#MeToo Makes It To the Metaverse: Second Life YouTuber Recounts Real Life Harassment Through Her Avatar

#MeToo, the social media movement provoked by the harassment allegations that recently hit Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood, has spread to England and even France, has entered the virtual world with this video by well-known Second Life YouTuber Isabelle Cheren, who discusses several instances of real life harassment she's experienced over the years through the anonymity (and relative safety) of her SL avatar.

"I felt more comfortable doing [this] with my avatar," she tells me. "I speak openly in real life often but in YouTube it’s a lot harder to expose yourself... I just think [shooting the video through her avatar] made opening up more easier to not be the woman people may recognize in the street."

She also shot the video in part because while numerous prominent figures have been named as harassers, the wider part of the problem has not been as well addressed: "The harassment stuff has made me a little angry too because they only talk about actors and politicians in the media," she says. "But the reality is the average person suffers it in a daily basis. But they don’t speak of it."

I ask her if other virtual world/MMO YouTubers might follow her example, and make avatar-based #MeToo videos of their own:

"I think other SL YouTubers [should] do what makes them comfortable," she says. "I wouldn’t say they should follow in my footsteps because it’s a personal choice. My channel was always going to be about more than fashion and such and I want to speak."

That said, if you are a YouTube who shoots a video, please post the links Comments below!

Comments

[Isabelle cheren]

Thank you for sharing this. It’s not just the “famous” people who go through this. In 2017 it’s hard to fathom it’s still an issue that keeps coming up. But there it is, still.
We can hope that educating people and challenging their behaviour may eventually work.

[Ayesha Lytton]

It's great that she shared this. But we should also talk about the harassment towards women / female avatars that occurs IN Second Life. Yes, we have the ability to block, TP out, and report abuse, but the sheer frequency of abusive behavior and level of entitlement I see in SL is much higher. Men think they can join SL and demand sex from any female avatar they see... and that says a lot about our culture.

[The road to nowhere]

@ Ayesha Lytton

Strangely enough half of those are women role-playing stereotypical male social actions with many going so far as to use a voice changer.