When Did We Stop Dancing?

When did dancing become uncool in Second Life? 

I don't mean that nobody dances anymore. They obviously do. There are still dance clubs, dance events, dance HUDs and people who happily spend an evening moving around to music.

But something has changed.

And perhaps it is only the beginning of a change rather than its final form.

I first really noticed it last year around August at the The Hotwife Hotel, when on different occasions I asked someone to dance.

The answer was something along the lines of: "Thanks, I don't dance. It's not cool."

Or perhaps it was "That's so noobish."

I don't remember the exact wording anymore. But I remember the feeling. Noobish? Dancing?

When did that happen?

Because once upon a time, dancing was one of the most ordinary things you did in Second Life.

You arrived somewhere, found some music, clicked a dance ball or opened your dance HUD, and started moving. Someone else joined. Maybe you danced together. Maybe you changed dances every few minutes. Maybe you simply stood in a group and let your avatar do something while you talked. 

You can still experience this feeling at Muddy’s today, a place frequented by new players and oldies who enjoy socialising by dancing and chatting.

Movement was part of being there. Today, increasingly, it seems that simply being there is enough.

From dancing to choreography

There has been a fascinating technological evolution behind this.

In the early days, Second Life dancing was relatively simple. You had the dances that came with the clubs or dance systems such as Bits and Bobs. You sat on pose balls, your avatar danced, and that was it.

Then came increasingly sophisticated personal dance HUDs.

Instead of everybody doing the same handful of dances supplied by the club, you could build your own collection. You could decide exactly how your avatar moved. You could create sequences, synchronize with a partner and develop your own particular style.

Today, systems such as the Paragon Hybrid Dance HUD can handle both solo and couples dances, large animation libraries, sequencing, synchronization and precise positioning. In other words, Second Life has never had better technology for dancing.

And yet I increasingly see fewer people actually doing it. That is the paradox.

When movement became a fashion statement

At some point, dancing itself began to change.

The old dances were often obviously animations. You could see that an avatar was dancing.

The newer generation of animations became increasingly sophisticated, subtle and realistic.

And then came the pose. The avatar no longer had to do something. It could simply look like it was doing something.

A slight shift of weight.

A hand resting somewhere.

A particular tilt of the head.

A carefully selected stance.

A slow sway.

A pose that says I am relaxed, attractive and completely unconcerned with the fact that there are 37 people looking at me.

And eventually we arrived at something rather strange: The ideal Second Life avatar increasingly seems to be one that doesn't move very much.

The statue effect

Go to some clubs today and watch the crowd. Not everybody, of course. 

But increasingly there are avatars standing around in carefully constructed outfits, often with highly customized AOs, occasionally changing their stance or animation, but otherwise remaining almost completely stationary.

They are not necessarily inactive.

Their owners may be chatting.

They may be reading local chat.

They may be IMing three other people.

They may be shopping in another window.

But visually, from the outside, something peculiar has happened.

The virtual humans have become statues.

And perhaps that is not accidental. Because in Second Life, appearance has become extraordinarily sophisticated.

Bodies are better.

Faces are better.

Clothes are better.

Hair is better.

Lighting is better.

Animations are better.

Poses are better.

We have spent years making avatars look more human.

And perhaps, at the same time, we have made them increasingly afraid to behave like humans.

When the accessory starts moving

But there is another development that makes this even more interesting. While the avatar itself may be standing almost completely still, something else is often moving.

Over the years, Second Life designers have become extraordinarily inventive at turning objects into extensions of an avatar's personality and appearance.

Cigarettes and cigars are an obvious example. Designers such as Chris Two Designs have created increasingly elaborate smoking accessories that can be attached to the avatar and animated convincingly. Suddenly, standing still doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing. Your avatar can be standing there, beautifully dressed, apparently lost in thought, while slowly smoking a cigarette or cigar.

Then there are the drinks.

A glass held casually in the hand can do almost as much for an avatar's appearance as a sophisticated pose. A drink from a designer such as :::CHICCHICA::: becomes part of the outfit, part of the scene and part of the character. The avatar may not be dancing, but it is doing something.

