Ballooning Vulnerability

I don't consider myself to be a particularly weak person. I have my soft points, but I think anybody who knows me would probably agree that they are not easily got at. This morning, I was made to feel more uncomfortable and more vulnerable than I have ever been in Second Life.

The worst part is that the person who IM'd me and landed their hot air balloon, uninvited, on my skybox roof this morning was not unpleasant. At no point did he insult me, nor make any stupid sexual advances or comments. He sent me a message saying he was in the sim, had seen me on the map, and was saying hi. He told me he was in a hot air balloon, and was coming to find me. Was I in my skybox? I was? Cool. He was coming for a cup of tea. He did ignore my attempts to point out the weirdness of him inviting himself into my virtual home, but I wasn't especially insistent with them.

And why wasn't I? Whilst this was happening, I was relaying the chat to my friends sian and Norah, and they were equally weirded out. Norah was especially uncomfortable, and began to talk about the way girls are taught to be nice in the face of awkward and unwanted advances of all kinds.

She's right, of course. But this is something I am aware of, and something I have seen in my own behaviour and tried to moderate. It isn't that we shouldn't be nice to people because we should, whether we are male or female, but where and how do you draw the line? How do you make the switch from nice to firm? To nasty, even? 

With obvious provocation, it's easy. I kept expecting this guy to sudden realise I was trying to repel him and break out into insults. I expected to be a 'stuck up bitch', or a 'slut', or some 'prudent' combination of both, and had he begun down that path, I'd have had no trouble drawing the line in the sand and linguistically annihilating the bastard. 

But the insults never came, and when he landed on my roof, he still didn't understand that I didn't want him there and that I wasn't about to invite him inside. He stopped just shy of coming in of his own accord, but had my skybox possessed an obvious door, that wouldn't have been the case.

I had thought, as I could see him getting closer on the map, that he would get lost on the way somehow, or that he would get bored and go away. I thought he would get the message and stop. I considered, laughingly, moving the house when he got close by - but that wasn't a particularly practical notion. I also considered teleporting out of the sim and going somewhere else. I'd vanish from his map, and then maybe he wouldn't even be able to find my skybox. 

That's when the vulnerability set in. I had been told when I moved in to this sim that people could only access it if their names were on an 'accepted people' list, and I dutifully gave my friends' names to my landlady so that she could add them to that list and thus they would be allowed to come to visit. The security system in place stops people on the list from teleporting into the sim - but it doesn't stop them walking in, or, say, flying in in a hot air balloon. I have no system for ejecting someone from my house, and I seriously considered leaving it because of somebody else.

That annoys me. The idea of giving up my own turf for fear of somebody else annoys me. And yet, even with that realisation, I didn't know how to make the transition from being nice to telling this guy where to get off. I was afraid of judging it wrongly, of being, ultimately, impolite and/or more heavy handed than the situation called for. 

If it had been sian or Norah, or any of my other friends, faced with this situation, I would have had no qualms about stepping in and telling this guy where to go. I wouldn't have had a single one of these worries. It wouldn't have mattered.

...What is that about?!

Coming Out Party

Everyone, I've got a confession to make. Not really a 'confession', because the word 'confession' implies I've done something wrong. I haven't done something wrong - or, at least, I don't think I have. I'm babbling now. What I'm trying to say is that I've got something to tell you.

Some party, huh?

I'm not ginger in real life. I'm not blonde/white-haired in real life, either. I'm not 5ft3" tall in real life. My feet aren't that flat. I can only dream of having a ski-slope nose, high blue-blooded cheekbones and pouty lips (And - just to clarify - I only have one SL avatar. If I want to change Kitti's hair colour, I just change it. And her eyebrows, of course. I made this picture by overlaying two pictures. This is the extent of my photo manipulation skills).

Deception was not my game here, it was just that nobody told me that I had to make my SL avatar look or be anything like my real physical first life self whatsoever. That wasn't even in the fine print of the terms and conditions - which I didn't read, of course, but ctrl+f is pretty handy. Kitti is my representative in the virtual world, yes, and I have expressed before a certain guilt curtailing the way I style and dress my avatar, but at no point have I ever set out to make her a replica of me.

In many ways, we are similar. Kitti has the appearance of a young woman. In real life, I am also female, and also in the 'young woman' category, though Heaven only knows how I made it there. At 5ft3" tall, Kitti is one whole inch taller than me. She speaks with my voice, and the only time I have ever put on a kind of play-pretend voice for her is during role-play scenarios. Of course, it is not wholly my voice - it has been mediated not only by my real-life physical body and presence, but also by Kitti's virtual body and presence. I don't think it lost anything along the way. If anything, my voice gains something different when coming out of Kitti's mouth.

