What Makes An Female Avatar Truly Feminine?

Anyone of either gender can create and control a female avatar, and it is a popular Second Life parlor game to argue over the tell-tale signs that it's really a man at the keyboard.  Of course, the most obvious tell is an excessively large bust.  Then again, that's such a giveaway, gender-benders who don't want to be outed are apt to keep their chest size modest.  A woman once told me she looks for a more subtle cue: the size of a female avatar's hands and wrists.  Real women are far more likely to be aware of them, she argued, and make them small, while men rarely consider such details.

Ms. dandellion Kimban has another sign of true femininity, and being a dude, it never would have occurred to me, ever.  Can you guess what it is?  You have to look closer.

Comments

[Leondra]

TGIF... came home... got a glass of wine, started to read my blogs, and this one made me spit my wine all over the keyboard! Just sopped it up.

Well I assure you, I am a RL female, big boned, and with large hands and feet. My original avatar was very close to my original body image. I have tweaked things over time... but kept the larger than most female avas hands!

I will consider if I need to change.

Thanx for the laugh.

[Hamlet Au]

Sorry for the mess, Leondra, just reporting what one woman told me!

[Orin B]

Not sure if that really covers it! Seen way too many men with them on!

Oh, hang on..... Unless they are the females at the keyboard with a male avatar... *mind now boggles and is REALLY confused!* :-s

[Gogo]

So true.. never leave home without my prim lashes! :D

[Doreen Garrigus]

I own prim lashes. I decided against using them after I realized how much effort it was going to take to make them right. I don't wear a lot of makeup in the real world, either. Too much trouble. :)

[Eriko Watanabe]

I knew I should have bought into that eyelash company. You can bet all the manginas will be lined up to buy their proof of womanhood now, haha.
Seriously though, after being here two years, I've never felt a need to buy eyelashes. I think it's all the female avatars with big black patches where their eyes should be, I see after a tp to a place and wait for everything to rez. Apparently, eyelashes are the last thing to rez and I seldom have the patience to wait and see what they look like. Resizing my hands, feet and making my belly to a number greater than zero, was something I did my first week though. Oh yes, I am a woman. Go get those lashes though guys. Maybe I should make some to sell....

[Aberystwyth Lane]

Absolute bullshit, sorry. It's never occurred to me to change the size of my hands, nor do I own prim lashes. What a narrow and offensive view of femininity, virtual or otherwise.

[beatrix noel]

I'm really tired of this obsession with whether or not a female avatar is Really female in real life.

I ran around the gird with a square jaw and big boobs and no prim lashes for the longest time and I was still a female in Real life.

Why is everyone so freaking obsessed with avatars being proportionate (when most RL bodies aren't), totally realistic (when this is second life and anything is possible) and if an avatar's gender matches the typist gender (when this is real life and anything is possible).

It seems that in a world with limitless possibilities many people want avatars' appearances to fall into a very limited range.

[dandellion Kimban]

Thanks for the heads up Hamlet!

Reading the comments and I feel the need to clear some things... That post is not intended to give yet another clue about the sex and gender of somebody's human. though I am theoretically interested in gender differences, I keep myself silent and away from any definitive conclusions and generalizations.

That post is written as a short praise of prim eyelashes, inspired by a chat with a friend with male avatar. Yes, it points out differences in typical male and female thinking about beauty, what would one do for the beauty and why. That's it. No more, no less.

[Ananda]

This is ridiculous... next you'll find someone whose stereotypes are so warped and hardwired they'll insist they can spot the Adam's apple on avatars. *laughs*

Seems things have really gone downhill for you on this question since the days of Jade and Torley. :)

[Hamlet Au]

Ananda, gender in virtual worlds is a huge and complicated topic that'll often involve real world stereotypes, but that hardly means that's the only aspect I'm interested in. I'm just as curious why Residents *have* such an extended conversation around who is gender-bending and how to figure it out.

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks for the clarification, Ms. Kimban; I didn't want to suggest your post was a gender spotter thingie, as I know that's not what you were intending, though I see how my post can be misread that way.

[Ananda]

Sorry, this one just made me laugh.

I'll repeat a comment I made to someone else not too long ago on Plurk... This is an issue that will never go away because it's an unavoidable instinct in people to always be evaluating each other for the potential to create a future together.

While "future" doesn't necessarily mean the creation of children and/or family, that is a primal motivation hovering back of every evaluation of another person. I think when people scream of dishonesty when they find a gender "mismatch" it's really this instinct that's getting in the way. Chances are the person feeling betrayed never even thought to ask before, or honestly look at their own prejudices in making friendships.

That's my 2L$ on why.

[Hamlet Au]

Yeah, that's a good point and often true to many playing the What Gender Really game, Ananda. I also think it's often just innocent curiosity. It's got a 3D Turing Test aspect, too, that's worth exploring. (I mean the original test, where Alan Turing challenged people to guess gender by reading notes secretly written by a man or woman.)

[Burgundy Mirajkar]

How does an example of hyper-femininity become an indication of "true" femininity? I think there are a couple of leaps of logic here that need to be pointed out..

The conversation Dandelion described wasn't -- as she says here -- about ID-ing cross-gender avs.... that's something that suddenly appeared in Hamlet's spin on it (leap of logic #2). But it *is* titled "the essence of femininity," and I think that suggests something more than simply a praise of eyelashes... though it's likely that wasn't the intention at all. Essence means "core" to me, and I wonder if the use of that word triggered Hamlet's phrase "true femininity."

Leap of logic #1 is the idea that something that is hyper-feminine is actually at the core of femininity. I'd say it's exactly the opposite. It's hard enough to pinpoint what femininity is, but prim eyelashes and the time it takes to make them perfect, something plenty of female avs really don't bother with (regardless of what sex is driving them), is pretty non-central to it. Honestly, I think defining femininity and masculinity at all is pointless, but when you're using fashion/beauty/other physical symbols to do it, you end up wandering *way* off base.

And since those physical symbols are what we try to use in that parlor game of gender-guessing, it's really just a circular process. And really, *why* did the eyelash post turn into a gender-guessing post when it appeared here?

[Simone Gateaux]

I happen to be a biological male who has a female AV, and I am very comfortable with her, as she more adequately reflects me than my male AV could. If someone wants to know about my SL assigned gender all they have to do is look at my profile.

I had an interesting incident visiting Kira Cafe during its birthday bash the other day. Simone was decked out in one of her Kimonos and the Japanese Kira visitors started text and voice messaging me in Japanese. I finally straightened out that no I am not Japanese but admire certain aspects of Japanese culture and have an inordinate fondness for kimono and we got on fine. I even got some suggestions for good Japanese sims to visit.

Nobody cared that my birth assigned gender is male. As for prim eye lashes...hmmmm. When I made Simone, my aim (aside from reflecting something about how I feel about gender) was to have a relatively consistent and somewhat retrained look. I didn't really worry about the size of hands etc.