Originally published May 28 thru May 30 in 2003, here.
Someone sent me an e-mail last week, because they wanted to talk about "virtual sexual harassment." Alexis was her name, and she said she'd had a few such experiences with that in Second Life, and she thought I should investigate and maybe write a story about it. "Like what kind of incidents are you talking about?" I asked her.
"I have had one male avatar come up to my avatar," answers Alexis, "and tell me to take off my avatar's top (granted, it happened in a Mature sim, but would still qualify), and another one say to my avatar, 'If we had the gesture in here, I'd smack that (meaning my avatar's backside)'." (By "Mature sim", Alexis refers to an area in Second Life where behavior that's roughly equivalent to what you'd see in an R or NC-17 rated movie is allowable.) On numerous occasions, adds Alexis, she "had male avatars call my avatar 'babe', 'a hottie', and other terms that would be considered demeaning to females." At this point, it should be pointed out that incidents of this variety are, in my experience, fairly infrequent -- not just in Second Life, but in massively multiplayer games in general. If anything, as a recent Detroit Free Press article suggests, female avatars tend to get special, even chivalrous treatment, from other players, both male and female. In any case, the folks at Linden have already put up a pretty robust policy against harassing behavior (no surprise there, as a large percentage of Second Life's users are women) and make a concerted effort to enforce it. And as it turns out, just stepping back was enough to defuse one such encounter. "I just said simply, 'No'. It put an end to that situation," says Alexis, "but probably did not dissuade this person from doing it again to someone else... the funny thing is, I had never met the avatar before until that very moment." So Alexis' main objection to the talk about hotties and butt-smacking, it seemed to me, was the *way* it occurred: "If a statement like that came out during a bit of sexually charged role-playing between avatars," she says, "that would be fine... but this incident happened just as I arrived at the location where this happened, and that was the first thing that was said to me... other than maybe 'Hi'." After a bit of back-and-forth on the subject, something made me go back and check the "To:" line of the e-mails Alexis had been sending me. And only then did something strike me as a bit odd: "Alexis" is a man.
In the interests of preserving his anonymity, we'll call him, at his choice, "Dante" -- "a reference to Dante Hicks," says Alexis, "one of my favorite characters from the Kevin Smith series of films." "It wasn't my initial intention to play as a female at first," Dante e-mails me, "[but] when I signed up for the Beta and went to choose my Second Life last name," he couldn't find any that appealed. In the game, a player can pretty much choose any first name they want, but must select from a pre-set list of surnames. He did finally locate one he liked, and for several reasons, "Alexis" seemed to go with it best. "I have no problems playing Second Life as a woman," says Dante, because he's done so in numerous role-playing games. "And, as a pre-emptive answer," he adds, "I am completely heterosexual (many people think that if you are male playing a female character in a role-playing aspect, then you must be homosexual or have those tendencies.)" In any event, he continues, his actual gender is never a secret -- it's mentioned on his in-world calling card, if you just click the right button. "People are sometimes just too lazy to check the First Life tab," says Dante.
So I ask Dante/Alexis if, while playing a woman in Second Life, he ends up playing, so to speak, as a woman.
"I would say that 99 percent of the time, I don't... [but] there are times I have toned down my temper and not blown up at someone as quickly as I would have if my avatar was male... Oh, and I don't swear as much as I would in normal life." And when his avatar "changes" into a new set of clothes, he warns anyone standing around him, "no peeking."
(Now that he mentions it, I have to say it's a better act of gender deception than he's giving himself credit for: I met him online as Alexis a couple weeks ago, and from his speech, I assumed Dante was a woman in real life, myself.)
And has being a woman online changed his perspective at all, especially when he sees women in real life getting the same kind of unwanted comments he gets, in Second Life?
"I wouldn't say so," says Dante. "If anything, I feel that I have gained even more respect for women who are willing to stand their ground against this type of treatment in real life... and I have always had a high respect for women overall."
So Dante says his online reactions to comments he considers inappropriate are similar to what they are, offline. "I have even chewed out my own friends who have [made comments like these in real life] in the past. Now they have girlfriends of their own, and these same guys who did that in the past have come up to me and told me that I was right all along. The ironic thing is that I'm the only one of them who's single."
Getting back to his original complaint, I wonder if "Alexis" has a certain flirtatious, breast-heaving connotation -- especially since Dante gave Alexis a last name which also belongs to a famous soap opera star from the 80's. Since that's the name you went with, I ask him, might you be giving out (unintentionally or not) a signal that you'd *like* people to make racy comments to you?
Dante/Alexis doesn't buy that: "If you named your daughter Alexis… would you expect her to be a flirt or be heavily flirted on by men?" Besides, he adds, "If being nice, friendly and helpful to people is being flirtatious... then lock me up and throw away the key."
Somewhere in there, as I was writing the above, a female friend I'll call Lena happened to be visiting the home office. I showed Lena the screenshot of Alexis, and mentioned that "she" was actually played by a man. And that he had been complaining about racy, suggestive comments being directed at his avatar.
"What do you think?" I asked her.
Lena frowned a little, and she let me have it:
"It looks like that guy is just waiting to be sexually harassed."
That wasn't exactly the answer I was expecting.
