probably just shot his wad and logged off, but the dominant who doesn't know he's faking could think something went seriously wrong.
Actually, even if you know he was faking, it's still unnerving. No one has total confidence. The submissive could have triggered every sign in your book of being a fake (several of which I've mentioned over time) and still, if something goes "wrong," you'll wonder if something bad really happened. No matter how many decades you've spent seeing fakers, no matter how many times you've verified that your fake-radar works, there's always that smidgen of doubt.
That's why I generally don't roleplay. Once a year or so, I'll talk to a guy who I can tell is faking and roleplaying just to see where he takes it, while always keeping true to my own rules (i.e., if he wants to put his "little brother" on, I won't talk about sex stuff with the "little brother" except in a clinical answering-questions kind of sense, which usually makes them all go away pretty fast). But almost every time, at one point or another, the guy will raise the stakes and take it into territory that, if it were real, would not be cool at all.
And they always end the chats by just vanishing completely (or, if they eventually show back up under the same name, they refuse to talk again at all). And I always wind up wondering if there was some slim chance they weren't faking, even though I know they were, and even though I wouldn't have talked to them had I not believed they were fake. I have no interest in some guy's fantasy to be arrested for public indecency and carted off naked to jail, but sometimes it's interesting to figure out that's where he wanted to take the fantasy.
As long as there's anonymous chat (which is generally a good thing), there will be roleplayers who want to pretend they're not actually roleplaying. If you're talking to a guy whose situation turns bizarre and dangerous, look for signs that he's been faking it, because he probably has.
