A little while back I posted an entry about Beebo Brink's Classic Lines series of attractive, older skins for women. There was so much to say about those that I had to wait until later to talk about Beebo's unusual, lesbian-friendly offerings, including butch shapes and Dyke-in-a-Box avatars. These help fill a real gap in Second Life products, items for First Life lesbians that offer a real alternative to the two-femmes look that dominates Second Life.

(I'm very much in favor of two femmes, two butches, or any other combination, but really, there's been quite a lack of options!)

Beebo also offers no-makeup skins that aren't included in these reviews, but you should have a good idea of the quality if you take a look at the Classic Lines skins in the earlier post.

For a fun costume option, Beebo offers a fun avatar of 20th century bisexual Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. I must admit, I don't find this avatar as attractive or elegant as some of Beebo's other work, but it *does* evoke Frida very well. (Note that all of the clothes in this post are out of my inventory; the avis don't include them. I've seen the Frida avatar pictured with a dress often associated with the artist, though...I'd love to see that included with the package.) Skin, hair and shape *are* included with Frida. Most of Beebo's avatars include shape, skin, and styling notes (which are a great idea!), but not hair...the two avis I review here are an exception in the hair department.

Another avi Beebo offers is called Jazz Hawt, a butch black woman avatar with strength and elegance...really marvelous! Again, these are my clothes on the avi. A very different look than we often see in Second Life, and I hope one that catches on!



You can find Beebo's store Brazen Women here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ookami%20Ningen/94/108/27/?title=Brazen%20Women . :) She offers a freebie dyke walk, sports uniforms, avatars, shapes, and skins.

^^^\ Kate /^^^

So here's what I tried...







It's very hard to find shoes in my paw size, so I'm less tempted to try.

Avarian snow leopard avatar from Grendel's Children
Israfiel Grey Angel Wings by Material Squirrel

Photo taken at the foot of the giant tree Jen and Seven Shikami are constructing near their Flotsam Beach sim.

Over the past couple of days I've noticed two places - a blog and a virtual world - where the avatar figure question is very much alive.

The creepy one is Lively. In Lively, you can either look like an extra from a Tim Burton computer animated feature about the suburbs or you can look like a somewhat-normal person with assembly-line features and arms like a starvation victim (although I have to admit, at least the waistline isn't ridiculously skinny).

I admit it, I went into Lively just because there had been so much talk about it. Here's my Lively avatar. In case you're having trouble picking me out, I'm the one without wings. Oh hold it: nobody has wings in Lively! (Who came up with that? That's a *terrible* idea!) Not that anyone could fly if they *did* have wings. But then, I haven't even figured out how to walk in Lively, or even if it's possible.



Anyway, apart from the beautiful top they let me choose (Lively does get one gold star for that...and how did they know I wanted green? Did they purposely match my eyes?), Lively is not on my must-try-again list, and that's partly (Kate said, finally getting back on the subject) because of those freakish limbs. Oh, and you don't get to choose not to have the exaggerated body shapes they use, either. Boy oh boy, have sliders spoiled me.

The other avatar figure-related discovery was a much brighter one. I came across the blog of a resi whose picture I had seen, but whose name I didn't know: Rosie Barthelmess. Her avatar is beautiful! And very full-figured.



After seeing her blog and pictures, I had to ask myself why I never made another shape for myself that was much more full-figured. It wouldn't convey what I look like in First Life, but it would definitely help contribute to making larger avatars a little more present (and maybe accepted) in Second Life, which in turn might help people think about weight in a happier way.

So why wasn't I trying it? Oh, I could excuse myself from considering it and say it was too much of a change to the avatar whose shape I barely modify (although I do change my shape a little for a better fit with both my Japanese and black avatars, and my faerie avatar is more faerie-shaped than I am). That's a reason I don't spend any time as a furry, for instance. But really I think it's much simpler, and more embarrassing: I want people to admire me. I don't mean that I want people to write me love letters and give me prizes and shower me with compliments, but I like to feel that I'm impressing people with my grace and elegance and beauty (this is why I've always felt like turning and running the other way from events where people wear their worst hair, or their newbie clothes), and apparently I don't have the chutzpah to try to do that with a heavier shape. I'm definitely not interested in an underweight or starved avatar, so that's good, but apparently I won't go the other way, either.

