A Chat Among Friends

Recently I had a chat with a few friends. We talked about fulfilling fantasies and wishes within Second Life.

Have you always wanted to visit Venice? I am pretty sure someone built it or at least parts of it in Second Life.

Do you want to go sailing? Rent a boat, the Blake Sea is just around the corner.

Do you want to be a furry? Build yourself a furry avatar and have fun.

Do you want to fight against a zombie apocalypse? Someone already dedicated a sim to it.

Do you want to engage in all kinds of role-playing or erotic role-playing? Someone in Second Life wants to play with you.

Basically, you can do or become whatever you want.

So What About Cross-Gender Play?

We all agreed it is done for a variety of reasons. But what does it do to you?
How does it feel to play an avatar of a different gender?

Time for an experiment!

Time to take a page out of Caroline’s book and create an alt. My idea was to create a
female avatar, wander Second Life for a while engage in all kinds of activities and
chronicle my experiences. As per Caroline’s rules, I would only start with a small
budget of 500 L$ and would have improvised to get along.

Step 1: Building an Avatar

The basics were easily done. The same for both genders, but once you get into the
details the similarities end.

The options to customize female Avatars are at times overwhelming. Just looking at
clothing in the marketplace you find 388.000 entries for men, but 2.651.000 entries for
women. That is almost 7 times more articles of clothing for women than for men.
Admittedly women spend more L$ on clothes than men, so its only natural that the
supply fits the demand.

This flood of options actually worked to my advantage. Within my budget it would
have been possible, to build a decent-looking male avatar with some clothes, but as a
woman, I had the freedom of choice. A lot of choices, actually.

Especially when it comes to clothing. But I also found several free or reduced mesh
bodies. I guess with women spending more money on their looks, designers are
more willing to give away stuff for free or at a reduced rate, since a happy customer
comes back for more.

After being overwhelmed at first, I actually started to enjoy browsing the marketplace
and stores looking for promo sales to upgrade my looks.

With my male avatar, I am more of a reluctant shopper. I like to take care of my looks,
but shopping was never something I had fun with. I set myself up with a list of basics,
I could easily mix and match and occasionally add something new to it. For
footwear, I started with a pair of black dress shoes and a pair of sneakers. The idea of
just having two pairs of shoes seemed ridiculous to my female self.

I started to develop into a shopaholic!

With all the options available, spending time shopping was simply more fun.

The interesting thing was, this carried over to my male avatar as well. Now I spend
time browsing through the weekend sales and the marketplace looking if I can find
something new to add to my growing collection of clothing.

I also never bothered with Clothing Layers or BoM, but my female me just needed
those extra layers and options. So I wrapped my head around it and after I figured it
out I also did it for my male avatar.