It is Eureka Dejavu interviewing Jessica:
Eureka Dejavu: are you a man or woman in RL?
Jessica: how about you tell me?
Eureka Dejavu: I am trying to decide. you are certainly not gender-neutral but possess both in spades…sometimes I am positive that you’re a man, and other times equally positive you’re a woman
Jessica: lots weird gender things happen in here after awhile…like — the gender of the person on the other end doesn’t matter so much
Doesn’t matter? Really?
On one hand I couldn’t agree more. If metaverse was the world as it was imagined in sci-fi of passed decades, with too much geek talk about networks, data and stuff and no sex it would be ok. “Avatars don’t need to sit” – said a friend just few nights ago. Very true, I must agree, but I am the first one to complain if there are no bar stools in the club.
Gender does not matter if there is no sex in the world. Out of sex, and that counts a whole lot more than clubs with pose-balls, we can all be whatever gender, or androgynous shapes, or robots or abstracts. But, as you may have noticed, sex is here in the world. From shapes, skins and clothes to Xcite! and sexgen beds.
So, does our RL genders matter? Somewhere in Eureka’s blog it can be found that about 50% of residents are transgendered in second life. There is an urban myth that when asked about voice feature Philip Linden answered that’s gonna happen when they find an easy way to transgender the RL voice. (It was long ago and voice is on its way now.)
Second life is huge world with residents coming from different cultures, sub-cultures and with different backgrounds. What is perfectly acceptable and “normal” for one resident can be treated as completely weird for other. Some can feel deceived or even abused if find out that the cute girl they had fun with last night has biological male on the other end of keyboard. Other will pay no attention if “girl” behaves like a girl. Maybe they don’t want to go behind SL/RL border for any price.
We are all aware that avatar and its human are not the same and that there can be lot of dissimilarities between the two. But, some differences are more important than other. It becomes even more complicated if we take into consideration the way of telling our date something about RL selves. Is it ok to ruin the scene by telling something that is behind the satellites? It can be mayor turn-off for both sides. Second life is, once again, huge world and some rules are not possible to be stated. If we are in sex themed virtual world we could make some kind of terms and conditions, we could even insist on RL gender field on profile page. That doesn’t mean that all of us would be honest, but some people would have right to feel deceived and abused. This way, nobody ever stated that RL woman must have female avatar.
This is land where people fly and have wings and tails and horns. This is the world of tigers speaking. You can meet girl riding a dragon she is married to. And we all (most of us at least) find that as a product of imagination, not a lie. Why virtual living in the shape of the opposite sex should be treated differently?
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