'Coming out' - acknowledging the gap between user and avatar - can be a much bigger deal than I have made it out to be. For me, that gap has always been acknowledged, and never hidden. A number of my SL friends have seen my RL face and heard my voice, and I have seen and heard theirs. We're friends on Facebook. But that was a personal choice of mine, and is connected to my intentions within the virtual world. For others, that gap can be narrower or much, much wider - a chasm, almost - and admitting to that can be arduous. 

It is not always met with the greatest acceptance and understanding, either, and I would go as far as to say that some relationships only function within the virtual world if the real world is censored utterly from the equation. As long as that is known and agreed upon by those involved, then there's nothing wrong with that. But what if someone slips up? What if someone changes their mind? What about if a third party, unaware of the agreement, says the wrong thing? There are so many ways things can go wrong and it's not difficult to see why relations might then turn ugly, especially, I would venture, if sexual intercourse has been involved. The situation can also go sour if one person wasn't made aware of the game in hand.

Ultimately, it boils down to lies and expectations. If I poured my soul out to you in SL under the impression that you were going to do the same back, and I learned later that you had spun me a set of well-written lies, I might well be upset. If you tell someone explicitly that you are male in real life, and later on they find out that you are female, or vice versa, they might well be upset. There are a thousand similar situations you can come up with, taking into consideration even the tiniest details which might seem like nothing out of context but which could mean the world to somebody else.

What I think is unfair is when there have been no lies, and the expectations built up have little to do with the person then accused of betrayal. I have friends in SL who were afraid to 'come out', as it were, about their real life selves and were afraid of how I would react, knowing it made no real ounce of difference to me what colour their hair is or what nationality they are or what their sexual orientation is or what they have between their legs. Imagine how difficult it must be to come out to someone who you suspect does care, or will feel lied to, especially if you yourself have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure you have never lied to this person about the truth of the matter.

I'm not saying that everyone who gets upset by a revelation of this kind is a terrible person. I'm not saying that you are never allowed to lie about who you are, or that you should tell anybody in SL or any other virtual world anything about your real life self. Those aren't the issues here - because there is no obligation anywhere to tell the truth or to say anything whatsoever in the first place. I suppose what I am saying is that we need to be understanding of each other, in all situations and positions, and try our best to work these things out. To be supportive, and to consider our own motives for being in the virtual world and for presenting the face and persona we choose to present. It isn't really mid-life crisis kind of stuff; we don't need to sit in dark rooms and contemplate the meaning of life for an hour before we log in. I have already written at length about why our avatars can mean so much to us, and I barely scraped the surface in terms of energy and emotional investment. We need to remember, too, that the reason our words and choices have an effect on other people is because we are connecting with them not only avatar to avatar, but mind to mind. And I think that connection is a good thing, even if it means we get hurt sometimes.

So will you forgive the real life me for my brown hair and superior foot-arches?

Zero

There could be no more (in)appropriate a place to take the picture for this blog than Necronom VI.

On the news yesterday, it was announced that the Prime Minister (of the UK) David Cameron has plans to block online pornography. He is also bringing England in line with Scotland and making the creation and possession of pornography depicting rape illegal. These measures come in the wake of the murder of April Jones, and, as I understand it, seek not only to make it more difficult for children to access any form of pornography, but also to get a better handle on child pornography and make it easier to track down those who make and use it.

If it goes ahead - and it appears that it will - internet service providers will be applying 'family friendly' filters to their services as standard, and if you wish to access pornography online, you must ask for the filters to be removed. Existing customers will be contacted and asked if they would like the filters applying or not, and if no answer is given, they will be applied anyway. In conjunction, ISPs will also be adding certain search terms to a blacklist, meaning that when they are typed into a search engine, they will pull up exactly zero results. Google have been quoted endlessly by the BBC as saying they have a 'zero tolerance' policy to child abuse pornography (alternating, of course, with the news of the Royal Baby).

 

Obviously, there is opposition to this. The idea of censorship of the Internet immediately raises some peoples' hackles, and I think it raises questions about the taboo nature of pornography and what that does for those who use it and their ideas about sex. If it is more difficult to get hold of, will it become more desirable? The Labour Party has spoken out against the idea of giving existing internet customers the option regarding the filters, and think that the blanket opt-out approach should be for everyone. 