And then the possibilities become almost comical.

- A purse held in one hand - and a cell phone in the other.

- Dice being thrown and caught.

- A Rubik's Cube nimbly solved one-handed, almost casually, as a display of skill.

- A banana or an egg being tossed into the air and caught again.

And why stop there? There are creators such as Kunst, {geek} and Chris Two Designs producing objects and animations that can turn an otherwise motionless avatar into a tiny stage performer — sometimes even balancing something as absurdly inappropriate as a knife on their fingertip.

At first glance, these things might seem unrelated to dancing. I don't think they are. They are part of the same evolution.

The avatar doesn't necessarily have to move anymore. The avatar only has to perform.

And that performance can be reduced to one carefully selected gesture or prop.

The cigarette says something.

The glass says something.

The handbag says something.

The dice say something.

Even the ridiculous banana or egg says something: They are visual shorthand for a personality.

And this is where Second Life fashion becomes particularly fascinating. The modern avatar is no longer merely wearing an outfit. It is increasingly staging a scene.

The body, the pose, the accessory, the facial expression and the object in the hand all work together. You are not just standing there. You are posing as someone who would stand there like that. 

Which brings us back to dancing. Because dancing is perhaps the least controlled form of this kind of presentation.

You can carefully choose your dress.

You can carefully choose your AO.

You can carefully choose your cigarette.

You can carefully choose the glass in your hand.

You can even choose an animation in which you throw something into the air and catch it again.

But once you start dancing, you surrender some control.

Your avatar moves.

Your body changes position.

Your arms and legs do things you did not individually select.

And suddenly the carefully constructed image becomes a performance rather than a photograph.

Perhaps that is why the transition from dancing to posing is more significant than it initially appears.

The most peculiar thing

There is another detail I've noticed at The Hotwife Hotel: It isn't just that people aren't dancing. They're all looking at the dance floor.

Walk into the club and you can find a whole group of beautifully dressed avatars standing around the perimeter. They aren't moving much. Their AOs may occasionally shift their weight or change their stance. And almost all of them are facing the same direction: Toward the dance floor.

Which is very often completely empty!

Think about that for a moment. A room full of people has gathered around a space specifically designed for dancing. The music is playing. The dance floor is there. The animations are there.

And the people are standing around the edge, watching… nothing.

It is almost like attending a football match where nobody is playing football, while everyone sits in the stadium facing the empty field.

Of course, there are perfectly reasonable explanations.

They may be talking in private messages. They may be watching the chat. They may be waiting for someone. They may simply be enjoying the atmosphere. And The Hotwife Hotel is hardly a scientific sample of Second Life.

But the visual impression is striking. The dance floor has become the centre of attention without anyone actually using it.

And I've started noticing versions of the same thing in other clubs too: more avatars standing around, fewer actually moving.

Not everyone. Not yet. But enough to make me wonder whether something is changing.

The music doesn't even require the club

And there is another curious aspect to this.

The music itself isn't really the reason you have to be there. The Hotwife Hotel music stream can be copied and listened to at home or even offline. You don't need to have your avatar standing inside the club to hear what song is playing. You could sit alone in front of your computer, listen to exactly the same music, and never log into Second Life at all.

So why come to the club?

Of course, there are many possible answers. You might want to chat. You might be waiting for someone. You might enjoy seeing the other avatars. You might simply like the feeling of being there.

But that makes the sight of a crowded club where almost nobody dances even more intriguing.

The music can be enjoyed alone. The virtual company is optional. And yet people still come together — only increasingly without actually doing the thing the place was built around.

Perhaps this is another peculiarity of Second Life: the possibility of solitude in company.

You can be surrounded by dozens of people and still spend most of your evening alone — behind your avatar, behind your private IM windows, behind your carefully constructed appearance.

You are there.

They are there.

Everyone is together.

And yet, in a strange way, everyone may still be alone.

So, when did movement become embarrassing?

There is an interesting social pressure here.

A dance animation is not neutral. It tells everyone around you that you are doing something.

And that means you are also making yourself visible.

