Oil and water

This post came from a thread in the official SL “flogs” (as bad as they are, and in need of much flogging there are occasionally some good thought-provoking threads there).

This one starts with the common profile-statement “RL and SL are seperate and I do not mix them”. The Immersionist side of the Immersionist-Augmentist debate.

A fascinating subject, and lots of thought-provoking answers. To me, if I see that in someone’s profile I assume that either their avatar is nothing like their RL self (possibly a different gender) or else they’re married and not intending for SL relationships to become RL relationships.

In a sense, both of these apply to me and yet I still don’t feel like I do keep SL and RL seperate at all. My avatar may be taller and fitter and better-looking than I am in RL, and I don’t do voice or share RL pictures or phone numbers with SL friends. I am married in RL so I’m not in the market for a RL relationship. I have no urgent need to meet up with SL friends in RL (although I would not object to doing so if the opportunity arose). But despite this, my avatar is still me in every possible way. Aside from identifying personal information, I am open about my RL with SL friends. I can’t even say “my avatar is the same as me” because that would imply that we are two alike but separate things, and I don’t see my avatar that way at all. It’s just me, as I wish I looked, as I look in my dreams. In The Matrix movie, they call it “Residual Self-Image”.

And yet while I am very much myself in SL, I have no issues with people who see things differently- for whom their avatar is a roleplaying character very different from their real self (I have a couple of roleplaying alts too). It’s odd really, that I seem to fit on both ends of the I-A scale – both being very much true to my RL self in my avatar (although one of the biggest turnoffs for me is someone who asks too many questions about what I look like in RL and what I do, as opposed to what I think), and at the same time having no need to drag SL friendships into RL.

I have the following in my profile (and the same in Salo’s profile as well, actually):

I respect others’ avatars as they choose to present themselves, whether that matches RL or not is mostly irrelevent to me. I would hope to be treated with equal courtesy.

This means, basically, that I don’t care if your RL self doesn’t match your avatar – I’ll treat you as you present yourself inworld until you instruct me to do otherwise. Because it really doesn’t matter, for the purposes of a SL friendship – I’m much more interested in the words you type. And it shouldn’t matter to you that in RL I’m not a fit, red-haired hunk, I’m just a short, weedy nerd with glasses and greying hair.

Short stuff

Salo has been tweaked again.  It started when I tweaked my height back down to 6′4″, and then I realised that Salo was actually TALLER then me which just won’t do. So I had this idea to make her height much more realistic to RL… so now she’s 5′9″

And she looks TINY.

This pic was taken this afternoon, the guy next to her is just some random stranger.

Now, given that she has an androgynous shape, with no breasts, and an androgynous skin with no makeup, I’m just wondering how long it will be before she’s accused of being a child avatar.

Alter Ego challenge

I was inspired by Avalon Birke’s post in which she challenges bloggers to post up two pictures of themselves, illustrating two different aspects of their personality. So here’s the two sides of me. On the one hand, the scruffy, flannel-shirt-wearing, grungy hippy who never really grew up. On the other hand, the mature, dapper and well-mannered gentleman, out for a stroll around Caledon.

Phoenix

• Wings and tail – Aventity – Phoenix
• Hair – DV8 – Cyberhawk
• Tattoos – Kanival – Phoenix
• Pose – Sunflower – Belive I Can Fly

Can you tell I like Phoenixes? *grin*

body and ink

There’s been a lot of talk in the forums lately about body shape, and how so many people fail to get their shape in proportion. There’s a useful guide that was posted up in the official forums the other day, and today I used it to make sure my own shape was in proportion. I’m happy to say that, aside from my head being far too small, which I’ve now fixed, the rest was almost dead on. Increasing my head size gave me an extra inch of height, so now I’m 6′4″ (still a short-arse). I did tweak a few other things too; in particular, a bit more bodyfat, particularly around the waist, and by way of an experiment I tweaked my face to make it slightly asymmetrical. Both these changes aimed at making my shape a bit more realistic.