Well, fortunately I have other issues that I work with in other ways, and I don't feel like it's important to me to have a heavier avatar. But who else besides Rosie is up to that challenge? Anyone want to dare themselves? And let me know what you find out?

^^^\ Kate /^^^

First, can we all agree that a random sampling of Second Life avatars will usually give us a skinnier crop of people than a random sampling of First Life women? I admire those women who do their best to echo their First Life, heavier shapes with Second Life tools that are sometimes not entirely up to the task, but there aren't many of them, so this entry is about the rest of us.

From left to right, Torrid Midnight, me, and Moran Singh, who writes a blog called Dilettanteville

And when I say "us", I have to include myself. Like most Resis, I'm idealizing myself with my avatar, even though only by about ten pounds (and those ten pounds have been pretty stubborn, actually! Maybe someone can invent a controller for Second Life where dancing requires actual dancing!). For today I won't concern myself with our proportions, the way we can get particular parts of ourselves to be just the way we might prefer then: I'll just talk a little (well OK, a lot) about skinniness.

I have no idea whether Torrid and our blogger friend at Dilettanteville are idealizing or even (and I don't mean any offense by this!) whether their First Life selves are female, but their shapes look to me in the usual range for (tasteful) women in Second Life, with Dilettanteville's being on the skinny end of the scale. Torrid's shape isn't too skinny at all: she seems to have opted for rocking the curves. :)

Before I go much farther, I just want to mention that it was very hard to find pictures that could easily be compared. Since I couldn't get people all facing in exactly the same direction, and anyway the pictures are just two-dimensional and we can't get around-the-body measurements, I just did my best to size everyone to about the same scale and hope that we could learn some things by judging with our eyes.

All right, as to ideals: I'm going to completely ignore the whole thinspo thing (that's people who think you're not skinny enough if any of your bones aren't showing) - although I've seen avatars who are very unhealthily thin, and I worry about their First Life counterparts and those people's female friends, relatives, and lovers! But let's move right on to movie stars and supermodels. I picked a couple of movie stars who need to look attractive but who don't seem obsessed with thinness...and then for fun I threw in Kate Moss, who's much too skinny and seems to like it that way. Let's take a look.

Kate Moss, Renée Zellweger, and Sandra Bullock

OK, and for contrast (and a reality check!) here's a group photo from a PTA convention (I'm not in it, by the way! The PTA isn't quite my speed.), showing a nice range of shapes, neither of the extremes being healthy ones, but everyone wearing the shape they've managed to put together in First Life, no sliders allowed.

A range of real life women's body shapes

Now let's make some observations! I was worried that Second Life avatars might be upholding a painfully unrealistic standard. Although, really, you might ask me why this would be a problem. The thing is, while I think either a body type that reflects your First Life shape or an idealized but plausible shape is fine, an unrealistically slim body - one that wouldn't be possible in First Life for most women - buys into the same problems we have with movie stars and supermodels, who are chosen (a friend pointed out to me) because their shapes look appealing when projected in two dimensions. In other words, the Kate Mosses and Angelina Jolies of the world aren't successful because they're really, really healthy, or because their bodies are ideally sensuous for real life passion, but because when you project them on a screen, something in men's (and some women's) minds revs up. Idealized body shapes aren't beauty itself: they're a hieroglyph for it! And they're certainly not health itself.

Ancient Egyptians would have been able to read this movie poster...

So as a culture we're brainwashing ourselves a little into confusing these cut-out shapes on a screen or a piece of paper with what we should look like in real life. Although when I say we're doing it to ourselves, actually I think most of it is being done to consumers by businesses, some of whom, in a kind of cold-blooded and distanced way, notice that these hieroglyphs for beauty are good at selling things (movies, fashion, beer...), and so they keep pushing the envelope with them, and making them more and more widespread...and more and more extreme! I don't know that this is actually evil of the businesses, but it's not helping!

Which bombards us women (and to some extent men, in the way they think of women and in some ways themselves) with images that say "THIS, women, is what you're supposed to look like!"

OK, OK, enough of Intro to Women's Studies. What about in Second Life?

The thing is, in Second Life we get to create our own image of what we want to be. It's like a self-expressive art class! So what images are we choosing?