A ridiculous old dance can be funny. An exaggerated dance can be entertaining. A badly synchronized couples dance can be charmingly awkward.

But all of those things involve a little vulnerability.

A pose doesn't. A pose can be controlled. A pose can be beautiful. A pose can be selected because it fits your outfit. A pose doesn't suddenly make you look ridiculous because your avatar's virtual hips have decided to travel somewhere you hadn't anticipated.

Perhaps this is part of what has changed.

The more sophisticated our avatars become, the more carefully curated they become. And the more carefully curated they become, the less spontaneous they become.

From participation to presentation

This may be the larger cultural shift.

Old Second Life often felt like a place where people participated in things.

Today, parts of Second Life increasingly feel like places where people present themselves.

There is a difference.

Participating means: "Let's dance."

Presentation means: "Look at my avatar."

Participating is messy. Presentation is controlled.

Participating produces movement, accidents, bad timing, strange animations, unexpected interactions and occasionally hilarious failures.

Presentation produces photographs.

And increasingly, it produces carefully constructed little scenes: the perfect outfit, the perfect AO, the perfect pose, the perfect glass, the cigarette between the fingers, the handbag in one hand, perhaps even some absurd object being tossed into the air and caught.

Both have their place. But if the balance continues moving toward presentation, something very human may disappear from the virtual world: spontaneity.

And the technology is making this possible

There is an irony here that I find particularly amusing.

The technology keeps getting better at making avatars move.

Modern dance HUDs can contain enormous libraries of animations and sophisticated choreography. Paragon, for example, explicitly promotes the ability to build sequences and synchronize couples without traditional poseballs.

At the same time, designers are getting better at giving stationary avatars tiny pieces of life.

A smoking cigarette or cigar. A glass. A purse. A handful of dice. A banana. An egg. A knife balanced on a fingertip. The avatar may barely move, but the scene does.

And yet we seem increasingly reluctant to use all that movement for something as simple as dancing. We have solved the technical problem of virtual movement. Now we seem to have developed a social problem with using it.

The strange evolution of the dance

Perhaps the progression looks something like this:

First, we danced. Then we wanted more dances. So we bought HUDs.

Then we wanted better dances.So the animations became more sophisticated.

Then we wanted more realistic movement. Then we wanted motion capture.

Then we discovered poses. Then we discovered that even a stationary avatar could be made to do things.

Smoke.

Drink.

Pose.

Throw.

Catch.

Balance.

And somewhere along the way, the objective subtly changed.

It was no longer: "How can I make my avatar move?"

It became: "How can I make my avatar look good while barely moving?"

The funny thing is that the technological progression didn't make dancing obsolete. It made it better. And perhaps that makes the apparent decline in spontaneous dancing even more interesting.

Perhaps this is only the beginning

I don't think we should declare that Second Life has become a world of statues. It hasn't.

There are still plenty of dancers, clubs where people dance, couples who enjoy dancing together and communities built around movement.

And perhaps what I am seeing is simply a local or generational shift. Maybe other parts of Second Life are experiencing exactly the opposite. But I suspect there is something worth watching here.

The longer Second Life exists, the more its residents become sophisticated consumers of virtual identity.

New users once had an avatar.

Experienced users have an aesthetic.

They know their preferred body.

Their preferred head.

Their preferred skin.

Their preferred hair.

Their preferred AO.

Their preferred poses.

Their preferred photography style.

Their preferred way of standing.

And eventually even movement becomes part of the brand.

Even the things they hold become part of it.

The cigarette.

The glass.

The purse.

The absurd object that gets thrown into the air.

The prop that makes the avatar look as though it has a life even when its owner is sitting behind a computer.

Which raises an amusing question:

If everyone is trying to look unique while using increasingly similar conventions of beauty, fashion and behaviour, how unique are we actually becoming?

So, when did we stop dancing?

Perhaps we didn't. Perhaps we are simply beginning to dance differently.

Perhaps the old idea of dancing — getting together, pressing a button and letting your avatar move — belongs to an earlier, less self-conscious Second Life.