 

I don't think anybody, truly, is complaining about the illegality of rape pornography. I'm always weary of the idea of censorship, and the idea of David Cameron, but I think he is right about this one. Whilst rape and rape fantasies are not, at all, the same thing, I sincerely doubt that rape pornography makes that disclaimer at the start, or takes the time to discuss and thus highlight those the differences. Nor do I think those viewing it have much interest in taking the time to consider such in that moment. Personally, the idea that rape might turn somebody on is abhorrent, and I fear for young men and women growing up and being aroused by those images and thinking that that is how sex should be. I'd imagine that such is immeasurably damaging to the anti-rape message. 

So let's go back to the filter.

Some internet service providers already have the aforementioned family friendly filters in place that can be removed upon request. The problem with these is that the filters are a little over-zealous, and tend to judge Facebook to be a threat (which is telling, no?). Half the country would ask for the filters to be removed the day they were put on because they wouldn't be able to go online and look at pictures of their best friend's dog's cousin's latest hilarious anecdote about...I don't know...trains. If Facebook is banned by the filters, I wouldn't have a hope in Hell of being able to access Second Life with them switched on. I wouldn't even be able to access my own blog.

A little disappointingly, as I told Carmine Chris what I was blogging about today (just as I had finished writing the above paragraph), he informed me that an article on the Independent (an important UK newspaper) had basically announced that Cameron's plans are, well...brutally fucked. If you'd like to read the article, click here - here! It outlines what I was kinda of saying, only much, much better.

After reading that article just now, I'm inclined to think that Cameron has given up a little easily. There are definitely issues involved here, but I think we need to do something. Of course this kind of topic is difficult, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't engage with it. Hmm.

[Post tags (below) can be used to navigate to related posts]

Steel Buns

Today, I threw together this outfit based on a prize Sian Pearl has created for the hunt her shop is taking part in, and I skipped off merrily to investigate sci-fi themed sims in which I could snap some vaguely interesting photos. I ended up - against my initial, better, judgement - in an aforementioned notorious space brothel bar, but managed to find a relatively quiet, relatively plain, spot in which to take what I hoped would be a decent shot. 

I had not been there five minutes when the IM came through: "Come join me", it read, "I'm in a dark alley."

"Why are you in a dark alley," I replied, "When there are all these lovely electric lights to bask beneath?" God only knows how he found me in such a large sim when, according to my mini-map, he was nowhere anywhere near me. 

"Come and join me," this male avatar wrote to me again. "Do you want to play?"
"No," I replied. "Sorry. I'm sure you'll find somebody who does!"

Considering the reputation of this notorious space brothel bar which labels itself a place for "rape, forced sex, alien sex, and bdsm", these IMs were very unforceful and not as presumptuous as some I have received on much nicer, happier sims. But doesn't get away from the fact that what we are talking about, here, is the proposition of a rape fantasy. The proposition of forced sex and, I'm sure, some kind of sexual enjoyment of the scenario in the real world by this person. That he propositioned me is not the issue - I was in a place where people go to do that kind of thing, and he followed the etiquette perfectly by asking me rather than attempting to force the fantasy upon me. No; the problem here is my response.

What did I do when asked if I would allow my avatar to be potentially forced into all kinds of strange and definitely uncomfortable-looking sex positions and acts? I apologised. I didn't just say "no, thank you" and move on. I apologised, and felt the need to offer him a bizarre kind of compliment.

Why did I do that?!

I got the photos that I wanted at Insilico, not the unnamed notorious space brothel bar. They weren't what I originally wanted, but I got to be a little bit more creative in my self-portraiture, I guess.

Gaaaah.

Steel Bun(ny Ear)s

Click the image to enlarge, or click here to see it on flickr.

How to Ask for It

Loud enough?

Our clothes are asking for it. Loudly. They actually demanded it. They pointed at our half-naked bodies, gestured obscenely at our chests, thrust forward our groins, practically pushed us onto your prim cocks. They shouted: WE WANT YOU TO HAVE SEX WITH US - RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We dare you

I think not.

As ever with this blog, I have written about this topic before. Here and here (sort of) and here and here. But here I am with another slightly different angle to dissect the topic and try to get the best look at what is really going on, here. 

Sian Pearl is a parthenoid (this is best explained by her blog). She has a very specific aesthetic, well-cultivated and, okay, whilst it isn't always to my taste, it is well thought-out and considered and carefully pieced together. But recently, her developed sense of self has taken a bit of a knock, and she has been considering dropping her image in favour of jeans and jumpers. Well...that's fine, if it's what she wants - only, it isn't what she wants. What Sian wants is...okay, I imagine, a little bit of a wow factor. She wants to be attractive, I'm sure. But she also wants to be taken seriously. And questioned. And interacted with - not just prepositioned. And, if you will forgive me for being crude, not just turned into a fetish object and/or masturbated over. That such happens is not beyond Sian's comprehension. She has known this since day one. But the onslaught has reached such a point that she feels uncomfortable. And that just...isn't on.