I was worried that across the board we'd be unrealistic, foolishly exaggerated. But looking at the pictures, it doesn't seem like that's so! Some Second Life shapes are movie star-slim, or even just I-go-to-the-gym-a-lot-and-don't-eat-carbs-slim, and while that's not exactly the sanest picture of things, at least in those cases we're not making things worse than they already are. In other cases, though, even among non-Thinspo avatars, we see bodies that are thinner than we could physically get without drastic surgery.

(Later addition: I wasn't being entirely clear, so I'd better say I'm just talking about more-or-less human shapes, not people whose avatars are furries or robots or boxes of spaghetti or something.)

If you have an implausibly skinny shape, what are you telling yourself? If you're a woman, are you trying to sell yourself on a shape you can never come close to having, and if so, is that making you happy or unhappy? If you're a man, what are you telling yourself about what an attractive woman is? Have you ever snuggled up to an underweight woman? Does bony feel good?

Sorry, I'm lecturing. I try not to do that, but then sometimes I can't stop myself. I'll just do the cartoon thing and then hush. :)

Now, the cartoon thing is this: I've heard some people describe Second Life avatars as cartoons. That's kind of disturbing, because I identify with my Second Life self, and I am most certainly not a silly little sketch of a person - and neither are you. If a person's just using their avatar as a puppet, that's fine, but it would be sweet if everyone would be willing not to use the words "toon" or "cartoon", just because it will make the rest of us feel better. (But that's part of the whole augmentationalist versus immersionist thing, which is just to say that some people use their avatars and others are their avatars.)

I think Disney Princesses have to get rid of some of their internal organs to fit more conveniently into the available wardrobe

But of course some people do design their avatars like cartoons, which is where we see the hieroglyphic thing taken to ridiculous lengths. I mean, cartoons are meant to exaggerate: real deer don't have eyes nearly as big as Bambi's! But I think some cartoons go too far, especially some of the ones that children watch over and over. Can Second Life help bring a little more sanity to body image? Or are we doomed to only reflect the most aggressive images that are pushed on us from the outside? And what else can we do beyond considering our own body shapes?

Later addition: You know, there's something exciting about this! Usually only people involved in advertising, media and entertainment get to influence what ideals of womanhood everyone sees - virtual worlds finally give that power to everyone. So now that we have it, what shall we do with it?

^^^\ Kate /^^^

I suspect that a lot of people have alts--that is, additional Second Life accounts: third and fourth and fifth lives! Of my closest friends, though, I only know of one or two who do, and I speculate (because of course, that's what I do!) that maybe some of the ones whom I don't know to have alts actually do have alts, because I've heard people talk about creating alts they can use when they want to log on quietly, without getting in touch with everyone they know, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of my friends sometimes need a little peace and quiet. :) Or, of course, they might be having wildly interesting paint-the-town-red alts, in which case I'm jealous that I don't get to hear! But then, some of my friends don't need alts for that!



Frankly, this probably would have been a good idea for me, but it's only now that I'm creating an alt, and I'm afraid it's not a secret-love-affair alt, or an I-don't-want-my-friends-to-see-me-as-a-schoolgirl-furry alt, or even a sometimes-I-just-want-to-go-around-incognito alt, but rather a much less interesting Kate-has-work-to-do-and-is-easily-distracted-by-her-fascinating-friends alt.

Even more boringly, my alt looks just like the regular me, just with less good stuff! I even was going to call my alt-self Kate again, just with a different last name, but when I tried signing up like that, Kate was taken. Not just for my first pick last name, but for all last names. (And kudos to Linden Labs for writing code to let me know about that instead of letting me bumble around for half an hour discovering it for myself!) I hardly ever meet Kates in Second Life. Where are we all? Everyone I meet is named Euphenia or RocketGirl or Transylvanio or Barbie or something. Kates, Susans, and Louises are few and far between!

Maybe people who sign up with usual First Life names are people who tend to think Firstlifily and don't find Second Life to their taste?

So not being able to be Kate, I thought about some variants of that (although I'm only tolerant of "Katherine" and am never, never to be called "Kathy!") and of my middle name (which I decided it would be silly to reveal in Second Life, considering I try to keep my First Life comfortably private), and was finally rewarded to find an Irish version: Kaethe. I think the correct pronunciation of this is as crazy as all Irish (Gaelic) pronunciation, something like "Kay-heh," but I'm just pronouncing it "Kayth," which I liked until I realized how much it looks like a typo for "Kathy." Oh well!