To celebrate my new perfect body, I decided to decorate it. Actually I’ve wanted a full body phoenix tattoo for a while, and today I happened to find one at Kanival, and it’s absolutely superb. I even wrote to the maker to compliment him, which is something I rarely do. (His profile is all in Japanese – I hope he understands English!)

So here I am, showing off body and ink:

blast from the past

Remember I said that I used to have another avatar way back in 2006, that I stopped using? Well, today I found some pics of him.

*dies of the n00bishness*

Alice, you were asking about what place the pic was taken? I remembered where it was. This was a treehouse in a place called Oakmyst, on Phyllira. The build is gone now unfortunately. Oakmyst was a fun place.

Gender and Disclosure in Second Life

This is a collection of thoughts that sprang out of an interesting thread on the SLU forums, in which the OP lamented the fact that as a lesbian woman, she found it incredibly difficult to find other genuine RL lesbians with whom to form relationships, and instead was disppointed by the number of “lesbians” who were, in fact, straight men with female avatars. The purpose of this post is to correlate my thoughts on this and related matters, and expand on them a bit. Be warned for tl;dr.

This whole issue is an ethical minefield, and because of my own situation it is also one that touches very close to home.

The main question that seems to arise from this situation is, if your RL gender does not match the gender of your avatar, at what point, if ever, does it become mandatory to disclose this fact? And at what point does failure to disclose it become an act of deliberate deceit? The general consensus was “it depends”, and the things it depends on vary from one person to another, and one situation to another.

It is fairly accurate to say that the majority of SL users fall into one of two camps.; On the one hand you have people who take other people’s SL avatars at face value, and they do not mind if reality differs from that; they treat the other person as though they are who their avatar appears to be. On the other hand you have the group of people for whom SL is a tool for interacting with a RL person, and for that group, the identity of the typist is far more important than the identity of the avatar. The problems arise when a person from one group hooks up with a person from the other group and one or both of them have not made their position clear from the outset.

The situation that arose in the original post is clearly one of deceit. A straight guy wanting a bit of hot girl-on-girl pixel-porn dresses up in a girl’s avatar, goes to a lesbian club and picks up another girl and starts dating her. Only after several days does he confess that he’s really a guy. Kudos for him that he actually admitted it at all, many don’t, ever. But to string her along for days, to take her on dates under false pretenses… the deceipt began with the first IM, and I think that is despicable.; The amusing thing about all of that is the thought that two blonde lipstick lesbians hooking up are actually two straight guys both of which would be absolutely horrified if they thought they were wanking off to another bloke.

This leads to the development in SL of the A/S/L – pics – voice – webcam conundrum, where many guys are just too afraid to get involved without knowing for absolutely certain that the female avatar they’re chatting with is a female in RL. It starts with A/S/L – but the girl might be lying. So they ask for RL pics. But they might be pics of someone else – so they ask for Voice – but that might be cheating using a voice modulator – so they demand web-camming… and so it goes on. (And makes me wonder why they are even bothering trying to pick up girls online at all if their paranoia is so great that they distrust everyone they meet).

But there are other reasons for guys (or girls) to have avatars that do not match their own RL gender, and here’s where the ethical waters start to get murky.

Lets take situation two. Woman A is, in RL, a bisexual female with a slight preference for other women. She is of the type of player that really doesn’t care about anyone else’s RL identity – she takes everyone at face value, and states openly that she does not mind if the person behind the keyboard is male or female. Woman B is in RL a straight man who is experimenting with a female avatar for fun and personal curiosity, just to see what it’s like. He choses NOT to tell woman A that he is male in RL. They hook up and have a lot of fun together. Is that deceipt too?

Now lets look at situation three. A post-operative transsexual woman, who was born biologically male, but fully identifies as female, has completed medical transition and has offically changed gender and become female. She has a female avatar in SL. Is this deceipt? Is there a point at which it becomes essential for her to disclose her previous gender?

