My second life as a rl female playing a male avatar

I wanted to see what it would be like to play a male so here's how it went.

Went shopping. Limited choices! Men have limited coices in second life and real life. I guess it would be difficult making male lingerie or something sexy for men. The clothers were pricey like females but not much to buy. No wonder why there are so many female avatars.

Went to a few clubs and found that men get catty like women especially over other women. A guy wanted to kick my ass just for talking to his virtual girlfriend lolz

Dance contests, well you have a better chance at winning since there are a lack of males so I guess that is cool.

I told people that I am a scripter and no questions were asked but when I was a female avatar questions were asked including "Are you a male in rl?"


I thought it would be easier to be a male but in secondlife not really. Women have more choices of clothing, hair, shoes etc...

Does anyone else have a role reversal story to share?

I truly hate men who have big ego's.

They should realise that the avarage relationship in SL doesn't last that long , so it's all temporary.

I definatly know this. I play female though. I got so many clothes i duno why i don't wear them. i wear the same thing most the time hehe. But i have a male alt who is so limited on selection hes wearing a trenchcoat, or sometimes a hawiian shirt with black leather pants. O.o

i have a female alt,her name is a secret tought ,but i have not had any fun with it,found it easier to be a male than a female,too many females to compete with

Well.. we could cross dress but then others would insult us over the forums.

Hiya,

I am a male in Rl and in SL. But i took an alt to see if there is a difference. Sort of like an investigations

http://www.howsyourworld.com/2006/07/muses-muse-part-i.html

What's funny about this is that programming used to be a female job. If you google for photos of old mainframes, there were lots of women there, and the first programmer was probably a woman, Ada Lovelace. "Probably" because it seems there's some controversy about how much she actually did, and whether she did enough to qualify as a programmer, but I think she deserves quite a lot of credit in any case.

Very nice exercise and report.



VERY limited. Thing is iRL men really have less styles to choose from while still looking good. Women's bodies take to adornment very well, that is, you can make outlandish designs and they will look good on a woman and make her look good as a result. Heck you can make a sculpted dress out of chicken wire and a woman can make it look good even if she doesn't have model proportions! Doing the same level of outlandish design for men will result in disasters. I think we're biologically wired to allow wilder adornment only on women.

Anything a man can look good in, a woman can look good in it too. Military uniforms, battle gear, full plate armor, athletic attire, house clothes ... etc.

I'm not even happy with the selections, I haven't seen anything I want to buy. I'm going to be making my own clothes eventually (right now I still use defaults). I'll be making ordinary looking stuff.



Yep. Possessiveness.



LOL.



Well statistically it would seem that most scripters are male and most texturemakers are female. Prim manipulators seem split down the middle.



One advantage: We don't receive as much unwanted sexual advances. While it's true that most sexual advances would be accepted, we don't get the bad, treated-like-object type.

It's nice that people notice you have to take some effort to look good.

Hi!

I'm Velocity. I help Fade out with product shots, and I like to spend his money! The shopping is just so much better! Sometimes I feel like making different things to Fade, so eventually I'm going to start creating under my name. I've been learning to make accessories, bags, that kind of thing.

I also like to take time out to explore new places, and see the world. I'm still pretty new, but so far people have been nice, and girls are pretty friendly, mostly they compliment me on my shoes . I always tell them who I am, which makes them laugh. It's also more fun when I just want to run around with a friend.

I like being spoilt for choice. Fade's always complaining about the sorry state of men's fashions in SL, but I don't have that problem. He needs to change that jumper, he's been wearing it for days now. I really like being able to enjoy the beautiful creations of people who's work I admire. I already have more skins than Fade. I love my new Boneflower skin, and I have to put the hard word on him about one of Munchflower's that I just need! Don't even start me on the hair and shoes. I am so going to have to get some work out, and start earning my own keep!

Anyway, that's my story so far!

I'd be very interested in further female-to-male perspectives on flirting and dating. What did you find different about it?



This is a cultural thing. There have been many cultures (and still are) where the man is the one who engages in sartorial flamboyancy more than the woman. But the Anglo-American empire imposed a dominant business fashion all over the world, and now it is hard to be taken seriously if your style doesn't conform to it.

Also I think you are looking at the issue a bit backwards. There isn't really any one style that suits all women, but men seem to have lucked out - put almost any man into a well-tailored suit and he'll look good. Again, this is a cultural standard, though.

