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Monday, October 10, 2022

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ilsa

I get “you are hot except your boobs are to small, and you look like a little girl”
This is repulsive on many levels… first, if you are trying to be demeaning,using a demeaning term like “boobs” or “tits” is a good way to start… these are terms that women can use that men should probably avoid on a first conversation..: my response is usually along the lines of “you look like a man but your peepee is to small
Secondly, why are you thinking I look like a little girl but hot!?!?

Allegory Malaprop

I mean...on the one hand, yeah, duh. It doesn't matter where you go, what platform you're on, this is just navigating life, online and off, for anyone female in any way. Is it right/fair/not producing a background noise of white hot anger all the time? Nah, that's just what you deal with when you or others perceive you as being female. But it's the way it is, and we keep fighting tooth and nail to make it slightly better and sometimes it gets slightly better.

So, no, we shouldn't stop trying, but fucked if I know how we "fix" it. Keep trying to make it less socially acceptable- change the actual minds, not just platform options; the much more difficult task. Even platforms with minimal avatar customization have it (I was a big World of Warcraft player for a bit before I started up SL, eons ago- you could basically pick your body type by race, which effected how you functionally played too, and some hair style and tinting options and it still had user female body issue problems ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE). Go on a dating app (don't. And don't open your DMs if you do. Ever). Facebook. Forums. Before the WoW phase, I had a bunch of webpages, not internet famous or anything but that strangers would stumble across, with no actual photos of myself, just drawings, and woooo boy. Weird sexual-ish propositions all over the place from men who didn't even mean it that way, they just don't know any other way to interact. There's a subtle undercurrent that women ignore, and men tend to not even be aware of, under just about everything.

It's gotten better, because more of it is being acknowledged, but still: assholes gonna asshole. Sad truth is that as long as we have meat suits, some people are going to think with their reproductive organs- and other people are going to encourage them to be "part of the group" and do it- and we're going to have some struggle with this idea that "those people" are just going to be objectified objects they will see as existing only for their own selfish desires. Just don't make it easy for them to thrive and expand.

If you're female, you've been developing your way of dealing with it on your side since birth. We all make different choices depending on what exactly we've experienced directly and what we want, but we've all got our toolbox that we've been sharpening up our entire lives. Doesn't make it right, it's just the way we are required to live. Doesn't make it STILL not hard to deal with each. and. every. fucking. time. Also doesn't make it not fucking exhausting on a day to day basis.

Is ignoring it and putting everyone in a Disneyfied avatar that is cartoony and provides zero body shape customization the solution though? Because that's been tried, and that just encourages body dysphoria too. (And STILL with the disgusting/offensive DMs.) And really, at this point, SL users have been breaking the "rules" about how an avatar is intended to work for well over a decade- they said "no I don't want that crappy hair, I'll wear prims; I don't want that janky Ruth avatar, I want big smooth Lola Tango boobs, I want a full mesh body that uses the sliders in a way between subtly and massively ignoring how the original shapes actually work" and also tinies and massive giants too. You open the door to any customization and users WILL run with it, for good and ill. It's like the problem in all the discussions about the potential dangers of AI: the inherent danger of AI isn't that computers will decide on their own that humans need to be exterminated, the problem is that they will develop all of their ideas based on what humans can come up with just faster, harder, and with potentially more far reaching consequences (an example of it in action, under 24 hours to turn a chat bot on twitter into a nazi complete with genocidal tendencies). We're the problem.

It's also the miniskirt defense: it's not my responsibility to form myself into the shape that makes YOU comfortable.

Luther Weymann

Why can't the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

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