Anyway, now I have a worker alt to do building and scripting and things with, and I really *hope* that will help keep me from first, being rude to my friends, and second, spending all my Second Life time playing. I know, Second Life is mainly about playing, but these days I have work to do, and I plan to do that instead of frolicking as much as possible. Boring again, I know. :) It would be more interesting to hear about the times I give in to the temptation of playing around. :)

Well, and of course I had a wonderful excuse to play around a little as soon as my new self arrived: I had hardly any clothes or beauty accessories! Even if I'm a worker alt, I don't want to look like a slob. When I'm staying at home to do housework or bills or something in First Life, I still try to look presentable, although it might just be with old jeans and a t-shirt and my hair pulled back into a ponytail. It's that much more important in Second Life, when I'm made to stare at myself every time I move!



At least, that's how I justified making my first action with my worker alt being to jet off to pick up some choice freebies. Actually, I was shocked and delighted at the wonderful new default avatars they have! I settled on one whose them appeared to be "girl next door," which is a little embarrassingly revealing, since that's kind of how I like people to think of me (when I'm not singing or running some kind of business activity, anyway). I like people to like me. I want people to say "Oh, here comes good ol' Kate! What a cheerful person she is! And man, does she have beautiful wings!"

Anyway, "girl next door" was not only immediately presentable, but had a hairstyle I really *liked*. I suspect I'll wear it a lot! I'll say more about that avi and the new orientation experience in a separate post, but in any case, I looked presentable from the beginning except for my creepy gray-and-white eyes. I don't think that texture loaded properly.

But even so, I jetted off to some favorite stores (more on this too, in another post) to pick up New Resident freebies and Just Plain freebies, and then I exited and logged back in as regular me, Kate Amdahl, to give myself some hand-me-downs: the eyes that are a little too intense, the wings that I decided point out too far to the side, and those kinds of things. I also had a business suit I rarely wear and a gray overall set, and I thought those would be good work clothes, and I gave myself those as well. Oh, and I copied my shape (which I had made by hand) over to the new me, too. And voila! Another me.



Being another me felt a little strange, frankly, even though I look a lot more like myself as my alt than I do as my black self or my Japanese self or my faerie self! I guess I've gotten used to changing my race, just not my identity!

And now I've set the challenge for myself: when I log in as Kaethe, will I use my unusually quiet surroundings to get work done? Or will I look at my inventory (so easy to organize! So few things to trouble with!), despair, and spend hours shopping? (God help me if I decide I want to use that alt to model things for my store!) Or will I contact my friends even though they're not on my friends list and send Kaethe-me off dancing and flirting and conversing all the livelong night? Well, we'll see, dear reader. Let's hope I have another boring answer for you when I report back. :)

^^^\ Kate /^^^

We all know Second Life can be addicting. I thought I was over that, because I had deliberately (and painfully!) pulled away in order to give proper attention to my First Life (including, at the time, a new romance that is no more, although dating possible replacements makes as much a demand on my time as actually being in a relationship!). It turns out that if I'm not careful, I can be sucked in to Second Life pretty much at any time that I want company ... by which I mean, I'm spending time on Second Life that is really more than I can reasonably afford to spend. Well, c'est la deuxieme vie!

Whose house is this? Why does Kate look vaguely Japanese?
These questions and more, to be answered below!

But of course, it's very rewarding! Going out on a date with an old virtual friend, trailing along on shopping expeditions, catching up on what some of my closest friends are doing, looking for some parcel of land that's for sale in the same sim as my store (there is none; a very nice group that has created lovely sims has gobbled them all up. My store will have to stay this size or move, at least for now.)... my ego gets stroked, I get to exercise my wardrobe, play without restraint, spend time with people who are dear to me...but there really is a First Life out there that needs attending to, so I'll need to get myself straightened out and stop jaunting off into Second Life at every opportunity.

To facilitate this plan, I rented a home in beautiful Flotsam Beach, the sim run by creator and creatrix Seven Shikami and Jen Shikami, a brother-sister pair whose work includes everything from an awe-inspiring array of wings to virtual arcade games to tiny fairy avatars that make Tinies look huge to the fishing game that has quickly become so popular in Second Life. (It seems to be one of those things, like gambling or dancing, that people are often willing to do for hours and hours on end. Jen says the unofficial motto of the game is "Don't forget to pee!")