Or perhaps we're witnessing the beginning of something else. A virtual world in which the avatar becomes less a person who acts and more a person who is displayed.

A world where the ultimate sign of sophistication is not knowing how to dance beautifully.

It is knowing how to stand perfectly still.

And that would be a rather extraordinary outcome for a technology that gave us the ability to move anywhere, become anyone and dance without gravity.

We spent twenty years teaching our avatars how to dance better.

Maybe the strange part is that we are now teaching ourselves not to.

And perhaps the strangest image of all is still the simplest one:

An entire room full of beautifully dressed avatars at The Hotwife Hotel. Everyone standing still. Everyone looking toward the dance floor. And the dance floor… completely empty.

Perhaps the question isn't really "Why isn't anyone dancing?"

Perhaps it is: "When did movement become something we have to be embarrassed about?"

Are We All Going to Be Nakey in the End?

When Sexy Isn't Sexy Anymore: The Disappearance of the Last Boundaries

There was a time when making a female avatar look sexy in Second Life was an exercise in suggestion.

A low-cut top.

A short skirt.

A glimpse of cleavage.

A stocking disappearing beneath a dress.

Perhaps a little lingerie visible beneath an otherwise respectable outfit.

The trick was not to show everything.

The trick was to suggest what was underneath.

That seems to be changing.

Today, particularly in some of Second Life's adult clubs and nightlife environments, we increasingly encounter avatars for whom the traditional boundaries between suggestive, revealing and naked have almost disappeared.

Breasts are no longer necessarily something to conceal. Nipples can become part of the visible outfit. Clothing may cover less than it reveals. And increasingly explicit anatomical details can become visible elements of an avatar's styling rather than something reserved for a private encounter.

And this raises a rather amusing question: Are we all going to be nakey in the end?

 

From Sexy to Explicit

There is an important difference between being sexy and simply being naked.

A plunging neckline is sexy partly because it leaves something to the imagination.

A skirt that is very short can be sexy precisely because it suggests rather than demonstrates.

Lingerie works because it occupies the fascinating territory between clothing and nudity.

The erotic charge comes from the boundary.

And boundaries are precisely what seem to be disappearing.

The argument here is not that Second Life has suddenly discovered nudity. It hasn't.

The more interesting development is the apparent movement from nudity as the culmination of sexual presentation toward nudity itself becoming part of the everyday presentation.

And once that happens, something rather strange occurs.

The final step becomes less meaningful.

 

When There Is Nothing Left to Reveal

Imagine fashion as a game of hide and seek.

The clothes conceal something.

The body reveals something.

The imagination fills in the rest.

Now progressively remove what is being hidden.

First, the neckline becomes lower.

Then the skirt becomes shorter.

Then the underwear becomes visible.

Then the underwear effectively disappears.

Eventually, there is nothing left to reveal because everything has already been revealed.

At that point, the old vocabulary of erotic fashion begins to break down.

There is no longer much difference between "look at how sexy I am" and "look at my naked body."

And that is where the paradox begins: The more sexuality is displayed, the less special the display of sexuality can become.

This isn't an argument against nudity. Nor is it an argument that people shouldn't dress however they want in an Adult environment.

It is an observation about the mechanics of eroticism.

Eroticism needs anticipation.

And anticipation requires something that has not yet been seen.

 

The Curious Phenomenon of the Permanent Tease

There is another aspect of this that is particularly interesting in Second Life.

An avatar can be dressed in a way that communicates an enormous amount of sexual information without the person behind that avatar necessarily wanting any sexual interaction at all.

That creates a fascinating middle ground.

The avatar can say:

"Yes, I know exactly what I'm showing you."

without necessarily saying:

"And yes, I want you to do something about it."

This is perhaps one of the most important differences between virtual sexuality and real-world sexuality.

In Second Life, the avatar is simultaneously a fashion statement, a character, a fantasy and a social signal.

Someone may enjoy being looked at.

They may enjoy provoking reactions.

They may enjoy the confidence of presenting themselves as sexually uninhibited.

They may enjoy the fantasy without wanting the reality.

Or they may simply enjoy the aesthetics.

There doesn't have to be just one explanation.

