SITTING PRETTY

Used to be, when female avatars and male avatars would sit down, in Second Life, they more or less sat the same: Hands loosely laid on the lap, legs slightly apart. (Or as one resident waggishly put it, “Sitting with your junk hanging out.”) This didn’t sit well, so to speak, with many residents, especially some women. (And one assumes, some male residents who play as women.) It just didn’t do to put on a skirt or a dress, and attend an in-world fashion show, for instance, then end up sitting more like a stevedore at a sports bar, than a society lady. Quite a few complained to the Lindens.

The solution came last month. The Lindens implemented a tweak to the default sitting posture, for women. Now, when a female avatar takes a seat, her legs and feet are kept together, and pointed at a slight angle to one side; her hands are folded together, too, and placed on the opposite thigh. So it was a decidedly feminine way of sitting.

A few women, however, weren’t too happy with this solution. Leading the protest was Michi Lumin:

“I give up. I'll put on mascara and saunter around daintily,” she raged in a community forum. “I look like a prim and proper missy-miss now, and have NO choice in the matter... What are you guys going to do next, make us curtsy?”

After protest from her and a few others, the Lindens added a fix, so that women who didn’t like the new feminized sitting posture could revert back, if they chose, to the original, gender neutral position.

Michi, however, wasn’t too pleased with that workaround, either.

“It's pretty damned obvious that Linden Lab has made a judgment,” she wrote in another heated post, “on there being a proper way for women to sit and a proper way for men to sit, with a pacifier thrown to the few complainers-- yeah, the few females on SL who don't want to look like Barbie™ dolls.”

When I finally caught up with Michi, she was in Abbots, one of the new simulators, and she wasn’t doing much sitting. For that matter, it wasn’t even entirely clear if she was supposed to be a female then, either. She was a purple dragon with samurai swords and leather pants and a “Re-elect Richard Nixon button” pinned to her jacket. She was busy helping build a new Cold War-era radio tower, the kind designed to survive a nuclear attack. The plan her and her friends have is to construct a bunch of these towers, across many sims, and install a system of laser transmitters that communicate to each other via bursts of light, which are then translated at the sending and receiving ends into text. (In other words, it will be a much more elaborate way to do what is already possible and easier via Instant Message. It’ll just be a lot cooler.)

“What can I say,” Michi tells me, after she explains the project, “we’re geeks.”

She takes a break from jiggering with her purple laser, to demonstrate to me the source of her anger.

“I can't seem to get people past the notion that there are many women who would never be caught dead in a skirt,” she says. Michi sits down on a chair on the deck of a nearby luxury cabin. “Do you see how ridiculous this looks?”

Thing is, she’s still wearing her dragon avatar, so the feminine sitting posture doesn’t look that much more ridiculous than, well, a dragon sitting on a chair in the first place.

So she puts on her human female form, and tries again.

“It's just discouraging I guess that folks seem to believe that behavior is divided that sharply and unblurrably across gender lines,” says Michi Lumin. She does acknowledge how divisive her crusade on the matter may have been. “It's real hard to skirt (mind the pun) the border between getting my point across and sounding like some kind of feminist, though... It's just tough [because] 90% of the folks out there are happy as a clam, real life and Second Life, taking their [prescribed] gender roles on.”

“[D]on't you think it's possible you're reading too much into this?” I say. “I don't sit in on their design meetings, but I don't quite see Philip Linden sitting down and saying, ‘Let's turn all women into decorative objects!’”

“Oh no no no,” says Michi, “I'm not thinking they actually said or felt that. As a matter of fact, Colin Linden told me that my posts really spurred quite the heated debate in the office. I don't think it's that outright [an] intent, Hamlet, no... I'm more saying that that was the effect, and that the effect wasn't considered that big of a deal by Linden Lab.

But how many women even objected to the feminine posture?

“Oh wow,” says Michi, counting, “at least ten.”

“To be fair to the Lindens,” I say, “that's not a huge number, proportionately.”

“Well, no, but how many did they ask? I don't know. I don’t know how many reported the original problem, either. I do think, though, that it's often assumed, among guys, that sure, dudes can vary from dude to dude, but there are certain things that all women like. Women vary just as much as guys do, really,” she finishes, smiling.

“I mean, Hamlet, let me ask you this - how would you feel if they made you sit that way?”

“Hmm,” I say, “good question.” And it really is, because it takes me a bit to answer. “If it took a bit of jiggling to my [posture how I wanted],” I finally say, “I wouldn't mind too much.”

Trouble is, Ms. Lumin explains, jiggling the posture doesn’t work everywhere. Changing a woman’s seating posture to a gender neutral position requires a complex series of customized avatar movements, known as a “script call”. And since scripts have a tendency to sometimes cause technical problems or confusion-- not to mention consternation, when someone scripts their avatar to perform an obscene gesture, say-- they’re forbidden in certain regions. Like the Welcome Area, where new residents arrive, when they first enter the world at large.

