Chat Roulette is an adventure.

It’s an expedition in human behavior, namely in what people will do to each other when every inkling of accountability is absent. In its essence, Chatroulette.com is speed-dating over the Internet, except it is unspecific to gender, everyone knows that the end point is not love, and nobody gets a second date. There is no login or registration required; you simply visit the site and click play, and enable your webcam. The server instantly hooks you up with another user - a stranger from anywhere in the world – whose live face appears on the video section of your computer screen. You can chat in a dialog window or by microphone.

The most important portion of your screen is the prominent next button, which you or the other person may click at any time to immediately be whisked off to a new stranger.

When users encounter ordinary people they’ve never met in a community they don’t have any ties to, raw behaviors emerge. There is no one to call you out on rudeness after you next them, so cruel comments will be coupled with blatant rejection. There is no one to ruin your professional reputation, no one to charge you with a misdemeanor for indecency. It’s impossible for strangers to cuss you out or shame you for being a prick if you next them before they can respond, so no one can stop you from accosting elderly women, children and the deeply insecure.

Your tactfulness with rejecting someone or patience with uninteresting encounters is completely up to your own conscience. The anonymity and randomness of the game means that there are no social consequences beyond having to re-set your internet connection if your IP address gets banned by a moderator for indecency, if any moderators even exist. You can do pretty much whatever you want – and people do.

There will be four dominant themes to your encounters in Chat Roulette:

First, intoxicated teenagers or twenty-somethings will be gathered in pairs or groups of three, often all boys who will immediately next you if no females are present on your side of the camera. These are the “bros” with backwards baseball caps and preppy but unkempt clothing — the dullest experience on Chat Roulette; one of my friends described them by asking “does the same group of guys just run to a different room in the house and sign back on?”

Second, foreigners will want to ask you about your country. They will be the most polite users, and make for the most interesting match-ups if your want is conversation – but they aren’t as common.

Third, solitary geeks or bohemian-type young people (mostly boys) will be sitting alone awkwardly, fumbling for words, vaguely looking for love. They too will next you quickly if you aren’t the gender or type they’re going for, and if you allow it, they will usually be eager to turn the conversation to sex.

The fourth constituency are the cocks, and they abound on Chat Roulette; one out of every three to four encounters is likely to be a close-up of a penis protruding at one angle or another, sometimes in the midst of bizarre juxtaposition. It might be rubbed against a stuffed animal, jammed into a hole drilled in a cantaloupe, choked by rubber bands, or slathered in sour cream. Most often, though, it will be wrapped in fingers that delicately stroke it and wag it around.

The prominence of cocks is what I find most interesting about the site. The total number of men whose pinnacles of social freedom are to wiggle their dicks in front of random strangers of all ages, genders and ethnicities is staggering. Surely nobody is sexually attracted to such a wide range of people as users of Chat Roulette are.

Why do people enjoy doing it, then, beyond the sheer novelty of getting away with it? Do they hope that random strangers will join in? Is there a specific category of people the exhibitionists are looking to be checked out by, or do they really intend to spank it for anyone and everyone? Is it analogous to streaking? Would they do this on the bus, out of their hotel windows, or even in front of friends if they knew they could emerge unscathed?

Your first prejudice is to assume these men are unemployed losers with pedophilic tendencies who live in their mothers’ basements, but that is a classist and probably false assumption. You never see their faces, and the anonymous wankers could just as easily be medical interns and off-duty cops, principals and Sunday school teachers who are thrilled for a chance to break character.

Chat Roulette cock shots are just another another item of a theme we’ve breached many times here on Nightcharm, as part of a storm of examples in which sexual exhibitionism and availability are enabled by technology. This will undoubtedly force all of us to change our sexual values over the next generation as it gets harder to find a person whose record is clear of electronic transgressions.

And as the site was founded by a Russian 17-year-old and is popular among teenagers, it’s another example of sex becoming accessible in different ways to younger people who are growing up desensitized and unshocked by things that would have been jaw-dropping a decade ago.

If you are in your 20s or older and thought you’d never gasp or raise an eyebrow the way your old fashioned parents did when they first heard dirty innuendo on a primetime sitcom, think again. With the help of the Internet, America might be transforming into a society with a sexual tolerance more similar to what we think of as European. What a lot of us have long longed for America to be, the whole world is being forced into by the Internet.

Or it might be going somewhere else completely, as new technologies we haven’t even thought of yet emerge to redefine sex. We’re in uncharted territory now, and technology is leading us to see ourselves as sexual beings in ways we never have before.

© 2010, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com