What's to be done?

As I have said...Sian knows that by dressing this way, she is allowing a handful of people to view her as a fetish object. To use her flickr stream as self-pleasuring material. If I was more popular on flickr, I might be concerned that some of Kitti's latest pictures might be used in the same way. There is an understanding that dressing this way attracts such attention. But does that mean Sian shouldn't dress this way? Does that mean that I continue to dress as I do, the same fate awaits me?  Don't we have any control whatsoever over how we are viewed beyond our attire, and what the image we make can be used for?

There is a fine line between curiosity and voyeurism...

To what extent does the way we choose to dress act as a statement of intent? Without question, there are people, both in Second Life and the real world, that dress a certain way to suggest a certain desire, and that is not always a sexy desire.  We dress smartly in an office to be taken seriously. We go to comedy shows in our jeans to show that we're ready not to be taken too seriously. There are a thousand examples.

But how do we negotiate that? How do we work that out? It must, surely, get confusing for people contending with these issues. But that does not make it okay to presume. It does not make it okay to take images that aren't yours and use them for purposes other than what was intended - especially not without permission.

How do you work out what someone's intention is? I'll get to that in a second.

Here is a statement of my intent. Don't get it? Click here.

What this shouldn't lead to is a sense of fear. We shouldn't be afraid of each other. We shouldn't be afraid of each other's intentions and guessing them wrong. But that comes, I think, with a little intelligence, and some respect.

Respect really is the bottom line here. Having respect for others - enough, at the least, to ask somebody what their intentions are if you are unsure. In many roleplay situations in SL, roleplayers are asked to check via the private IM system before they do...well, anything!...with another avatar. It takes a heartbeat to check with someone if it's okay to attempt to engage their avatar in conversation, to start a confrontation, or to solicit them for sex. And, I imagine, most avatars are capable of answering you pretty succinctly. And if you're still unsure? Steer clear. Don't do it. And this is the same for outside of rp situations.

It comes back to that age-old battleground of "She Asked For It". Only, she didn't. We all know this - or, at least, we all should. There is only one way to ask for it. And I'm going to tell you How It's Done.

Are you ready? Are you going to write this down?

You open your mouth, and you bloody well ask for it. What your clothes are "saying" has absolutely nothing to do with it. I reiterate - I ask for it with my own mouth, not my attire.

Thank you to Sian Pearl for posing with me.

Shut Up and Eat It

Meeow

My cat is still missing. I know now that I need to file a ticket (essentially a missing persons report) with my landlord and the place I got my cat from, and hopefully they will be able to trace her/bring her home/give her a stern telling off. Thank you to everyone that offered me advice about that.

I was talking to a non-SL-using friend this morning about the aforementioned missing cat, and how it was slightly amusing that she had gone missing the morning after I had her neutered. Feeding her was becoming expensive, and so I made the (actually quite difficult) decision to buy the bottle of permapet and stop my cat from being a breedable. It only makes sense, of course, that cats getting a lot of exercise eat more than cats that only think about getting a lot of exercise, but by administering this permapet solution stuff, my cat no longer even knows what sex or breeding are, and never will again, so she apparently doesn't need to eat anything at all.

Anyway. What this led to was my voicing of something strange that happened when I neutered my cat. Over her head, as you may have seen from previous posts, used to sit a set of little meters that told me how hungry she was, how tired she was, and how happy. Once I had her neutered, all of these bars vanished. All of them. Suddenly, because my cat was no longer of breeding stock, keeping her happy and well-rested ceased to matter. I wasn't expecting this, though I appreciate how such things might work to create a game out of breeding cats. Poor Party Cat went from being a slightly more realistic tamigotchi to a cuddly toy in the click of a button. 

"You took her feelings away," said my non-SL-using friend. "That's cruel." 

"No," I clarified, "I took the measurement of her feelings away." It was pretty arbitrary, anyway, and I found it insanely difficult to balance her tiredness with her happiness. She would be miserable, but I couldn't cuddle and play with her because she was insisting on sleeping, and vice versa. Useless. But if what I said is true, why do I still feel uneasy about the idea? 

But did Party Cat ever have feelings in the first place? If we are talking on a plane in which she even exists, then yes, she does have feelings. But in a wider world context..?