Situation four – same woman, with a female avatar in SL, but ten years younger, and this time still pre-op. Maybe cross-dressing full time in RL, and identifying internally as female, but still having a RL body which is physically male.Is this different from situation 3, and if so, on what grounds?

This is the situation that matches my own, except the other way round, gender-wise. I regard myself as transgendered, female to male; I cross-dress near enough 24/7/365, but for practical reasons (mainly financial ones) I have not and probably will never make the magic medical transition. So… is it unethical of me to not disclose this to all I meet in-world? It’s an odd situation, being transgendered in SL, because I don’t feel that it’s my SL avatar thats the wrong gender. My SL gender is right, it’s my RL avatar that’s wrong. I cannot possibly say that I’m female in RL because this is blatantly not true – there’s nothing female about me except for my reproductive organs. At the same time, I can’t honestly say that I’m male because physically, I am not. The only way out of this dilemma I can find, without deliberately lying, is to be completely up-front and honest about being transgendered. Unfortunately doing that has totally ruined any chance I might have had of any sort of relationship in SL – straight girls and gay guys don’t want to know because I’m not male. Lesbians and straight guys don’t want to know because I’m not female.

In the end, I’m fairly unusual as far as transgendered/transsexual people in SL go. Most of them do not disclose at all, partly because it ruins the immersion, and partly because in many cases SL is the only place where they can truly pass as being the gender they feel they should be. I certainly would not expect a transgendered person to disclose their RL situation. As far as I’m concerned, a TG man is a man and a TG woman is a woman, regardless of the genitals they were born with. But then again I am bisexual and it really makes no difference to me if my partner is male, female, or somewhere inbetween. I can understand it being different for someone who is 100% gay or 100% straight, where the mere thought of being with someone of the wrong gender is a complete physical turn-off. So I can see how, for some lesbian women, that a transgendered woman doesn’t quite meet the required standard.

The problem is not everyone who has a male body in RL and a female avatar, is either TS or TG. Some of them are just straight guys wanting to watch a bit of hot girl-on-girl porn and they figure the easiest way to get it is to be one of those girls. Its these straight guys playing sexual games for their own entertainment, those are the asshats that are being deliberately deceitful. But where do we draw the line, if the other woman (as in Situation #2 above) says that she doesn’t mind? Would it be deceitful for a guy (maybe a closet gay or bi-curious guy) to put on a female avatar and pretend to be a straight girl for me? I’m inclined to say no, I don’t consider that deceitful, because gender isn’t a deciding factor for me. Likewise I would believe it’s not deceipt for the woman in situation 2 either.

One thing is for certain – every situation is going to be different, and the answers to the above questions will not be the same for everybody. The most important thing in any relationship, whether it’s in SL or not, is for both parties to be absolutely clear with each other right at the outset, what they’re looking for,l and if one of them does not match the others’ needs then it’s just wrong to lie about it.

With all of that in mind, I updated my SL profile today.

sitting in a tree

I moved house today, but only just across the sim, because Aph is doing some rearranging. The one I’ve got now is better, almost flat instead of that steep hillside. So I build a proper house (and I think it’s too big), and Aph let me have the pick of her sculpty trees to decorate my parcel. I picked a lovely red-leafed japanese Maple, and then I stuck some poseballs in it. No not the dirty sort, just the sitting-in-a-tree sort.

So here’s me and Salo sitting in our new tree.

The house in the background is my neighbour’s, not mine. Mine is in need of some decent textures. Kaaaarl????

Odd thing. When I’m on my main av, I think of Salo as an antirely different person, and vice-versa. And I’m definitely thinking of her as female, which I didn’t expect. She’s cute, but I wouldn’t kiss her. That would be like incest or something.

Winter Wonderland

Winter Wonderland

Originally uploaded by Lewis Luminos

I’ve been having another go at making something, and I came up with this
flexi scarf in burberry print. I can’t decide whether I’m turning into a
country gent or a chav. Still, it’s warm with all this snow.

(and also testing direct posting to my blog)

two of us

A rare shot of me and Salo together. I love how we’re nearly looking at each other.