 

Tease Without the Next Step

And perhaps this is why the phenomenon is more interesting than simply saying that people are "showing more skin."

There appears to be a growing category of sexual presentation without necessarily progressing to sexual interaction.

The avatar is provocative.

The presentation is deliberately conspicuous.

The message is unmistakably sexual.

But the interaction may stop there.

In that sense, it really can resemble a permanent tease.

And perhaps that is exactly the attraction.

The person behind the avatar controls the entire situation.

They can display sexuality without surrendering control over what happens next.

They can invite attention without necessarily inviting contact.

They can be provocative without being available.

And they can turn the avatar itself into a performance.

That is a very different proposition from simply being naked.

 

But Why Does the Display Keep Escalating?

This is where things become particularly interesting from a fashion perspective.

Fashion works through differentiation.

If everyone wears the same thing, it stops being remarkable.

The same applies to sexual presentation.

Once cleavage becomes normal, cleavage no longer distinguishes an avatar.

Once lingerie becomes ordinary clubwear, lingerie loses some of its provocative power.

Once toplessness becomes commonplace in a particular environment, simply being topless no longer makes an avatar stand out.

So what happens next?

The boundary moves.

A little more skin.

A little more explicitness.

A little less ambiguity.

Until eventually, the difference between fashionable sexual suggestion and actual nudity becomes extremely difficult to identify.

This may help explain why some adult fashion can appear almost strangely competitive in its explicitness.

The question is no longer:

"How can I look sexy?"

It becomes:

"How far can I go while still presenting this as an outfit?"

And that is a very different fashion game.

 

The Hotwife Hotel — and the Adult-Club Effect

The Hotwife Hotel is an interesting example to consider precisely because it sits within an environment where sexuality is already part of the premise.

And it is certainly not alone.

Club 511, for example, is another environment where this kind of highly sexualized presentation can be observed.

Second Life's Adult destination listings include numerous environments explicitly built around seductive presentation, flirting, teasing, nudity, adult fashion and role-play.

That matters because context changes perception.

An outfit that would be shocking at a mainstream shopping event may be completely unremarkable at an Adult club.

And once a particular level of exposure becomes normal within a community, the community's definition of "revealing" changes with it.

The boundary doesn't disappear overnight.

It moves one small step at a time.

 

From Fashion to Anatomy

Perhaps the most striking development is what happens when the body itself becomes the accessory.

Traditional fashion decorates the body.

Modern SL adult fashion can sometimes seem to do the opposite: it uses the body as the decoration.

Tattoos, piercings, intimate accessories, deliberately exposed anatomy and increasingly elaborate body modifications can become part of the avatar's overall styling.

The result is a peculiar reversal.

Instead of asking:

"What am I wearing?"

the viewer can increasingly find themselves asking:

"How much of the body is actually being presented as the outfit?"

At some point, the distinction between fashion and anatomy becomes almost philosophical.

If an accessory exists primarily to draw attention to a sexual body part, is it still an accessory?

If clothing exists primarily to frame rather than conceal the body, is it still clothing?

And if the body itself is effectively the main visual attraction, are we still talking about fashion at all?

 

The Paradox of Maximum Exposure

There is an irony here.

One might assume that showing more would automatically make something more sexual.

But perhaps the opposite can eventually happen.

Consider the bikini.

It is revealing because most of the body remains covered.

Its erotic effect depends on the contrast between what is shown and what is hidden.

Now imagine removing the bikini entirely.

The result is certainly more naked.

But is it necessarily more sexy?

Not necessarily.

It may simply be more explicit.

And those aren't the same thing.

This distinction may become increasingly important as Second Life fashion continues to explore the outer limits of exposure.

 

Sexy and explicit are not synonyms.

In fact, they can eventually become opposites.

Sexy says:

"There is something here you haven't quite seen."

Explicit says:

"There is nothing left to imagine."

 

The Strange Possibility That Everything Becomes Ordinary

This brings us back to our title.

Are we all going to be nakey in the end?

Obviously not literally.

But fashion has a curious way of turning yesterday's taboo into tomorrow's normality.

