I have a confession. As enticed as I am by the idea of indiscriminate sex, I am also completely terrified of it.

For one thing, as I've already documented, I don't like how I look. It's not that I think I'm ugly. In fact, given the right lighting and a kind angle, I think I can look quite handsome. But that's when I'm fully clothed. When the clothes come off, it's a different story.

My sense of physical self has long suffered from a sort of Goldilocks complex. Some parts of my body are too big (belly, ass, thighs), another part is too small (guess which one) and, in an unfortunate departure from the fairytale, none ever seem just right. As a reader/friend reminded me, I could always go to a gym and whip my marshmallowy bottom into shape (Ex would have liked this; it might have even bought us an extra few months). I appreciate the value of exercise; my body-image was never better than at the tender age of 20 when I devoted a half-hour each day to push ups and crunches. Last month I decided to carry on this routine. I got as far as 10 knee push ups and half as many excruciating crunches before I reevaluated my decision.

Thankfully, a technology exists for the marshmallowy, modern man - the man who craves sex but shudders at the thought of exposing himself directly to a stranger's judging eyes.

Two nights ago, I was chatting with a man on OkCupid whose profile photo broadcast the all-American good looks of a college football star or an Old Navy mannequin. He'd winked at me earlier and was now making small-talk; I, emboldened by the attention, flirted by way of my keyboard like a horny Mavis Beacon. At one point I teased him for having only one picture posted to his profile. He offered to show me others - possibly of the more lascivious sort - and suggested I do the same. Alas, I had no such pictures, I wrote. And I couldn't imagine him wanting to see them even if I had.

I thought wrong. My playmate wanted to see me, or at the very least my chest. He tried sending me a picture of himself as incentive but it "didn't go through," so he suggested we switch to Skype, where he was certain he could shoot me the file.

Skype has one feature OkCupid lacks: video chat. Surely I must have realized my playmate had ulterior motives; probably I was too high on hormones to care. In any case, switch to Skype we did. He sent me two pictures - one of him shirtless at the gym and the other of him, also shirtless, squatting in a half-finished attic. (He was a building contractor, he told me. Apparently building contractors have a tenuous relationship with their shirts.)

"You're shitting me," I wrote, gawking at his six-pack in the pictures. He responded with a question mark. "How can you possibly be attracted to me?," I asked, no longer flirting. My playmate was one mustache and a bottle of posing oil away from being a Village Person, and I did NOT look like that without my shirt on. My playmate replied that I was handsome, that it didn't matter. I'd spoken plainly, yet here he was, sticking to his guns. He wanted - truly wanted - to see my body. And I was starting to believe him.

Then he asked me to turn on my webcam.

I didn't want to break the spell, to supply photographic evidence that my playmate's shimmering carriage was actually a pumpkin. He sweetly pressed on. He wanted to see me. He'd shown me his chest; now it was only fair that I showed him mine. What did I have to lose?

I might have continued saying "no" were it not for that timeworn question. What did I have to lose? So what if my playmate didn't have a webcam? So what if I wouldn't be able to watch him while he watched me? So what if I were beginning to suspect he might not be the person he claimed to be, that the the 1950s Football Hero might have been his ex-boyfriend, son-in-law, or some random person he'd managed to photograph, shirtless, on three different occasions? (He'd sent me a third picture as extra incentive for turning on my cam, this one of him - or his ex-boyfriend, or his son-in-law - standing shirtless on a roof.) This wasn't about my playmate. This was about me getting over myself and turning on my damn webcam.

I clicked the "video call" button. He answered.

He asked me to take off my coat (I was chilly that night); I did.

He asked me to take off my checkered shirt. I had on a t-shirt underneath, so no problem; I did.

Then, as I knew he would, he asked me to take off my t-shirt. "I want you to stand up," he wrote, "and take off your shirt, and don't even think about it."

This was the moment of truth. I blushed at the camera, ginning dopily. "You're already thinking about it," he wrote.

I was. And though I never stopped thinking about it, I took off my shirt, stood up, backed away from the camera - far enough for a wide shot - and showed him my bare chest.

"Who doesn't like chest hair?!," he exclaimed.

"I've got that!," I replied. I was smiling, delighted, feeling as though I'd accomplished much more than simply removing my shirt.

Then I heard a bell, followed by an electronic blip - the sound of a Skype hangup. I glanced at the chat log; it said, "call ended." The green icon next to my playmate's handle had gone grey. I typed "hello?", hit "enter," and the text just sat there. My playmate was gone.

I searched for him that night and the next, poking around OkCupid and periodically scrolling through my Skype contacts. His OkCupid profile remains active, but the man behind the profile is gone. Could it be that the spectacle of my naked chest scared him off, after all? But then why did he compliment my chest hair?

I invent stories to account for his sudden disappearance. Perhaps he's married and closeted; his wife could have entered the room just after I took off my shirt, at which point he would have hastily switched off the computer. Or maybe this is how he gets off - by persuading self-conscious Jewish men to go bare-chested, then abruptly signing off, leaving them hanging, as a kind of power play. Maybe he has a torso fetish. Maybe I made him come. Maybe he hung up because I didn't make him come.

I'll never know what happened to him or even who he was; nor am I likely to encounter him again. Regardless, I have him to thank for introducing me to my webcam, for helping me take one small step and one giant leap towards exploring my sexuality in pixels. The next time a stranger on the internet asks me to remove my shirt, I'll think about it less. My pants, on the other hand... Those I'll hold on to for now.