Airline and I screamed when the phone rang. The incoming call was from a 45 year-old man from the Bible belt we had never met who was calling for phone sex. I looked into Airline’s eyes and nervously laughed in horror at what we were about to do. I looked at the phone and winced. What should I say? As the phone rang a second time, I tested my voice, making it as high-pitched and breathy as I could, the voice of an excited girl. I picked up and quickly said “hello” like the alluring sex kitten he was waiting for.

“Hi, baby, it’s Daddy,” the deep, twangy voice said back to me.

I thought I was going to die. Airline and I met our southern phone sex-suitor in a Daddy/Daughter Sex chat room on Yahoo! Chat. We chatted with this man who’s screen name was something like BigDaddy4Baby and convinced him that we were a 14-year-old girl named Jennifer who wanted him to call us and talk dirty – an experiment of epic and hilarious proportions.

I stumbled upon this lexicon of society when I signed up for my Yahoo! Email account. Users of Yahoo! Mail can also utilize chat rooms and messaging systems. When I saw the option for “chat” I laughed. I thought the widespread use of Myspace and AOL Instant Messenger had made the idea of chat rooms obsolete.

My curiosity piqued, I explored the chat room menu. Chat-nation was alive and well; there were rooms for any interest or topic you could think of, though most rooms’ Users In Chat lists were empty or scant. The most populated rooms in the thousands were, of course the ADULT rooms. Yahoo! Chat offers a number of ADULT chat rooms based on orientation, fetishes and even region. There is a link you must click to verify that you are of legal age to view these rooms, but if a young person lies about their age in their profile, they can easily access the ADULT room list.

I looked at the few ADULT chat rooms that Yahoo had created, the names of which were all pretty chaste considering they were sexually oriented. Then I saw the “User-created Rooms” list and my mouth dropped. There were at least a hundred chat rooms, all with names I cannot publish because they were extremely dirty. I thought I was a filthy person, but these chat people put me to shame.

There were a large number of rooms that made me very uneasy and angry at the same time: they were all Daddy/Daughter sex-oriented. Fantasies are one thing. I think everyone should be able to do what they want in their own private life, but these chat room titles alone were encouraging older men to meet young girls in real life for sex. The obvious course of action, I immediately deduced, was to make a fake profile and see just how much of these chatters were into fantasy, and how much were into a scary reality.

Airline and I convened to jumpstart our experiment. We started with a screen name. We knew it would have to be something suggestive. We constructed a profile of a 14 year-old girl, complete with Britney Spears quotes. With our new identity created, Airline and I ventured into the chat room.

Because we had listed our age as 14, we were not allowed into the ADULT area. However, we quickly found out that we didn’t need to be admitted because of the flood of instant messages we were already receiving from men. We giggled and squealed at the things these men were saying to us. We viewed their profiles, saw their pictures and saw that many of the men listed themselves as “married.” The ominous pall that hung over our experiment kept hitting us in the face with reality: these men were married men who were looking for real sex with under-aged girls. I kept thinking as we laughed nervously how un-funny the situation was.

The thought occurred to me that these men could be just as fake as we were, so our experiment of course went to the next level.

“Lets see some web-cams,” Airline shouted at me as we hovered over the keyboard like scientists splicing up atoms.

With a few keystrokes, the screen filled up with windows displaying live web-cam images of men, some nude and indecently gesturing. We covered our eyes and squealed like the girl scouts these men were hoping for.

“I can’t believe this!” I screamed and clutched Airline’s hand.

I saw wedding rings on the hands of men touching their own naked bodies. I saw the smiling faces of middle-aged men attached to these bodies, snickering. The realness of the images, of which these men thought they were showing off for, made my stomach turn.

“Lets make one of them call us, and reveal that we’re guys!” I shouted, which brought us to our phone conversation with southern BigDaddy4Baby.

I can’t tell you what he said to me because it’s not suitable to print, but we strung him along for five minutes before I talked in my normal voice, revealed that I was a guy and asked him why he, a married man with children wanted to meet a 14-year-old girl from the Internet. He couldn’t say anything. He tried to laugh at the situation, but I pressed him with more questions, asking him what his wife thought of him calling young women. He hung up amidst our booming laughter, leaving our questions unanswered.

I didn’t really expect answers. As I laughed with Airline, I thought to myself what a funny anecdote this would be: tricking old men into thinking we were girls.

Then the weighty truth about our culture hit me: authorities are suing teenagers for downloading songs, yet nothing is done about the men who actually talk to young girls on Yahoo! Chat, begging them to meet or have phone sex with them. What’s really important is whether or not Kid Rock has another diamond-encrusted sofa because of the endangering of profits by downloaders, not the corruption and rape of young women. Ignore the next Amber Alert, because these chat rooms couldn’t possibly have anything to do with kidnappings. What is really the dangerous crime on the Internet is truly the illegal download of the next crappy Metallica album. “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world…”

Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.