I wrote a post on a popular SL forum the other day about the wording on a notecard of rules for the space brothel bar I mentioned in my 'ad(Mired)' post - which was along the same lines (and using the same lexis) as the sim rules I wrote about in one of my most popular blog posts, 'On Being Offended'. The response I got was less than enthusiastic - or, rather, less than enthusiastic about my take on things. Despite my explanations, I couldn't quite seem to articulate myself properly, and was basically told, in the end, that I was being picky and pedantic. I had got my cake, and I should just shut up and eat it. 

This, I confess, I disagree with. I think I have a point there that is, if only on a semantic level, important. And like I said, my post on the subject from a few months ago remains one of my post popular posts with (at the time of writing) one-hundred-and-sixty-one views - which is a hell of a lot for me and IYDISL! So I can't be alone in thinking that such is important. 

But where is the line? Despite my sense of unease, I'm not really sure that whether or not SL has a measure of my cat's happiness is ground-breaking digital journalism. A better question, perhaps, might be why you never see my avatar Kitti smile, and if there is a measurement for her happiness. Is her happiness my happiness? What does happiness mean in a virtual world context, and how is happiness measured, anyway?

Now the line is well and truly muddied. My little paragraph there has made it the muddiest line I have ever sought to draw. But right now? I think I should just shut up about my cat, file the damn ticket, and eat my muddy cake.

(ad)Mired

(ad)Mired

Since the holiday season is now over, I decided that I ought to begin the rather tedious task of sorting through three years of university work to figure out what needs keeping and what can hit the recycling bin. In my sorting through and ordering and filing, I came across a sheath of notes I had made about an article by Saba Mahmood, entitled Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror. Bear with me here.

What interested me and sparked the ideas for this post were two quotes I had quoted from the text, one of them which begins mid-sentence but still captures the point of the idea. It's important here to outline that I am not using these comments to talk about Islam or Muslim women - I am using them only for the ideas they spark about the world of Second Life. I am aware of the danger of using a text like that, but am not going to shy away from such things when it is possible that they have something important to say in another forum. I will put as full a citation as I can at the end of this post, so that should you wish to find the article for yourself and read it as it is, in its original context, you can do so. 

Quote one:

...securing the judgement that Islam's mistreatment of women is a symptom of a much larger pathology that haunts Islam - namely, its propensity to violence.

Quote two:

Women who contend that the veil is part of a religious duty, a divine edict, or a form of ethical practice are usually judged to be victims of a false consciousness, mired in a traditionalism that leads them to mistakenly internalise the opinions of misogynistic jurists whose pronouncements they should resist.

In a sense, it is pretty easy to modify both of these quotes to make them fit just about anything and any way of life that we might disagree with, but I think perceptions and, dare I say it, realities of Second Life have much in common with what Mahmood suggests is laid (unfairly) at Islam's feet. That misogyny exists in Second Life is without question, and I would not hesitate to suggest that SL also has a 'propensity to violence', be that because of its use as a sexual playground or because nobody wants to roleplay situations in which everybody is happy and safe and at peace with everyone else and themselves. That would be unimaginably dull, I'm sure, and largely useless to the world at large. 

But how do these quotes, in particular the second one, translate out of a question of what women might choose to wear within Islam, and into what women might choose to wear within Second Life? 

With equally dire ideas, it would seem. 

When I logged into SL a couple of nights ago, I was invited by a friend to join him in an apparently notorious space brothel bar (which shall, for the time being at least, remain nameless). There were a few other women there, also friends of his, and they were dressed in all manner of different outfits. He asked a couple of them if they would mind getting up and dancing around the poles that were there, for our entertainment. One chose to ignore him, but then, when another lady got up to dance, she gave in and joined in, too. I was not asked to dance, though whether that is because I had chosen a markedly unprovocative outfit that evening, or because I've said "no" every other time I have been asked, I cannot say for sure. But that I have to question says it all for me.

Can you see me now?

There you see the trappings of these ideas emerging. Dressed sedately in a space brothel bar, I felt that I would not have been asked to dance for their entertainment, whether I had said no before or not. Alongside some of the attire the other girls were wearing, I would be willing to bet money on that assumption. A judgement was made, by me and by them and by the friend asking the girls to dance for him, based on our attire.

