Masculinities
Posted by: jamiesedge on: February 27, 2009
Sherry Turkle: “by enabling people to experience what it feels like to be the opposite gender or to have no gender at all, the practice encourages reflection on the way ideas about gender shape our expectations” (77).
My avatar in Second Life was a female, so I did not actually have an avatar in this space that was of the opposite gender than myself. However, in creating my female avatar I can relate to how her being a female influenced and shaped the choices I made. It was without hesitation or even any real consideration that I began to make changes to the avatar to make her more physically like myself, but better. I made the necessary changes to my avatar to make her what I considered to be physically attractive. I increased muscle tone, lowered body fat and even changed the shape of her eyes. There seemed to be no limits to the changes I could possibly make in order to make my avatar as physically attractive as possible. At the time, I was not considering what this possibly said about how her gender shaped my expectations of how I should make her look.
Horsley claims “masculinity is what a culture expects of its men” (69). Does this mean my avatar’s “feminity” is what our culture expects of its women? Did I unknowingly demonstrate that our culture expects not only physical beauty, but physical perfection from its women?
This being said, if I had created a male avatar I believe I would have attempted to make him as physically attractive as possible as well. Does this mean that our culture expects its men to be physically perfect? Ultimately, I don’t think gender would have necessarily would necessarily change my expectations when creating the avatar. Perhaps, however, it would have changed how I interacted within the Second Life world and even how others interacted with me. Because I did not have a male avatar I am not sure if this would have been the case.
2 Responses to "Masculinities"
February 27, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I agree with the idea that we create our avatars as attractive as possible. I similarly made my avatar into a version of me that had some definite improvements – at least, that was the goal. Since we can make avatars look like anything we’d like, why would we want to make them unattractive?
I had similar experiences with my female avatar, so it would have been interesting to see what it would have been like from a male point of view.
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- lauradav: I agree with the idea that we create our avatars as attractive as possible. I similarly made my avatar into a version of me that had some definite imp
- fg004: I think it's interesting that you came to the realizations that you did in creating your avatar, and I can agree that there would be a concept called
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February 27, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I think it’s interesting that you came to the realizations that you did in creating your avatar, and I can agree that there would be a concept called “femininity” that holds idealized visions of women. But, I like to think that they are just that, idealized visions, and not expectations, for both men and women. I feel that expectations is just too strong of a word because people will always tend to feel that they are not meeting some sort of expectation.