Regular SL- Newspaper readers may know my deep interest in how and why residents choose their specific SL identities. Those identities are primarily visual and we can find that others react more or less positively, according to our avi’s choices of clothes, hair and build. Now, maybe I am wrong but a lot of us here play it safe. We hustle to the skin and body shops as soon as we have scraped together enough Lindens, and we buy ourselves an ideal human figure. We spend time searching for hair far removed from the dreaded bowl cuts and mullets that mark out the noob in our midst.
And I did it too. It’s only recently that I have started to think about the impact that adopting a different body shape or skin ‘condition’, for example, vertically challenged or aged, would have on my own perception of myself in SL. And to be a furry… Well my mind boggled.
Now, I don’t like it when my mind boggles. I want to want confront that confusion and, dare I say it, fear. So I leapt at the chance when the Avatar Identity Research Centre sent notification of a lecture given about furry identity. The lecture promised to discuss avatar identity when expressed through furry, quad (four legged animal shape) and tiny avatars. Of course the topic is huge and the assembled audience (a representative cross-section of neko, quad, furry and human avis; sorry if I missed the tinies present) were keen to air their own experiences of SL. Worryingly, quite a lot of time was given over to the discussion of anti-furry behaviour from griefers in human form, with furry avatars experiencing a range of prejudicial treatment from being barred from nightclubs to grief in IMs.
The lecture, led by Keris Koba, an RL sociologist, discussed why such anti-furism existed, touching on misconceptions about sexual proclivities and the separation between furry and human-form communities on SL. Now this separation may exist because humans, RL humans that is, tend to find and stay in groups of people with a shared interest. We find our blues clubs and a place to race our motorcycles. We dance to “our” music. There is safety in numbers and maybe we play for security in identity as well as escape from the shapes our Real Lives force us to assume. But does it mean, maybe, that separation encourages SL residents to be suspicious of anyone or anything that does not seem “familiar”?
We ran out of time in the lecture. Tinies remain uncharted territory for me. But I want to make sure that I have some experience of identities alternative to my chosen human form before I can comment. Will I be brave enough? We’ll see. In the meantime, if your curiosity is piqued, you can check out the AIRC in “groups”. I may see you at their next lecture.
By Ermine Cortes