[After showing her the screenshot of Alexis, a curvy blonde woman in a tight outfit], I asked my friend Lena about the unwanted attention he was getting, while playing a woman. Lena isn't a gamer and doesn't play Second Life, so her opinion is strictly based on the Alexis screenshot, and her own experience as a woman.
And she isn't that convinced by Dante's claim that the attention is "unwanted", to begin with.
"Most women," Lena says, "we don't have a choice [in how we look], but we can dress down or dress up -- I know when I wear certain things, I'm pretty much prepared for a reaction, though not necessarily harassment. Does he want to attract people by the way he looks? He has a whole host of choices which led to this character. It's through those choices where he's almost saying he wants that kind of attention. It looks very sex-positive, if you know what I'm saying. If I didn't want that [kind of attention], I'd make myself into a bald eagle or something."
But shouldn't he have the right to give his avatar whatever appearance he wants for it, and not be bothered?
"So make yourself less physically attractive, if you don't want people commenting on how you look."
Lena suspects Dante has created a woman that he'd actually want to date, himself -- he just wasn't prepared for the way other men reacted to her:
"The avatar he created is likely the image of a woman… he'd be sexually attracted to. That character looks like someone he's probably looking for [in real life] is my guess. But I don't think he can handle his own reaction when it's directed at him… He's just overwhelmed by it, I think, because he's not used to it at all."
But if anything, she suggests, walking a mile in his dream girl's shoes might be good preparation.
"So maybe when he actually meets that person," says Lena, "he'll have a better idea as how to approach her -- or not approach her, I should say."
Dante isn't persuaded by Lena's speculations, when I tell him about them: "As for [her] 'sex-positive' comment," he says, "she hasn't seen some of the [Second Life] avatars that seem inspired by Madonna's 'Erotica' video or even Cher's 'If I Could Turn Back Time' video... compared to some of them, I think 'Alexis' looks pretty tame." So he didn't' design her to provoke salacious reactions -- from others, or even from himself. Alexis isn't his vision of a woman he'd like to date, he adds, because "a woman who can hold a conversation with me and share a lot of the likes that I do will be someone I would be more sexually attracted to, no matter what they look like, than just 'some hot piece of you-know-what'."
To get another perspective on Dante's dilemma from a female point of view, I log back into Second Life. As far as I can tell, longtime SL veteran Lyra Muse is a woman in real life, and her own take on Dante/Alexis' experiences are quite different, at least at first: "Just because a person makes their avatar a certain way," she says, "does not give others license to act like socially inept morons."
I agree with that, but wonder if there's another point of view that's just as reasonable. "Harassment seems to be defined by context, in which someone has to be somewhere [inappropriate]," I suggest, "like at work, or in a public space. So wouldn't the rules be different [in Second Life], in a context which is, basically, analogous to a wild party? Especially in the Mature-rated areas."
But to Lyra, Second Life is markedly different from other massively multiplayer games, which usually assume a high degree of role playing.
"[T]his is not an instance where you are necessarily playing a character," she answers. "This is Internet relay chat in a 3D environment... This is a context where our avatars are just pixilated extensions of ourselves. We work, we play, and we socialize here. How is that any different from our first lives, if only that it is encased in a series of servers run by Linden Lab?"
But then, I point out, many players do engage in some form of alter-ego role-playing in Second Life, which we both agree is just as valid. So, I argue, "I guess it comes down to the first attempt. If I role-play sexy talk [to a person in SL], for example, which the other person objects to, and so I knock it off, that doesn't strike me as harassment at all -- just a temporary clash in expectations."
"I'd agree with that," says Lyra. "It's at that point where the player needs to Instant Message the offending party and say, 'Look, I'm glad you appreciate the way I have made my avatar… but please stop making such a big deal of it, I find it embarrassing', or whatever."
And for those that *won't* take a hint, Lyra shows me the tool a friend of hers has created with Second Life's scripting language, to repel the obnoxious. She invites me to her hangout at Theater Parnasse, in the cyberpunk metropolis of Nexus Prime (Bonofacio 170,25), for a demo.
"Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly," she says, then adds, "This is Bel's product. I'm just demonstrating it." Bel Muse, a developer with Black Market Technologies here in Nexus, hovers nearby.
"See the thing on my right hand? Bel calls it the Seeker Module. It has three functions... Zapper, Bouncer and Killer."
Lyra says the word "zapper" and the disembodied zapper asks, "Who is the target?" Lyra Muse says my name, and the zapper announces, "Seeking... Hamlet Linden."
A sphere of electric energy emerges from thin air, and immediately makes a dive bomb for my...
"It's biting my ass!"
"Yup it tends to target that region," Lyra says, pleased. "Kinda like a dog.. A spherical electric dog."
She shows me the Bouncer command, usable if the owner is on land he or she controls. It instantly flings its target sky high, off their property. "And of course, Killer, well… kills you. That works anywhere that land is not set Safe. [Bel's] done an amazing job with the script..."
And then of course there's always the old school slap to the face, which Lyra also demonstrates on me, for kicks.
None of which, perhaps, may be helpful to Dante, as he continues to play Second Life while living in Alexis' skin, and he tries to demarcate the borders of what constitutes rude behavior, for him. But at the very least, Lyra and Muse's demo gives you the sense that there's an unlimited number of tools to establish these boundaries, one person at a time.
And some of them can even bite you in the rear.
Comments