“It doesn't work in Welcome,” says Michi, “and that's where I spend most of my time. Since it is a script call, it won't work in no-script areas.” Michi works in the Welcome area as a volunteer who helps orient newcomers to Second Life. “I'm a Mentor, and spend a lot of time there, and new users see me. I make a first impression, you know? Basically, if you're sitting prim and proper, demure, and prissy-- that’s what it says about you. If you sit with legs bent, hands on laps, it doesn't say much.”

“On the other hand,” I say, “a female avatar sitting ‘like a guy’ is also expressive, but in a different way, and one that a lot of women apparently didn't like, enough to complain to the Lindens.

“Well, is it really sitting like a guy?” asks Michi. “I'm on a college campus most of my day. I look around, and everyone sits rather generically. Pretty much the same, in the real world. I didn't see anyone sitting with hands clasped on one legs, knees locked and looking like a princess. Anywhere. Not on the bus, not on the subway...”

I point out a factoid I happen to know, about one of the largest MMORPGs. The female avatars that players have to choose from there are almost all “sexy” in a traditional sense: big breasts, thin waist, shapely hips, and so on. The company who created the game got a lot of flak from many women, for falling into this stereotype. But as it turned out, the art director for that game was herself a woman.

“Well,” says Michi, at that, “I'm sure she was designing what would appeal to the supposed target demographic, Hamlet. She was doing her job.”

“I dunno, Michi. Even here, given the choice, most women create sexy avatars.”

“I know,” she says. “I know that. But I really, really, don't want to be like most. Doesn't mean I want to be 'fugly', but I've had people remark that even my human avatar is 'different'. I mean, a fedora and Lennon shades, jeans and plaid socks... it doesn't exactly speak of 'supermodel'... I like to think of myself as more 'sharp looking' than sexy.

“However. The reason it bothers me, Hamlet, is it's something I've had to deal with all of my life. Presumptions of what I do like, what I don't like, what I do want, and what I don't want. It's tough. Most of the WORLD wants to be a certain way. And when you don't want to, well, it's hard to make an argument for it... I'm not saying it's some grand conspiracy. But I can't deny the frustration.”

I ask her to give me a concrete example.

“All right, well, you know the Cold War communications stuff I talked to you about? There's a local group that goes out and looks at that stuff [in real life]... All guys, of course, except for me. Now, I go with a male friend of mine, but easily all of the guys assume I'm a tag-along… they seem to say, ‘Who's girlfriend is she and why is she here?’

Then she gives me another.

“When I worked for a government agency a few years back, doing coding work, one of the guys came by and lectured me on not installing 'unlicensed shareware' on the machine. Talked down to me, told me what shareware is, what software is, etc.

“The program in question was one that I wrote.

“I told him that I had just licensed [the program] myself, so it's legitimate, and if he had a problem, he can call me at my number and take it up with... me.” Or as she puts it, “I'd like to thank me for flying Me airlines.”

Still, returning to game development, I point out that the vast majority of gamers are still young men.

“That's changing,” insist Michi, “I know that's changing. Myself and my [female] friends fly in the face of that absolutely. We've been gaming since 8 bit [computers], and let me tell you, some are more rabid gamers than I. The ‘assume everyone online is male’ is kinda becoming a bit of an anachronism.

“Well, slowly,” I say. “Even Second Life, I think, is still largely male (though many of the hardcore residents are women.)”

“Well, sure, it is,” Michi says, frowning, “but really, assuming that all women want to be femmy caricatures is going to kind of ensure that the ratio doesn't equalize so much.”

As we talk, someone named Zate Kojima has discovered the radio tower built by Michi Lumin and her friends. It’s standing on top of a picturesque forested ridge, and Zate doesn’t like what it’s doing to the view. “HISS... evil Ming!” Zate yells, pointing a finger at Ming Chen, one of Michi’s collaborators. “IT’S THE CREATOR OF THE UNORTHODOX BUILD IN NATURE!!”

“Dang hippies,” Ming Chen shouts back.

Kojima keeps going, heedless. “HE has made this magnificent land into a dirt hole with his uncanny building... HE! Has stained thy sacred land widst THY FILTHY objects!”

“So in the meanwhile,” I continue, “when you're in sims where you'd end up sitting pretty, you'll just stay on your feet?

“Seems like that, Hamlet,” says Michi, smiling. “Probably a good summary. But I do want to say, one more thing? I may be kind of fiery. I might be loud and argumentative and sometimes crass. But, one: I appreciate Linden Lab and the Lindens, every last one of them. If I wasn't so enthusiastic about this world, if I didn't love it so much, it wouldn't upset me so much. Second, I am a Mentor-- so please, everyone should approach me for help IN SPITE of my wrath.

She grins. “I bark loud, I rarely ever, ever actually bite.”