Certainly another way of looking at it.

Now back to the other side of the looking glass. The average woman has a large breadth of choices that would make her look good. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Advantage is a woman can easily change her look. The disadvantage is that the variety of looks will lead to competition with other women, hence the difficulty of deciding on one's look.

Lucky men, yes that the small range of sartorial fashion still makes us look good. Where we suffer is lack of variety. There's not much freedom of style for men.

Western styles aside, even in my country's history mens fashion was still more constrained while females had more variety.

I'm curious whether there really is an untapped market for mens clothing or if this has created a self-fufilling vicious circle. Women shop and are into fashion because we have more choices, men don't because their choices are limited and therefore have little interest in fashion. Aside from all the RL culture we are ignoring, the fact is that only gay men are allowed to enjoy fashion as much as women in our society.

In other words, even if someone built it, would the men come and shop? If they had the wide range of choices that women have would they be spending their linden on them, really, or has this become so cultural that a guy would have a hard time justifying spending so much of his money on clothing? (we have to rationalize it too, we just have a lot more practice, lol) I'm talking beyond just the "I need a decent ponytail/pair of jeans". That's just too practical, fashion is completely nonessential, that is it's pleasure.

Off topic, I know, but I want to make sure Ada gets her due. She wrote:

Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...

She's talking about Second Life here. Even if she was nothing but a pundit, this is remarkable depth of vision.

Well, I can only speak for myself and those that I have chatted with, but if given a wider choice, men would definitely shop more.

it has been, since I've been in SL (2 1/2 years), very furstrating to shop for men's clothing. There are a few designers that do some very nice ones, but overall, the selection is sorely lacking. I've given up completely, unless someone tells me directly of some new things, or a new designer. Then I'll go take a peek.

it is more abundant than it used to be, but still a market untapped for the most part.

As an experiment, I made a female alt, gave her L$4000 and 2 hours from the moment she first logged in.

I was decked out in a great skin, stylin, hot, variety of prim-hair, variety of outfits, even a weapon, and had a little bit of L$ left over by the time my 2 hours were up.

That's not likely with a male AV..

If men were given more choices they'd buy more ... the hard part is determining what they want. Here you will have a wide variety of "wants."

That's because men in general don't go fashion crazy, and when we do want clothes, we don't always follow some established trend.

Like iRL I want a shirt similar to what Chou Yun Fat wore in "Crouching Tiger..." to use as leisure wear. How many other men are thinking the same way?

If it is true that men would shop more given the choices, I guess the eternal question is: What do men want?

Maybe it is because women do so much of the designing. If we had more male clothing designers, there would be a wider range of choices for the guys based on their tastes. I think women know what women like and may feel it's a risk designing for men, given their fickle natures...

I've been trying to make menswear for a while, but I can't ever seem to find things men like to wear, you ask 5 guys what they want and you get 50 different answers.

Yes we are terrible we can never make our minds up.

LOL SO TRUE!!!

I'm getting tempted to steal my 2nd grader's fashion sense, he's pretty cool for almost 7, he likes the asian inspired rayon shirts, hawaiian shirts, t shirts with smart ass sayings, jeans, and sneakers.

I've spent far more time than is healthy shopping for a pair of decent strides. I'm currently walking about in tartan trousers which I painted brown. It can't be right.

Albion

My av may be Irish but please ... tartan trousers?

Look among the defaults, I think there's a good pair of jeans there somewhere. It takes color nicely, I've tinted them dark green, dark red, black, and also have them plain.

It would be interesting, (if somewhat humilating) to try this as an experiment of sorts, lol. Let your 7 year old choose the designs and see if that is what men want, after all.

I can only answer for me, but I can tell you I'm a total clothes whore... at least I want to be. There just isn't anything out there, and what there is, mostly isn't good.

What I want, is clothes that actually relate to what's happend in fashion it the last five years or so. Most of the stuff available for guys just isn't particularly contemporary. I mean for fuck's sake, ponytails? I want stuff that's on point... not some wannabee gangster stuff, not goth, that's all so dated and played out. If places like like Wrong made more guy's clothes, I'd be there with my money. A modern, indie kinda vibe. The kind of clothes that go with your Interpol, The Strokes and The Bravery CDs. That's how I dress RL, and how I'd like to dress here.

If someone gets on that tip, I will singlehandedly keep their business afloat.