My new house in Flotsam Beach

Actually, moving into a new, Shikami-supplied beach house in Flotsam Beach does anything but help me stay away from Second Life. It just gives me more excuses to go back in. But I was tired of living in a box floating above my store, with no prims for furniture or pictures or dance poles or anything!

The other micro-quest I've taken on lately is improving the skin of Asian Kate, my vaguely Japanese-looking version of myself. This happened because of Grizzy Griswold's recent challenge in which she and a number of friends tried living in avatars of a different race, gender, and/or size for a week.

Grizzy Griswold as a Moslem woman

While I sometimes spend a day or three as Black Kate, I rarely have done that with Asian Kate, and I began to wonder why. The answer, it turns out, was as plain as the nose on my face--in fact, it had a lot to do with my face! I wasn't enjoying my skin, and since I didn't like how I looked, I avoided using that version of myself. Easily resolved...if I could find a skin I liked better! And after a new search (my original Asian skin was very hard to find) I turned up this gem, Glam Sakura Bisque Ton Visage from Sin Skins

Glam Sakura Bisque Ton Visage from Sin Skins

This replaced my Asiatique Dark Seductress from Tete a Pied, which had been my favorite of the original Asian skins I found, but which I guess I didn't fall in love with. (And I usually wear Gala skins, so I'm used to falling in love with the skin that I wear!)

Asiatique Dark Seductress skin from Tete a Pied

The differences might be nearly invisible to many readers, which makes me look a little silly! So let me point them out: my old skin has a pretty constant tone throughout, while my new one has subtle variations that bring out skin tone and features. The detail is also a bit clearer around the eyes and mouth on my new skin, which is a small but (for me) very important difference. This skin is easy for me to stay in!

Of course, in the four hours or so I've spent in this skin since I bought it, no one has commented that I suddenly seemed to have changed race. I'm hoping that's because they're used to me sprouting wings and changing complexion and turning into a mermaid and all, and not that my new skin looks insufficiently Asian to do the job.

Unfortunately, Sin Skins only sells this beautiful piece of work in two colors, both of them lighter than I would like: Porcelain and Bisque. I think this might be partly due to the problem a number of skin designers have mentioned with detail on darker skins, although it's a shame for ethnic diversity in Second Life. Still, I feel very fortunate to have found an Asian skin that I like.

Oh, and if you're looking for a female Asian skin, you might also try D-Skin. The ones I tried there didn't really work on my shape, but Iris Ophelia loves them. :)

(By the way, my apologies to anyone who might be cringing along with me every time I use the word "Asian," as though Asia were one big undifferentiated country. But since the skins aren't specifically Japanese or Thai or Korean or Chinese or Vietnamese (etc.), I can't really find a better term. Oh well!)

Actually, that's one of the funniest things to me about ethnicity in Second Life: since it's optional, anyone who wants to contribute to ethnic diversity in Second Life can, by changing ethnicity! If you give that a try, would you post in the comments here, preferably with pictures? I'd love to see. And don't forget, a new ethnicity is a good excuse to go shopping, if (like me) you won't be inclined to spend time in a look unless it looks just right to you. Perfectionist multiculturalists of the world, unite! ;)

^^^\ Kate /^^^

This post explains what an "SL resident name" is.

My friend Kit Meredith brought up a problem in a recent blog entry: since many people blog, correspond, comment, and otherwise have public lives using the versions of us that exist in Second Life (which if you haven't heard of it is a virtual environment in which people build, socialize, exchange information, play, and spend leisure time), we often will sign messages with the names we use in Second Life. Those names correspond to a virtual version of ourselves, one that may or may not match our physical appearance, gender, age, species (!), or even personality. Many of us keep our legal identities private and don't publicly associate them with our Second Life identities.

I call the name my virtual self uses a "Second Life resident name," or "SL resident name," because individuals in Second Life are called "residents." Some people might use the term "avatar name," but since a single avatar can change its build, height, skin color, hair, clothing, or gender within a few seconds, this can be confusing: the word "avatar" can mean either a resident's virtual self in any form or a particular version of that virtual self. For instance, in Second Life I am sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes Asian, and so on, and sometimes someone would call each of those an avatar, and sometimes they'd call all of them my avatar, singular. So the term "SL resident name" might be less confusing than "avatar name."

