Girlie usernames get hit on more

susibaker06: i like to replace sour cream with non-fat yogurt in my recipe.

bistrodude: you sound hot. wanna hook up?

Sometimes being in a chat room is much worse than being in a bar and every woman who has been online knows this. You could be talking about world peace or the long bill platypus, but all the boy chatters get is "girl. want girl. want some girl." Because chat rooms are anonymous, chatters are often less inhibited which is why guys tend to shed the shyness and get more aggressive online. It's also much faster and easier to play the numbers. Eventually, some girl chatter will take up on the cheesy pick up.

So, yesterday, the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering, came out with a study which concluded that female user names in chat rooms got hit on 25 times more then male or ambiguous user names. During the study, while trolling the chat rooms, the female user names also got on average 163 tasteless private messages a day. So, what's the shocker?

These results are no big surprise to me. You don't need some fancy study to tell you that girls get hit on A LOT online, and that most of it is nasty, forward, or just mean. Socializing on the Internet is a very different experience for women as it is for men. Ask any woman who has spent time in chat rooms, forums, online dating services, and social sites like MySpace. The amazing part is that even without any visuals like pictures or videos, you'll still get hot on because your user name and tone of writing smells like girl.

I'd like to see a study that focuses on what women as a whole, companies, and/or groups are doing to make the Internet safer for young girls and women in general. Or, how about a study on male online behavior. Not, where they spend their time, but on how they behave socially online. How often do they hit on women? What factors drive them to act nasty online? In the guy's opinion, advice they would give to women about how to make themselves safer or less of a target online. Info like that would be revealing.