He's not bad, huh? Of course, it depends a lot on taste. :)
(from Robbie Dingo's video, in a recent post, below)
While you think about that, I'll name some of the reasons I know of that men get the short end of the stick in Second Life in terms of physical beauty.
* First, and most obvious, is that there are lot fewer things for male avis to buy for themselves. For instance, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of really pretty hairstyles for women in Second Life. I own about 150 good ones myself, and that's with me having almost all longer styles and almost all of them in a medium brown shade. Good men's styles? Very few. If you want to be very picky, you might say no more than a handful!
* First Life men seem to be a lot less likely to be interested in shopping to make themselves more visually attractive, and my sense is that a lot of the males who are interested in shopping and self-beautification in Second Life find it more fun to do that as Second Life women.
* This one may be mostly personal taste, but good women's hairstyles usually seem to need more body and sometimes length than men's, and I don't think Second Life is very good at hair that is short and doesn't have much body, which is what would look good on men. So many of the men's hairstyles either look a little girly or just don't look great, and it's hard to be really gorgeous without great hair.
* What generally seems to makes a man attractive may have to do with more things that are hard to simulate on Second Life. Of course, attractive personality and behavior look good on anybody, but when you're in a world where facial expressions and gestures and even posture are hard to influence, your visual attractiveness has more to do with your clothes and body and face than with how you stand or with the character of your gaze. The standards for beauty among women, generally (making a big sweeping statement about our society and not about your tastes in particular), have a lot to do with the kind of things you can see even if you stand her very still, stiffly, against a wall. Personally what I find attractive in a woman has more to do with how she smiles (and how much she smiles), and the tilt of her head, and the subtle ways she physically communicates, but even I find it much easier to admire a cute woman's body in a pretty dress than a strong man's body in what (in Second Life) passes for a nice suit or something.
* Second Life is much more competent to show avis who look like they're in their twenties than it is with avis who look like they're older, and so while we get completely ripped off in First Life by getting subtle clues that we're not as beautiful as we were when we were 22, men on the other hand can often stay on the top of their attractiveness game well into their fifties. Did I mention that this is horribly unfair? But women have a bit of an advantage in Second Life, where an older man just looks older, and usually not more in possession of himself or wiser or kinder or more magnetic.
See what I mean? He looks kind of dorky (no offense)
and she's on the pretty side, although neither of
them is really my type.
So there are some reasons it's an uphill battle for men to be gorgeous. So who are the exceptions, and what are they doing, and where are they shopping? I'd like to invite everyone, whether you usually read this blog or not, to post comments with pictures of men you think look especially gorgeous. But please don't post pictures of your boyfriend, lover, or husband, or of yourself (unless you feel you can be completely unbiased!). And remember that this is not a question of which men *are* attractive, which takes into account speech and behavior and personality and achievements and all those wonderful things, but a much shallower question of which men *look* attractive. Please do post! Or if you know of someone you'd like to see included but don't have a picture, let me know and I'll try to get one. :)
PS - Thanks, Kit, for inspiring me to think about this from a comment in passing in your post about Rezbians!
Post-PS ... Thank you, Eris, for the new userpics!! :)
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kateamdahl- Kate Amdahl
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Comments
Unfortunately his stuff is no-transfer which makes it difficult if not impossible to give as gifts. I did IM him to ask if it would be possible to buy something as transfer for a gift and he wasn't open to the idea. Pity.
Having spent time as both genders in SL, I will say that there are FAR FAR fewer options available for men than women. Also during the times I am using my male alt, I tend to only want to wear things that I would wear in rl. Most men's styles in sl are either too goth, too gangsta or too (for lack of a better word) metrosexual for rl me. In rl, I wear pretty conventional clothing: jeans, t-shirts, khakis, polos and occasionally a jacket and tie. I would feel silly wearing a lot of the menswear in sl and thus since my male avatar is pretty much me, I feel silly in sl too. The same goes for a lot of the male hairstyles in sl. They just aren't me.
I actually think that most of the male avatars that I encounter that have put a lot of time and money into their appearance don't look like any guys I know in rl. They look like a model or actor, or a character in some tournament fighting video game but not someone I could relate to.
I also hate buying clothes in rl and generally only do it when something wears out that needs to be replaced. Men's clothing is pretty dull and utilitarian. Also as a straight male, I don't want to look at a pretty guy while I am in sl. Since I'm not attracted to pretty guys, I find it boring to put time into a pretty male avatar. Not so with a female avatar.
When I made my male alt, I made him look like me. It took about an hour and a half and most of that was using sliders to make his features look like mine. The rest was buying a few outfits I would wear and a pair of glasses. I guess what it comes down to is most of us don't want to take the time to make a beautiful male avatar. There are few choices for male avatars, but I think that's because that's what the market dictates.
- Good hair. Good luck. I finally found a set of prim hair I can tolerate, but it's nothing like some of the beautifully done hair on some of the female avatars. Why? Again, most guys don't seem to care. They're content to wear the free prim hair you can find all over the place, even if it isn't especially great.
- Decent shoes. I finally paid for a pair of boots, 'cause all the shoes I had looked like crap. Big sneakers? I didn't wear those in my 20s; why would I want to wear them now? Even the boot selection sucked. I'm not a biker in real life, and I don't want to be one in SL, yet I run across loads of biker-like boots. Finding something decent looking that isn't a "genre" boot (a biker boot, a cowboy boot, etc.) is surprisingly hard. I don't need a virtual closetful of them, either; I just want one decent pair.
- Skin. I'd love to find a skin with a decent beard and body hair combination. Seems like if I find one with a decent beard, the body is all wrong. If the body is right, it doesn't have a beard. I may ultimately have to make my own to get it right, but time is an issue.