What Kit pointed out is that there may be confusion about the names we Second Life residents sometimes use in correspondence to people who are using their legal names. For instance, I might be interested in quoting someone on my blog and e-mail them to ask about it, signing the e-mail "Kate Amdahl." But since "Kate Amdahl" is my SL resident name and not my legal name, I might worry that the person reading the message would be misled into thinking that was my legal name. So in future, I'm going to have the following line after my signature in some kinds of messages, linking it to this entry:

Kate Amdahl is my Second Life resident name.

If you'd like to do the same thing, you could link to an explanation of your own, or you'd be welcome to link to this post, which as you can see, I've tried to set up to explain things to someone who doesn't know about Second Life.

And if you're a person who has questions about Second Life residents or identity, you're welcome to post them in the comments to this message, which will make their way to my e-mail account and usually be answered promptly.

Of course this post is continuing my vampiric little habit of turning my blog into an extended comments section for Kit's Blog, but Kit's posting regularly and I'm posting at whim, and further, I'm not doing any grand social experiments in Second Life at the moment (whereas I usually have been, in the past!), so it seems only appropriate that I should be stirred to thought by Kit's posts and surf, as it were, in her wake. :)

^^^\ Kate /^^^

Those Second Life appearance sliders-and all the tools that go with them-have a sort of sneaky appeal. You might come into Second Life wearing an avatar that looks a lot like the First Life you, but then one day you log in and say to yourself "You know, if I can stand to lose twenty pounds in my First Life, why not in my Second?" Or you don't wait that long and trim off the extra 20 pounds (or what have you) when you start. I don't think I have trimmed off 20 pounds, but I'll bet I've trimmed off ten. Actually, I imagine it's hard to find anyone (at least, anyone who isn't in top shape in First Life) who hasn't lost a little weight in translation to the screen.



It's a bit like this for kara_timtam, who says "The other"-she means one of her two avis-"is not so perfect because it is a re-creation of the real me. Admittedly, I knocked off probably about 50 pounds. Maybe that's narcissistic, I like to think of it as positive imagery."

I think she's right that it's not narcissistic. Is it positive imagery? I think the way we tell that is whether we find ourselves making changes in our lives to be fitter or healthier or more self-expressive because of our Second Life selves. I haven't heard of anyone doing that, but then, I don't think people usually like to talk about looking less than perfect in First Life when they're in Second Life among so many idealized bodies. The only problem with this attitude is if your Second Life avi sends you back to First Life despairing about your weight or face or gender or species or height or whatever you might have made different on your avi.



When I first joined Second Life, and for some months after, it was kind of a point of pride with me that I kept to roughly my First Life hair color and length and eye color. Why this should make me proud, I have no idea. Maybe it's the Puritan idea of forgoing anything that seems self-indulgent?

keikotakamura is no Puritan, but she seems perfectly at peace in sticking with an avi that's closely modeled on her First Life self. "My AV is a sort of flattered version of my RL self," she says. "I tried to make the face and hair and general shape as close to me as possible. Asian eyes, little snub of a nose, glasses, pudgebelly, etc. I tend to dress better in SL because I can afford it, unlike RL. :/"

I like her attitude toward not Barbie-ing up: "What, is my sparkling personality not /bling on enough for you??" she says.



With me, though not with Keiko to date, there did come a day where I put on a dress that seemed to minimize what I had going on up front, gave my avi a good, hard look, and moved up my breast slider. It goes up and down now, between 52 and 72, as the outfit seems to demand. And then over time there were other experiments: fashion experiments, racial experiments, and recently a week where I decided to be a redhead, which felt as strange and playful to me as if I had colored my hair in First Life. I guess one of the benefits of staying having an avi that looks something like you is that changing your look is that much more exciting.



rena_mayne has done this with more self-awareness, I think, than I have. She says that her avi "started out more like me, hair color, eye color, skin tone, height, and she wore the kinds of clothing I wear in real life. The more I learned about SL the more she changed and evolved. I began experimenting with different hair colors and eye colors and then different skins. I started noticing that I reacted differently to situations depending on how I looked. If I looked shy and innocent, I acted accordingly because I felt shy, and a little vunerable. If I looked fierce and sexy I acted appropriately. It was an interesting phenomenon."