Judged

What one chooses to wear, especially in Second Life where the avatar is often seen as a canvas for the expression of personality, has an impact on what other people think you are or want. A short skirt or a latex catsuit with artificial nipples sewn in says 'I am flirty and up for sex', whereas a roughspun tunic or a turtleneck jumper says 'I'm just here to be your friend'. If your hair is blue and your clothes are impossible-seeming or strange, you smack of fun and frolic and a good laugh, but if you choose to make your avatar an advocate of as-I-was-born 'normal' fashion, you're boring.

(pretty)Boring

But also, whether you dress in what might be deemed a sexually provocative way, or you dress like you know your grandma would want you to, you are stuck as Mahmood suggests women who wear the veil are stuck. Both choices describe a miring in traditionalism - a traditionalism based on the points of view of misogynists, who simultaneously expect you to be a sex goddess and a private possession, seen only by them, who should be dressed for home life. People make judgements about you without hanging around long enough to find out what you are really like, or what you really want - and whether or not your choices for your attire are based on your own, sound reasoning, or somebody else's imported logic.

I have no doubt that, to some extent, SL is guilty of hoading women who feel the need to dress a certain way because of a misogynistic viewpoint imported from the real life into the virtual - and I think that can work both ways, in terms of taking your clothes off or piling them on. But I also have no doubt that there are plenty of women dressing themselves in SL based upon their own carefully considered opinions and desires.Why is it assumed that people are incapable of such? - isn't that a kind of misogyny, too?

It is also ludicrous, in my opinion, to suggest that any visual aesthetic could tell wholly and completely the personalities and desires of anybody. A fun person might wish to have blue hair, but that doesn't mean that everyone with blue hair is fun and un-serious. A short skirt doesn't automatically say 'I WANT SEX', and a plain white shirt is not akin to stamping the word 'ASEXUAL' across your forehead. Looking good and/or sexy isn't an invitation to sex anymore than looking scruffy and dirty is an automatic denounciation of it.

And here is where the 'propensity to violence' really comes in. In the quote about Islam, the idea that isolated cases indicates a sense of the whole is completely, completely unfair. But in Second Life, it doesn't quite seem to work that way. Because if you think these are things that only become relevant in notorious space brothel bars, you would be mistaken. This is something that chases all of us across the grid every time we log into SL. And as a testament to that, when a complete strange told me on a public sim a little while back that she thought I looked good, not only was I desperately surprised that she'd even noticed my sedate little avatar, but she felt the need to go to great lengths to tell me that she wasn't trying to chat me up or anything. I thought that was a little weird at the time, but then, stood in that space brothel bar, if someone had done the same, wouldn't I have run a mile?

It's a kind of violence, this. Because of the way we understand semiotics in relation to our patriarchal - and until very recently, really, our very decidedly misogynistic - society, a simple compliment can be perceived as an act of violence. Going out naked in SL and not engaging in sex becomes violence. Covering yourself up becomes a defense against expected violence. And it is so, so wrong.

It seems like such an obvious thing to say, and yet I have struggled with the wording of this post, read it over and over again, worrying that somehow, I haven't quite hit the nail on the head. This is going to sit uncomfortably within me now because I am not sure that I have phrased it correctly. But I felt the need to say something.

Why is this such a mire?

[Mahmood citation: "Chapter 8 - Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror" by Saba Mahmood, in Gendering Religion and Politics - Untangling Modernities ed. by Herzog and Braude.]

The Batman Complex

Probably closer to Batfink than Batman, but there we go

As I wrote on Tuesday, the Fashion for Life event has been going on in SL, raising money for the American Cancer Society. I was a little late to the party with my blog post, though I had been trekking around the mammoth sims for a few days beforehand. As the event drew to a close on Tuesday/Wednesday, everything seemed to be going smoothly. No drama like the one I mentioned in my post. No mess, no fuss. Well, it would appear that I spoke too soon.

On Wednesday, 'The Fashion for Life 2012 Blogger Hall of Shame' appeared, courtesy of one Nave Fall, on the website of the Associated SL Press which is affliated with the Best of Second Life Magazine website. I confess, I hadn't heard of Fall, Associated SL Press, or the BOSL until yesterday, so if you are reading that list of names and feeling a little nonplussed, don't worry about it. Or, at least, we can sit and feel bad together. 

Anyway: the actual body of the '...Blogger Hall of Shame' post seems a little confused, and Fall seems to be both excusing himself and being a bit mean to someone called Rusalka (again, not a clue), but he eventually comes to his 'Hall of Shame' - a list of all the names of the bloggers who had been sent free gifts by the Fashion for Life event, but had posted nothing about them or the event to their blogs.