Today's provocative look becomes tomorrow's mainstream look.

Yesterday's shocking neckline becomes today's casual top.

Yesterday's lingerie becomes today's club outfit.

And perhaps today's extreme exposure eventually becomes simply another variation of Adult fashion.

If that happens, the truly provocative outfit may eventually be the one that covers something.

Imagine arriving at an adult club wearing an elegant evening dress that actually conceals the body.

Suddenly, the dress itself becomes mysterious.

People might wonder what is underneath.

And isn't that precisely what erotic fashion used to understand so well?

 

Perhaps the Future of Sexy Is... Less

This is where the whole trend becomes wonderfully paradoxical.

If the fashion race continues toward ever greater exposure, the ultimate destination may not be more sexy.

It may be less.

Less visible skin.

More suggestion.

More ambiguity.

More imagination.

More clothing.

Because once everything can be shown, hiding something becomes interesting again.

Perhaps the most provocative woman in the room will eventually be the one wearing the dress that leaves everyone wondering what is underneath.

And perhaps that is the real disappearance of the last boundaries.

Not that Second Life has become too naked.

But that we may eventually become so accustomed to nakedness that nakedness itself stops being particularly sexy.

And when there is nothing left to reveal... what is there left to tease?

Because sexy was never really about how much you could show.

It was about how much you could make someone want to see.

FROM WOUNDS TO WRINKLES: THE RISE OF THE IMPERFECT BODY IN SECOND LIFE

A further look at the changing avatar

If the first article in this series was about darkness in fashion, the second about occult symbolism and the third about the wounded body, then the next development may be the strangest of all:

The deliberate rejection of perfection.

Second Life has always offered something that real life cannot easily provide: the ability to construct an almost impossibly beautiful body.

A resident can be young forever.

Skin can be flawless.

Waists can be impossibly narrow.

Legs can be perfectly shaped.

Breasts and buttocks can be exaggerated far beyond normal human proportions.

Faces can be symmetrical, smooth and permanently youthful.

In a world where physical imperfection can be removed with a slider, a texture or a new skin, why would anyone deliberately put it back?

Yet that is increasingly possible.

Cellulite can be added.

Bodies can be made heavier.

Stomachs can be made softer or larger.

Thighs can become fuller.

Buttocks can lose their perfectly sculpted appearance.

Wrinkles and age spots can be added to the face.

Mature and elderly skins and shapes are commercially available.

And some residents seem increasingly willing to exchange the conventional SL ideal for something considerably closer to an ordinary human body.

 

THE STRANGE REVERSAL OF VIRTUAL BEAUTY

This creates a remarkable paradox.

The physical world gives us enormous incentives to hide imperfections.

Second Life gives us the technical ability to eliminate them almost completely.

And yet some residents voluntarily recreate them.

It is almost the exact opposite of what we might expect from virtual beauty.

The avatar could be perfect.

Instead, it becomes human.

That distinction may be the key to understanding this trend.

The objective may not actually be to become ugly.

It may be to stop looking unreal.

 

FROM PERFECT TO PLAUSIBLE

For much of Second Life's history, the ideal female avatar was unmistakably artificial.

Tiny waist.

Large breasts.

Long legs.

Perfect skin.

Perfect makeup.

Perfect hair.

Perfect face.

The result could be extraordinarily attractive, but it was rarely mistaken for an average human being.

The arrival of increasingly sophisticated mesh bodies and heads made the fantasy even more elaborate.

But the same technology also created the possibility of doing something else: creating bodies that look more like actual people.

Current Second Life Marketplace products demonstrate this shift quite clearly. Cellulite overlays are sold specifically to add natural-looking texture to the buttocks, back and other areas of the body. Mature skins and facial add-ons offer wrinkles and age spots and are explicitly marketed as ways to make avatars look older and more realistic.

In other words, the technology that allows residents to become superhuman can also be used to become more human.

 

THE CELLULITE PARADOX

Cellulite is perhaps the clearest example.

In conventional beauty culture, cellulite is something to conceal.

It is associated with imperfection.