In addition to more limited wardrobe needs (I have jeans, many T-shirts, a decent suit with prim ties, a couple of acceptable skins--what else do I really need?), cost factors into it the equation, too. Most guys just aren't going to pay L$5,000 for a skin, or L$1,000 for hair. Seriously. If a guy who wants to look fabulous finds that doing so is going to empty his SL wallet, he will, more often than not, settle for "decent" or even "not thoroughly hideous," rather than break the bank. After all, he might need the money for a motorcycle. :)Minnu Model Skins (they have a branch on the Kmadd Island) have a great many beard options, as well as an entire range with body hair. At 1500 a pop they aren't that bad. The skintone is a tad orangey, but the features are fairly realistic.
Good luck shopping!
Morissy Mills
Nyagos Kidd
Thanks for another interesting post, Kate!
I might have to get a couple of pics of guys I'm friends with. :)
That Morissy Mills guy argent_bury posted about IS very good looking. :)
Careful...he's a nice guy, and well-mannered, but he's quite the ladies' man. ;-)
My mate Russ
Russ's boyfriend Grey
(yes, the best looking guys ARE all gay, even in SL)
My friend Orli, who's the most gorgeous boy I've ever seen in SL
Mad Modeling Agency has some stunning male avatars. You can find most of the shapes the models have used at the KMadd shapes store in the same sim. As for skins, my partner has oodles of them and he seems to be partial to the Minnu and FKNY skins.
Hair is the biggest problem IMHO, but unfortunately, most men just "wear" and call it a day, when almost all hair could use some repositioning and resizing. My partner has had great results with Naughty Designs and Armidi hair (properly tweaked and modified).
Biases aside as noted above, I do think my partner has an attractive male avatar despite being the biggest dork to ever play SL, and so does my good friend Daydreamer, a compulsive shape-tweaker, who also happens to have a very distinct style that complements his look.
I generally like leaner male avatars; the AO really does make a substantial difference, and so does the hair. Most of the stylish guys I know seem have their own little shopping secrets and go on their own shopping trips, with occasional forays into the "mainstream" places like Armidi and ND (Day is one of those who always manages to find something edgy and new). Ben Vanguard's SL Men is another resource.
Caliah, if you want to underscore how good-looking a particular man is, I'm not sure you should show him in a picture standing next to you! You have a bit of a limelight-stealing stealing appearance. :) (Though you still proved your point!)
I really did want to post one of Vasean, as he's one of the few male avatars that are particularly eye-catching in a crowd, but he wasn't on so I could ask his permission. Do look him up in flickr, though, he's done an amazing job on his avie.
That's the rumor. I think that men who took the time and interest to get themselves looking good and do it on their own are often the rare birds in sl and the most desirable. They don't have the shopping addiction at first, I guess.
As to men not asking for help, that sounds pretty familiar. A lot of men seem to be incapable of going to the doctor or asking for directions, and I suppose this is the same thing!
Okay, that's fair--but only as far as it goes. True, we men often seem to insist on solving problems for ourselves. This trait can be especially pronounced among geeks, and SL is somewhat skewed toward the geek demographic. (I'm a geek, at least by trade, so I am allowed to make that kind of sweeping statement.)
However... I think there are others factors at work here, too. For instance, if I'm shopping for a suit in real life, I will ask for help. And, as it turns out, help is readily available, in the form of a presumably knowledgeable sales person. That's not true in SL, though. I rarely, if ever, go into a store and find helpful staff available. If I'm looking for, say, a skin of this hue, with this kind of body hair, that kind of facial hair, and these options, I am generally forced to do it myself, because the store is, invariably, empty.
Of course, the usual response to the above is, "Take a woman friend shopping with you!" Well, that's sometimes easier said than done, too. I have quite a few women in my Friends list--in fact, more women than men, as it turns out. And I have asked some of them for advice. But, so far anyway, only a few of them have been able to suggest good places for me to find gear suitable for a male avatar. Most of them are intimately familiar with places to get wonderful female clothes and shapes, but they're not as sure about stuff for males. I won't generalize from that experience to all women, but it holds true for a lot of my friends, anyway.
Now, each of them does have an idea about what constitutes a good looking guy, and sometimes their ideas even overlap. :) But establishing what you want to look like is one thing; finding all the necessary parts to make that look a reality is another thing entirely. There's a lot of hit or miss involved, not to mention lots of searching and teleporting, and I personally don't feel comfortable inflicting that process on someone else. I'm happy for all the advice I can get, but when it comes to meandering around the metaverse actually trying to find stuff, I often want to to it myself, to minimize inconveniencing someone.
So, yeah, guys can be stubborn about (not) asking for help. But sometimes, believe it or not, we actually have reasons for our behavior that aren't directly tied to testosterone level or conditioning. Believe it or not, sometimes we actually think we're being considerate.
And indeed is not easy for men to find the hair they like. My ex-bf tried to model his avie to his rl. Good and reasonable priced skin (with goatee) were not the problem, but he was unable to find suitable long curly hair :(
One of my favourite male avies is my friend Pat, even though he's looking quite boyish. I took the pic on our first meeting and later I found out that he's the alt of one of my other (goodlooking) friends ;-)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pier_tempel/
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/images/2007/08/0
- Garth Goode
I write for Men's Second Style, and have my own blog where I write now and then about fashion (though also about a ton of other stuff related to SL). I am proud to say I'm addicted to shopping as a SL guy and a RL guy.
Now, since I chose to be black in SL, I had an even harder time finding a skin than usual. Photorealistic skins for black men in SL all look waaaaay too grey, almost as if the person is dead. In the end I went for Nora's Hunter.
Hair is another problem indeed. I ended up paying 800 Lindens just to have a set of dreads custom made for me.
I recommend second-man.com and slmen.com for information on how to look good as a guy in SL ;)
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