Surviving the scarlet letter

In a renovated cafeteria across my college building at the University of the Philippines, a friend hurriedly typed a link on her laptop, excited to share with everyone a Formspring account that was beginning to go viral on campus.

Formspring, a social media site that follows a Q&A format, allows people to shoot questions to an account user with the shield of anonymity. In our heads, it just becomes a springboard for the cutesy-type of dating questions, which the user can then choose to answer or not. But by its very nature, you can understand how it could get ugly.

In 2011, that viral Formspring belonged to Chloe (not her real name). Initially, Chloe says, it started out as an inside joke with her friends, them poking fun at the questions people were asking. But as details of her sexual relations with members of the basketball varsity team and certain name fraternities began to surface, a growing number of people began following the online account. “Chloe Formspring” popped up on Google’s suggestions. People were asking all kinds of sexual questions, and Chloe seemed to be answering each and every one of them, unwavering and nonchalant.

She vaguely recalls receiving around 30 questions every day, which ranged from inappropriate (“How many guys have you slept with in total?”) to lewd (“Which guy on the basketball team has a bigger dick?”). “It might have started with questions that I shouldn’t have answered, then it snowballed from there,” says Chloe.

Chloe was a common face in college parties, mingling with the more popular names on campus. She stood out, naturally, because she was pretty. A slim frame with long legs and fair skin, she was confident in her stride. She was a character intriguing and entertaining to the larger part of the student body, who felt themseves above her.  When her Formspring page came to life, it seemed everybody knew her name. She became a central topic of debates.

Then

At that time, Chloe was a floating undergraduate. “Those times were a blur, what with the drug use and lack of life direction in general. I was 19.” Her Formspring painted a picture of her lifestyle: hedonistic, young and dangerous, drugs, sex and partying. And to top it off, she was not shy about revealing the names of those involved. Her sexual relationships with boys from the male basketball varsity team and fraternities instantly made her a hot topic. People love to challenge the barriers of sexual openness: threesome, group sex, sex tape? She answered them all. She even spoke openly about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, her accidental pregnancy with him, and details on how they pushed through with an abortion. Her life became an open book, available for everyone’s reading pleasure.

But a girl flippantly talking about her rampant lifestyle was just one part of what made the Formspring affair so interesting. On the other hand, there were the kind of revelations it presented about those who were actually asking all the questions. After all, the questions made up 50 percent of the reading material.  

The questions told of a raw and unfiltered youth sentiment unheard of before. In Chloe’s Formspring, we got a glimpse of what sex and relationships meant to this generation, and the different points and sides that arose from it. Who were these people asking the questions? And why?

Some sought advice from Chloe about the act of sex itself—treating the Formspring as an informative, alternative Sex Ed class.

Others tried to make meaning out of it. How did she turn out this way, was it in her upbringing? Did she have a severe case of middle-child syndrome? Repression? People were hungry to paint a story of this girl. (Background: Chloe went to a very conservative Chinese high school, but claims she was always a little bit of a black sheep in the family. Her father is a Buddhist, everyone else in the family, agnostic.)

Others brought up issues of love, relationships, morality and religion, which only challenged Chloe intellectually. “I do remember a few points I made. On morality, I always said that it is relative. Morality is the result of social evolution. It is a necessary by-product of a social species in order to function. Religion and God were created by man out of necessity, so naturally, sex is not a sin, nor is it wrong or harmful. I wasn’t forcing people to get out and have sex with everyone they meet, but I was stressing that it shouldn’t be demonized, and that to each his own.” Some girls even called her a “role model,” praising her for her courage to speak out about sex, and lauded her for her intelligent answers. 

All of this happened on her Formspring. It was the most open forum on sex that we could find at that time, it involved real people, real stories, and real sentiments. And it really felt as if no one could shame Chloe. She was unapologetic and firm in her ways, and she really couldn’t care less about what judgments people made against her. “During that time, my ego was seriously f*cked up. I believed that whatever I did was neither right nor wrong, I believed that I was above society, that they were all stupid and that I was intelligent. I was living in ‘lala-land,’ where time is eternal and actions have no consequences.” And she did always seem to have the last say.

Though the Formspring account enjoyed its heated airtime for a few good months, its novelty soon faded, maybe boring readers when they had nothing left to ask, and boring even Chloe herself, who suddenly began to realize the gravity of the situation. “At the back of my head, there was always this lingering discomfort because I wasn’t really able to fully grasp what it had become, not even until today. I was uncomfortable with not knowing the extent of what I had gotten myself into.”

And so in the same year, Chloe took down her account. And eventually, all those who had been on the campus during its high time had moved on and graduated.

Now

Two years later, today, Chloe still remains an undergraduate at the university, but interestingly enough, a totally different person. “My life for the past couple of years has been great. I never knew life could be so...rewarding. I am at peace with myself. I kind of wish I hadn’t spent so much time with the druggy party people, but it’s a stage of life that I’m glad I had.”

As a mere spectator to the whole drama myself, hearing Chloe’s renewed point of view in life as an end to this story was rather unexpected. Once scandalous and unapologetic, it was almost like a scripted moral that she had, in the end, come to realize that she was wrong. “I regret exposing myself like that to the world, because it has left a stigma on my reputation. They look at me and they see ‘that girl.’ They forget that I’m a smart, hardworking person with a lot of ambition. They didn’t know who I really was, they will never know who I became or who I will become. Eventually and inevitably, I realized that I was very wrong. That to some degree, social acceptance and reputation is essential for functioning in this world.”

I ask Chloe if the idea of social acceptance is only true because we live in a very conservative society. She muses that it probably wouldn’t be a big deal elsewhere, but “these things have limits, and I think that to some extent, what I did would still be slightly unacceptable, even in a more liberal society.” 

These days, she is involving herself in filmmaking, and surrounds herself with a group of intellectually engaging people. Although there is regret about the whole exposé, she tells herself that there was also something valuable to take from the experience. “I learned about myself as I answered the questions, I learned about the world from its effect on my life. It was a strange time. Also, I’d like to believe, probably to ease the regret, that I shared little nuggets of wisdom with those who were reading it.”

“What do you think of the word ‘slut?’” I ask Chloe, to end our discussion. A word that was tossed around plenty of times in her Formspring, or used in the conversations of people I knew when they talked about her. Still in full confidence and a little bit wiser, she replies, “I’d like to say that it should be eradicated from the dictionary. But no, I believe it is a label that should be reserved for men and women who use sex to fill a spiritual or emotional void, a void that should’ve been filled up by simply being born and being grateful for existing. Because if you are grateful for existing, your life force comes from within and everything else follows.”