It is something advertisements, cosmetics and fashion imagery have traditionally attempted to remove from view.

In Second Life, however, a resident can deliberately purchase a cellulite layer and apply it to an otherwise flawless mesh body.

That is an extraordinary reversal.

The virtual body does not accidentally develop cellulite.

Someone has chosen to put it there.

The question therefore becomes:

Why?

There are several possible answers.

 

REALISM

The simplest explanation is realism.

A perfectly smooth virtual body can look artificial.

Adding cellulite, softer tissue and less-than-perfect proportions can make the avatar appear more believable.

This interpretation should not be underestimated.

Perhaps the resident is not trying to make herself less attractive at all.

Perhaps she is trying to make herself attractive in a different way.

Not perfect.

Plausible.

 

BODY POSITIVITY

Another possibility is body acceptance.

The avatar may be deliberately rejecting the idea that women must have perfectly smooth skin and perfectly proportioned bodies in order to be attractive.

In this interpretation, cellulite is not a defect.

It is simply part of being human.

The message becomes:

“This body does not need to be perfect.”

That is very different from uglification.

It is a rejection of the requirement to hide imperfection.

 

INDIVIDUALITY

There is another possibility.

Once everyone has access to the same beautiful mesh bodies, conventional beauty itself becomes generic.

A perfect body is no longer particularly distinctive when thousands of avatars have access to essentially the same ideal.

Imperfection can therefore become a form of individuality.

The slightly heavier body.

The unusual proportions.

The mature face.

The wrinkles.

The softer stomach.

These things can make an avatar stand out precisely because they depart from the template.

In that sense, imperfection becomes another fashion choice.

 

THE ANTI-FASHION POSSIBILITY

But there may be something more radical happening.

Fashion has traditionally told us what is desirable.

It establishes an ideal and encourages people to move toward it.

The emerging virtual aesthetic sometimes appears to work in reverse.

Instead of asking:

“How can I make my avatar more beautiful?”

the question becomes:

“How can I make my avatar more interesting?”

Those are not the same thing.

An interesting face does not necessarily have to be conventionally beautiful.

An interesting body does not necessarily have to be thin.

An interesting character does not necessarily have to look young.

The avatar becomes a form of self-expression rather than a beauty contest.

 

THE MATURE FACE

The face may be the most revealing example.

For decades, youth has been one of the strongest components of conventional female beauty.

Yet Second Life now offers dedicated mature and older skins, shapes and facial add-ons.

Some are explicitly marketed as ways to make an avatar look somewhere between 30 and 60.

Wrinkles, age spots and more mature facial structures can be added deliberately.

This is particularly significant because ageing is one of the things that virtual worlds could theoretically eliminate.

An avatar does not have to age.

There is no biological clock.

There is no menopause.

There is no unavoidable loss of skin elasticity.

There is no requirement to become older.

Age therefore becomes a choice.

And choosing it can be a surprisingly powerful statement.

Perhaps the resident is saying:

“I don't need to pretend to be twenty.”

Or perhaps:

“I want my avatar to look like an adult woman rather than an idealised fantasy girl.”

That distinction matters.

 

OLDER DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN UGLIER

This is also where the language becomes important.

A mature face is not necessarily an unattractive face.

An older woman can be beautiful.

A heavier woman can be beautiful.

A woman with cellulite can be beautiful.

But all three deliberately challenge the narrow visual vocabulary that has traditionally dominated virtual female beauty.

The real change may therefore not be from beautiful to ugly.

It may be from:

perfect → human.

That is a much more interesting interpretation.

 

THE CONNECTION TO THE FIRST THREE ARTICLES

At first glance, mature faces and cellulite seem unrelated to Gothic fashion, occult symbols or simulated wounds.

But there is a common thread.

The traditional avatar ideal attempts to eliminate everything that suggests weakness, mortality or imperfection.

Neo-Goth does almost the opposite.

It embraces darkness.

Occult fashion embraces forbidden symbols.

The wounded body embraces scars and damage.

And the imperfect body embraces age, weight and physical normality.

The common denominator is the rejection of the pristine avatar.