Okay, so at first you might be thinking 'Well, it serves them right!' - but gotcha! The bloggers didn't necessarily ask to receive these gifts from the Fashion for Life event, and even if they did, they were at no time under any obligation to blog about what they were given. Whilst it might have been nice and kind and polite to make a post promoting the event and what it was selling, there are a thousand and one reasons why they might not have been able to, and I do not think it fair for this Fall guy (whoever the Hell he is) to go around calling them out. 

His post was followed up by a comment from one of the founders/administrators of the Fashion for Life event, saying that they did not support Fall's post, nor the sentiments within it. It would appear, too, that this is not the view shared by the general inhabitants of SL. After what promised to be a rousing speech from the owner of the BOSL about freedom of speech, questioning the need for censorship on the Associated SL Press website, said-owner Frolic Mills removed the list of 'shamed' bloggers earlier today. So much for 'Should it dilute the opinions of other writers and restrict freedom of speech, or should it be an open platform to seek, receive and impart information even if it’s tactless and a call out to the alleged wrong doings of others?'. I think his phraseology makes it clear which side of the fence he is on there - and, just in case it isn't, I don't think he's on the side of 'dilution'.

But that's where we 'get' Mills, too, because there is a large, gaping difference between expressing an opinion and tactlessly calling people out. Apparently, he was either bombarded with this opinion from others, or came to see it for himself, because he has taken the list down but left the body of the post intact. 

Obligation. I think it comes down to a matter of obligation. As I have said, at no point were those bloggers obligated to blog anything. Whether they blogged about the Fashion for Life event or not has absolutely zero reflection on them as moral people, and it says diddly-squat, as my mum would say, about their personalities when it comes to promoting and giving to charity. 

There is an obligation I think, however, when it comes to writing about charity events like this. They have aims and intentions that are, at the very least, rooted in goodness and it isn't right nor fair to simply slander them, or those who chose to be involved, or those who chose not to be involved. Creating bad publicity for an event does nothing but ruin the prospects for next year's turn-out, and it is now possible that Nave Fall's name will become synonymous with this event, detracting from the cause at the heart of it - those people that I mentioned in my previous post that are being diagnosed with cancer right this second, two minutes ago, two minutes from now...

If you are disappointed with a turn-out, fine - say 'I was disappointed by the turn-out!'. If it is a question, as Mills seems to be trying to make it, of why people only post comments about negative things, then fine - say 'I wonder why people only seem to post comments about negative things? Why don't they support the good, too?'. My question after reading his post was why is a comment saying 'well done' necessary? Why is starting a debate better than a thank-you note? Surely, the debate should have gone on before the cause was started, and a thank-you note is what is appropriate after people have clubbed together and raised all that money. If the debate about negativity, and even about censorship, needs to be had, why does it have to be in conjunction with something like the Fashion for Life event? 

Finally, we come to the Batman Complex. I doubt that that phrase really stands up to scrutiny, but I think you understand where I'm going with it. The bloggers listed in Fall's 'Hall of Shame' were being called out because they didn't make a blog post about the cause. But what about all of the other causes they aren't making posts about? What about the fact that Fall is spending his time calling out other bloggers and not blogging about all the other causes himself? Is he using every faculty in his power to solve everything? Somebody ought to call him out, and if he wasn't 'out of town', as Mills suggests, I might just have done so.

We cannot write, blog, protest and debate everything. Maybe we are physically and economically capable, but we aren't necessarily mentally able to run around and fix the world. We don't have all the answers. We don't really claim to. Does that mean that we shouldn't try? Of course not. But even Batman has to make decisions sometimes about who to save and who not to save, and there are always causes that we feel more akin to us for whatever reason (I mean, don't you want to wipe the smile off Heath Ledger's face in that movie? I sure do!). We ought to respect each other, and each other's decisions, and if we don't think somebody is pulling their weight, fine. Say so. But be respectful about it, and remember that you know Hell-all about what that person does for charity in their first life. You know Hell-all about that person at all. 

Also, somebody ought to call him out on his musical choices. 'Boom Boom Pow'? Really? Was that really the most appropriate song he could think to list? I know, I know. I'm pushing it now. I have said enough.

Teaser

So, I'm going to be straight up with you: I am not feeling my best. It is only a cold, but I'm tired and my brain seems to be a little addled. I managed to lose my student card in the library today, which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't used it to get into the library in the first place. I need my card to check books out, and to exit the library - so that was a fun experience, let me tell you! 

Onto the SL stuff: I had it in my head that I had read a fantastic piece about nudity in relation to comic book characters and how suggestive nudity is relative. Clear as mud, I know. Allow me to explain.