But there are some in Second Life who have other things on their agenda, and tend not to worry about the sliders. Mari McCann (mmccann), says about her child avi, "she is largely based on RL me (at that age), and contains 'flaws' of sorts. Glasses, freckles, a bit of chubbiness, some overbite, and some slight knock-knees are all part of her." But Mari has also modeled children's clothing, and it's hard to argue that she isn't a pretty child. With that said, she both says and demonstrates that she's not trying to be a baby beauty queen.



tekelili goes farther than that, saying "For some reason, I play what would be considered by many to be an ugly AV, and am exceptionally comfortable wearing him. I believe he's more 'unique' looking than flat out ugly, but, he's in no way "beautiful". He's pale, rail thin, creepy, and rather ill looking, and not in a 'goth' way, rather, just unwell-looking.

Although I have two other AVs for RP/admaking, I don't tend to be either one unless it's for one of those activities...it seems a simple case of being comfortable in the AV."



Don't think this is the end of the subject, but I think I've gone on long enough for now. Let's call this the end of part 2 and I'll pick up with part 3 in the next week or so.

^^^\ Kate /^^^

So I've been interested in what it's like to be on Second Life as a different race from the almost uninterrupted sea of white people. Thanks to the knowledgeable people on the LiveJournal second_lifers community (including our friend Soph, whom I guess I should have just asked in the first place!), I finally was able to find the skin I needed to put together a Japanese version of myself (Keiti?). Eris came along with me to Tete a Pied, where we tinkered with new shapes while we waited for skins to rez. (Almost everywhere we went last night was laggy, laggy, laggy until we came back to the Diversionarium.)

After getting new skin, hair, and eyes and changing our shapes, we went through our respective wardrobes, which were more than up to the challenge, and dressed the part. Eris came up with a lovely version of her avi that, to our eyes, looks distinctly Vietnamese. I think my results were less strikingly on-target, but I did come out looking (it seemed to me) passably Japanese.



Now, my question from here is, will people treat us any differently, or will we experience Second Life differently, in these avatars? Our only experience of strangeness so far was when our friend nox came by and said "I feel like a giant!", because our new avis are both to normal human scale and smaller than the average Caucasian woman even on that scale. She did look like a giant to us, or we looked like pygmies next to her. Later when I changed back into gaijin Kate, she seemed a perfectly normal size.

And down the road, I'll try further race bending experiments. While it's not like being a minority race in First Life, it should still be enlightening.

^^^\ Kate /^^^

A lot of Second Life avatars are different from their Real Life counterparts. A lot. Males have female avatars, females (less often) have male avatars, married people represent themselves as single and available, and almost everyone is svelte and trim, with large breasts for the women and bulky muscles for the men.

There are people who fight against this trend, some staunchly, others of us less emphatically. In my case, I've tried to at least keep my breasts to a realistic size. I'd love to compare them to my real life breasts to find out whether I'm in the ballpark, but there's no easy way to do that unless someone out there has a scripted prim measuring tape they can loan me!

For this entry, I've gotten kind permission to post Second Life and Real Life pictures of seven residents side-by-side. Here's Aur.

Anyway, it's all up for grabs: age, weight, race, marital status, sexual preference, personality ... you name it, someone in Second Life is appearing differently in that way than in Real Life. Let's call this kind of thing "identity bending."

And there are all kinds of schools of thoughts on what "should" and "should not" be the rule of thumb for different kinds of identity bending. This gets tricky, because there are all kinds of issues that come up. Some people are freaked out by or condemning of gender bending in any form; many people aren't interested in getting involved with someone who's married in Real Life; and even well-intentioned people might be a little disturbed to find out their petite, girlish lover is a 350-pound 55-year-old in Real Life.

Casidy Craig in Second Life and Real Life. In Real Life, Casidy is transgendered, female to male.

So some people hide their Real Life identities, and other people lie about their Real Life identities. I'm one of the hiders: my Real Life and my Second Life aren't allowed to mix, because in my Real Life I'm not interested in having to defend my habit of blogging about sex and all the other fun things I get to do as Second Life me. I'd do it if I had to, but in the end it would be more trouble than it's worth.

It might be useful before we plunge much deeper into this to reflect that there are really two different types of reasons someone might not want to mix Second Life and Real Life. One reason is because the person doesn't want their Second Life to affect their Real Life, as with me. The other is because the person doesn't want their Real Life to affect their Second Life, which usually means that they differ in some substantial way from their avatar, for instance in gender or marital status.