 

THE PERFECT BODY BEGINS TO LOOK BORING

There is perhaps an important cultural shift taking place here.

For years, Second Life's technological development was celebrated because it made avatars more realistic and more beautiful.

Higher-resolution skins.

Better mesh bodies.

Better faces.

Better hair.

Better lighting.

Better anatomy.

But once realism and beauty became technically easy to achieve, the next question was inevitable:

What do we do with that freedom?

One answer is to push beauty even further.

Another is to escape it.

The second answer may be what we are beginning to see.

Instead of making the virtual woman increasingly perfect, some residents are deliberately making her more ordinary.

Sometimes much more ordinary.

And sometimes deliberately older, heavier or less conventionally attractive.

 

FROM BEAUTY TO CHARACTER

This may be the most important distinction.

The perfect avatar is primarily a beautiful object.

The imperfect avatar can become a character.

A woman with wrinkles has a history.

A woman with cellulite looks as though she exists outside the fashion photograph.

A woman with a larger stomach looks less like a digital fantasy and more like an individual person.

The imperfections create biography.

They suggest that the body belongs to somebody who has lived.

And that is remarkably close to the logic of the previous article.

The scar tells us that something happened.

The wrinkle tells us that time happened.

The bruise tells us that something happened to the body.

The ageing face tells us that the body has existed for a long time.

The body becomes a story.

 

THE DARKER SIDE OF THE TREND

There is, however, another interpretation worth considering.

Could the increasing popularity of deliberately unattractive or damaged bodies represent a broader cultural fascination with the destruction of conventional beauty?

Perhaps.

The first article documented the rise of Neo-Goth.

The second documented the increasing use of occult imagery.

The third examined the aestheticisation of wounds.

And now we arrive at the deliberate introduction of age, weight and physical imperfection.

Taken individually, none of these phenomena is particularly mysterious.

Taken together, however, they suggest something larger.

The virtual fashion industry is becoming increasingly comfortable with images that conventional beauty culture traditionally excludes.

Death.

Darkness.

Demons.

Blood.

Scars.

Age.

Cellulite.

Weight.

Imperfection.

The beautiful avatar is no longer necessarily the flawless avatar.

 

THE GREAT VIRTUAL PARADOX

Perhaps this is the ultimate irony of Second Life.

The platform gives people an almost unlimited ability to escape their physical appearance.

And some residents use that freedom to reproduce it.

They can be twenty forever, but choose to look forty.

They can have perfectly smooth skin, but add cellulite.

They can have an impossibly slim waist, but choose a softer stomach.

They can have a flawless face, but add wrinkles.

They can be physically perfect, but choose to display scars.

The question is not why Second Life allows this.

The technology obviously does.

The more interesting question is why people increasingly find such imperfection aesthetically interesting.

 

THE END OF THE BEAUTIFUL AVATAR?

Probably not. The conventional ideal is not disappearing.

Second Life will continue to have glamorous, youthful, highly sexualised and extraordinarily beautiful avatars.

What appears to be changing is the definition of what else can count as beautiful.

The perfect body is no longer the only available fantasy.

There is now room for the mature body.

The ordinary body.

The heavier body.

The scarred body.

The damaged body.

The Gothic body.

The strange body.

The deliberately imperfect body.

And perhaps that is the real evolution of virtual fashion.

Second Life began by allowing us to escape the limitations of the physical body.

Its next stage may be allowing us to choose which physical limitations we actually want to keep.

 

FROM WOUNDS TO WRINKLES

Seen together with the previous articles, the progression is striking.

First, we changed the clothes.

Then we changed the symbols.

Then we changed the body by adding evidence of violence.

Now we are changing the body by adding evidence of humanity.

The question running through all four articles is therefore no longer simply:

“Why is Second Life fashion becoming darker?”

It may be something much broader.

Why are virtual humans becoming increasingly fascinated with everything that the traditional beauty ideal tells them to hide?

Perhaps the answer is not that residents want to look ugly.

Perhaps they simply want to look like something that a perfect avatar cannot be:

A person who has lived.

And perhaps that is the strangest fashion trend of all.