The idea is that, if you are used to seeing someone completely covered up, the slip of a bare shoulder, or a flash of ankle, becomes much more provocative and flirtatious than a semi-naked character becoming nude. It comes, I suppose, from the allure of the unknown, and wanting something that you potentially cannot have. There is also a shock, I think, created by being given an image of somebody that in some way does not adhere to the usual image you have of them in your mind. You are being forced to acknowledge that person in a new way - forced to look at them in a different way - and that multiplication of contexts, if you like, can be intriguing. You've been given a teaser and you want to know more and the same goes, I suppose, for the exposition of a freckled shoulder or curve of calf muscle.

This is not an idea adhered to often in Second Life, at least in my experiences. There is the question, as ever, as to why a person should feel the need to cover their body, and I am certainly not an advocate for closeting people, especially women, away because something they are wearing (or not wearing) might be deemed sexually provocative or revealing. We shouldn't be ashamed of our bodies. On the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to be introduced to your virtual vagina by your skirt-belt and lacking underwear. There is a time and a place for that kind of thing. As you might remember, I was confronted with this issue on my first outing in SL (if you don't remember, click here) in a space that I did not expect to be, though the outcome was more amusing than anything else. 

I appreciate that, in SL especially, people have the right to exercise their free will (to a certain extent - sim owners still have control over what happens on their land!), but I would perhaps urge people to consider how they are using their bodies, and to what effect. Maybe this isn't a message that I really ought to be giving out, but (I think) all of my readers are adults, and you can handle it. If you are trying to manipulate the response of others, using your body as a weapon to attain something, even if only attention, be smart about it.

If after consideration, full nudity is still what you want to go for, then that's just fine.

Did it work here? Ah, possibly not. 

On Being Offended

Now, I don't like to lie to you, dear readers, so here's the deal. I wasn't going to post today, or, at least, I wasn't going to post about this. I had another topic for discussion lined up, but the chances of me coming here today and committing it to virtual paper were incredibly slim. This evening, however, I logged into Second Life to scout out a couple of sims and found something that has genuinely outraged me. 

Because I am outraged, I should probably not be writing this right now. But I want to write it right now, and so I am going to. 

I will not reproduce the name of the sim, but when I landed there, I was directed to pick up a notecard (basically a Wordpad document) containing the sim rules and roleplay background. That's pretty standard procedure. When I opened the notecard, however, what I found is not something I consider 'standard procedure'. The notecard reads:

'BY ENTERING THE [name omitted] CITY SIM, YOU CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE IN REAL LIFE OVER THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN AND AGREE TO ABIDE BY THESE RULES. 

BY ENTERING [name omitted] CITY, YOU AGREE THAT YOU ARE NOT OFFENDED BY VIOLENCE, ADULT LANGUAGE OR SEXUAL CONTENT, AND WILL NOT HOLD THE OWNER OF THE SIM, OR ITS LEGAL PARTICIPANTS LIABLE.'

...Woah! Hold the phone! Just a minute! Back it up! Let's look at that one more time.

By entering this sim, you agree that you are not offended by violence, adult language, or sexual content - by 'sexual content', of course, they mean rape and public demonstrations of BDSM which, I should like to suggest, are not the same thing.

Don't get me wrong - in many situations (political correctness not being one), I agree with Steve Hughes - but it seems fundamentally wrong to me that this sim is suggesting that it is creating, or collecting, a society of people who are not offended by violence and sexual assault. If you wish to write about these things, by all means go ahead. Many artists and writers the world over have sought to engage with these topics. But I am offended by the idea that people should or might not find offensive breaches of morality and human rights. 

I am offended by the alternatives. What else are they going to do, if not find them offensive? - and, I think, this is the crux of it - Be entertained? Be amused? Should they find pleasure in them? Should they be indifferent? 

There are no rules, I might add, governing what is or is not allowed to take place on this sim. When you sign up, as it were, agreeing not to be offended, are you taking into account all of the possibilities of what could happen within that sim? Perhaps I am overestimating the imagination of the average SL user, but there was a poster on one of the foyer-room walls featuring a pair of handcuffs and advertising the "Hard and Nasty" group. These people are hard and nasty enough to warrant their own group?

I reserve the right to be offended. I reserve the right to be repulsed by some of the darker things humans and avatars are capable of. I reserve the right to engage with material that offends me, but I also reserve the right to be offended by that material, and to draw the line where I want it. 

Why should you ever, ever, give up the right to be offended?

Needless to say, I did not enter the sim.

I shall now cease this rant.

(I also touched on this topic, a little more eloquently, here)