The Global E-Male

Many pleasing metaphors have emerged to describe the ways the transnational, time-contracting interconnectedness of the Internet has changed our lives — it's a hive, it's a commons, it's a worldwide conversation. Little, if any, attention has been given to the idea of the global locker room. But consider the sorry tale of a young man working in Seoul for a private equity firm. His name is Peter Chung, and he wanted to tell his friends about his new apartment and his new life.

"The main bedroom is for my queen-size bed . . . where CHUNG is going to" — well, have sexual intercourse with — "every hot chick in Korea over the next two years," he informed his associates. "I know I was a stud in NYC but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say that they want to go home with me." He went on in this style for a bit, jokingly requesting an express delivery of condoms. He further noted that his boss, whom he described as being "chill," gave him rides in one of the few Porsches in all of Korea.

His former boss, I should say. Callow and dubious braggadocio is not a new thing, but in this case the forum was not a locker room, where listeners could simply roll their eyes and make a mental note not to invite this jackass to their next dinner party. It was an e-mail message to 11 people, and it ricocheted across the planet faster than Pokémon, appended with comments like "one blazing moron" and "he is the laughingstock of the world." One week later, news of Chung's forced departure from the firm was published in The New York Times.

This young man's case is spectacular, but it is not without precedent. Ill-considered, adult-themed e-mail misfires are becoming a standard part of office lore. Perhaps the first instance of someone earning global cad status via email occurred several months ago, when a young British solicitor forwarded a short but decidedly private e-mail exchange with his girlfriend — let's just say it was about bodily fluids, and leave it at that — to a few of his lads. Marketers who try to find ways to make their ideas spread "virally," leaping instantly and effortlessly from person to person, would have envied just how communicable this e-mail message turned out to be: it made news around the world and became the subject of a dedicated Web site.

It has been widely noted that there is something about online communication — which always seems as ephemeral as a water-cooler chat but often proves more indelible than ink — that we just don't have the hang of yet. "Disintermediation," sometimes coupled with anonymity, seems to make us bold and stupid, capable of, for example, unleashing a level of invective on intellectual opponents that would be unthinkable in face-to-face conversation. (Eg., any Internet stock discussion board.). It makes sense, then, for the e-male species to drag its knuckles onto the world stage right about now.

This ease-of-excess quality seems particularly intoxicating to followers of the surprisingly durable Maxim aesthetic, which places as great an emphasis on blathering on about hedonism as actually engaging in it. Part of this pose, as calculating as any dandy's, is deliberate indiscretion. This can be tough to pull off around the office, but the Internet is an ideal environment for the virtual boor; it's far easier to, say, skulk around peeking at porn sites than it is to schedule lap dances in the conference room. Or to make unapologetically chest-thumping boasts in e-mail than to do so, with a straight face, in front of people you work with on a day-to-day basis.

Another miniature trend that swept the Internet this year involved a site called PsychoExGirlfriend.com. The premise was that some young man, weary of pursuit by a woman whom he had lately deprived of his virility, began saving her desperate voice mails and posting them on the site — both for personal catharsis and in solidarity with overpursued Casanovas everywhere. The results were admittedly fascinating, but largely because they held a megaphone up to the Webmaster's cruel sado-machismo.

The site was, as it happens, quickly labeled a hoax. If so, it's no surprise, since the boasts of strutting males often whither under scrutiny. But the thing that electronic communication adds to this old formula is scale. And what it subtracts are the subtle social brakes (like snickering from the audience) that usually prevent even the most oafish peacock from standing up at dinner and asking the boys to toast his alleged womanizing. Similarly, the process of consigning such a thing to paper tends to make the potential repercussions more tangible — somehow a collection of words you wouldn't leave in the printer for five minutes can seem harmless and private while still on a computer screen.

What has changed here, in other words, is the medium, not the message. Poor Peter Chung is not by a long shot the first male to carry on to his buddies about his extraordinary power over women. But when the click of a mouse gets your idle boasts a worldwide audience, the echo is a lot louder than it gets in any locker room.

A similar version of this essay appeared in the June 3, 2001 issue of The New York Times Magazine.