Examining Gender, Race, and Body Image in a Virtual World

Here is my first you-around with Second Life interacting with other people.  Admittedly, I was a little nervous about doing this, because nowadays, there could be any kind of weirdo/pervert behind the keyboard of the other characters in Second Life, which, unfortunately became evident in this particular world I was in right away.

In this screenshot, I have just arrived in the virtual world and I am walking around toward the other people in it with me.

Here, we can see the gentleman in the suit telling one of the women in the world how beautiful she is.

Here, another woman comes in between the man in the suit and the scantily clad woman he had been complimenting.  She, herself, is also wearing a pretty skimpy outfit, and insists that she is "hotter" than the other woman.

Here, I was flying around the world to see if there were any other people in it (preferably normal people).  No such luck.

On to another world in a DIFFERENT avatar.

For this world, I chose London and I transformed my avatar into a girl in a dress.

There were quite a few other people gathered at the first place I teleported to, however, I was disappointed to be greeted with more of the same semi-inappropriate talk, especially aimed toward the girl seen below in the skimpy dress toward the right hand of the screen shot.

 Here is another exchange between the girl that was cat-called and the cat-callers.  She clearly doesn't have a problem flirting with back with these seemingly complete strangers.

 And here is one last futile attempt to fly around the world, looking for some normal people.

On to the next world.

I picked the "Blarney Stone Irish Pub" and I changed my avatar to an Asian girl wearing a red leather jacket.  As seen below, it didn't take long at all for my avatar to gain some attention and I had someone saying hi to me.

 This is the dance floor at the Blarney Stone.  As you can see, there is another scantily clad woman on the left of the floor.  The man directly in front of me was EXTREMELY excited about this girl, so much that I actually can't show the message board in my screen shots.  It got pretty vulgar.

In the next screen shot, I had ventured upstairs.  I ran into another person sitting on a support beam of the building.  Once again, I can't show what he said to me.  At this point, I'm pretty sure this will be the last time I venture around in Second Life.

And finally, here I am again, outside the pub, just looking for some normal people to chat with.  Again, no such luck.

Overall, I am pretty disappointed with these findings in Second Life.  In all 3 of the virtual worlds I entered, I was bombarded with sexism and inappropriateness.  In fact, for one of these experiments, I was in a world right around mid-day.  And the vulgarity was the worst here!  Who's to say there isn't a young curious child in the world at that point?  Call me old fashioned, but I definitely will be putting parental locks on Second Life whenever it is I have children!