CONTINUATION OF NEWS (netiquette)

Case Study: On January 26, 2013, the greatest Twitter direct message of all time leaked onto the internet. Its sender? J.R. Smith of the New York Knicks. Its recipient? A young—as in, a senior in high school—female fan. The exchange went a little something like this:

Fan: I'm going to your game tonight.
J.R. Smith: Dope
Fan: ^_^
J.R. Smith: Oh really
Fan: Oh really what [smirk emoji]
J.R. Smith: You trying to get the pipe?

Now, J.R. Smith was not the first person to use the internet to ask a total stranger if they wanted to fuck, and he was certainly not the last. But the confidence with which he posed the question, the degree to which he escalated what began as a benign interaction into an offering of sex, the sheer audacity it takes to refer to your dick as a pipe, the way J.R. joked about it on Instagram afterward... Is it any wonder the line became a catchphrase and then a T-shirt?

According to a certain kind of crude male logic, if you go up to a thousand strangers and ask all of them to have sex with you, at least one will eventually say "Yes," even if you get several hundred "Nos" before that. In real life, this would be extremely time-consuming, not to mention skeezy, and might very well get you maced or arrested. Online, this behavior is still skeezy, but it's much easier to ask for sex, especially if you're as famous as J.R. Smith.

What We Can Learn: J.R. Smith being J.R. Smith, the story was treated as a joke, but bluntly asking someone if you can present your genitals to them via Twitter DM is reallyfucking crazy and borderline predatory—even if you're a famous and shameless NBA player. You're just not supposed to act that way, unless you're on a site where it's expected that you'll be sending sexually explicit messages back and forth with other consenting adults.

This isn't to say that meeting your significant other (or even finding a casual hookup/sext partner) online is weird. It's not weird at all! But it's important to remember that the rules of normal society still apply when interacting and flirting with people from the internet. Not every social network is full of horny women in your area now just waiting for you to message them, just as not every building in America is an S&M dungeon.