Fenix Harbinger, matching closely in both lives

There's no question that some people would be very disturbed to find out that a friend-or especially a lover-is the opposite gender of their avatar, but it's hard to make an ethical case for objecting to this if the gender bending person doesn't claim their Real Life self is the same as their avatar. It comes down to asserting that people who bend gender should always reveal that in their profile because people who associate with them in Second Life may feel bad otherwise-but it's just as defensible to say that people who aren't comfortable with gender bending friends should stick to friends who have declared their Real Life gender already. In either case there's that bad old pitfall "should." Regardless of what you believe is morally best for people to do, a lot of people (in this case) are going to do the exact opposite. Many people will have avatars of a different gender than their real life selves without making that public knowledge, and many people will assume that avatar gender is the same as Real Life gender even though that's a lousy bet in Second Life. Ultimately we can't expect each other to conform to our personal codes of conduct. All I can suggest is that being as honest as we reasonably can and as open-minded as we reasonably can is likely to be a big help.

Keiko Takamura

The gender issue especially is more complicated than it might seem at first. First, there's the whole prejudice issue. If a person's profile is one gender and their "1st Life" tab says another gender, they are likely to be opening themselves up for abuse from random passersby which you could argue isn't really deserved. Second, there's the experiment part. If a man is trying to find out what it's like to be treated like a woman, or a woman is trying to find out what it's like to be treated as a man, the results aren't likely to be very accurate if everyone knows that the person's Real Life gender is different from the avatar's gender.

And being able to be different and to experiment are some important advantages of Second Life. Yet for all of that, some people always will be disturbed if they discover a friend is bending gender, and there's probably no way around that short of complete cultural transformation.

Lisse Livingston

Another thing that might be helpful to think about is this: sometimes people aren't given the option of keeping quiet; they must either lie or be silent and revealed. If someone asks a male avatar "Are you a guy in Real Life?" and the person is female in Real Life (or more confusingly still, transgendered!), then just refusing to answer the question or saying "I prefer to keep my RL private" is usually going to be taken as an alternate version of "no, I'm not." That cuts the options down to revelaing or lying, with no privacy in the middle. So if you feel people deserve privacy on these things, don't ask those questions!

Marianne McCann. This is an old picture of her, of course. As you can see, Marianne's avi is a child, too.

(I tried hopping into a male avatar for about an hour once. I stayed only with friends while doing it, and everyone knew who was really behind the wheel. I actually didn't find it appealing *at all*, but I understand there may be a greater appeal for men trying on female avatars. After all, we are prettier than they are! With the exception of the occasional Orlando Bloom, of course.)

I've sometimes seen people confuse "honesty" with "disclosure," and this is a mistake. For someone to decline to reveal something about themselves is not a lie; it's privacy. So a 50-year-old Asian male who goes around in a 20-year-old Caucasian female avi is not lying by doing that. That's bending genders and ages, not bending truth! Of course he *could* lie about it too, and that's a different matter.

Maus Ennui. Like Fenix, a close match in both lives.

Marital status is a more serious issue in some ways because many people (raises hand) don't want to have any part in someone else's marital infidelity. If you have an open marriage or are legally separated or what have you, that's fine by me (though not by everybody!). But otherwise it's a problem because people can get enticed into an immoral act without knowing it's immoral. (That is, if the sex itself isn't immoral by their standard, but cheating is.)

As to appearance and age, Second Life avatars are clearly designed with the assumption that they'll be relatively young and relatively svelte. I would be happy for my avatar to look my actual age (mid-thirties) instead of the default 25-or-so we all seem to look, but I don't know any way to age myself attractively in Second Life. And it's even harder, presumably, when everyone else has physically idealized, young avatars. Well, almost everyone! I've seen older and heavier avatars very occasionally, but I'm not sure in those cases that they represented a closer match to their Real Life counterparts; they may just have been experimenting.

In the end, it's probably helpful to think of Second Life as a place where it's fun and interesting to experiment with identity. If instead we get in the habit of assuming that everyone is showing their Real Life self, I think we invite trouble, because that's definitely not the case! At the same time, it's hard to go wrong with honesty when you can get away with it.

^^^\ Kate /^^^