Sit up straight. Don’t play with your food. Keep your elbows off the table.
In real life, we accept certain things as common-sense good manners. When you meet someone for the first time, you shake hands, you make eye contact, you smile. Tempting as it may be, you don’t bombard your new friend with sensitive questions, or ask, point blank, whether he’d like to get kinky back at your place. We call this being polite.
In a virtual community like Second Life, however, the rules of politeness are often quite different. How could they be the same? Here, personal information is hardly ever personal, and private encounters rarely stay private. So – in a world where public nudity, open solicitations, and gropings between strangers are all run of the mill – what determines "rude"?
It isn’t rude to interject into someone else’s chat. It isn’t rude to friend someone you met five minutes before. It isn’t even rude to hold three conversations at once. What is rude though is asking about someone’s real-life gender.
Or, at least, so I’ve been taught. When I first started in Second Life, about six months ago, a veteran was kind enough to show me the ropes. And when I asked his advice on that age old question, "R u a guy or a grl IRL?", the answer was simple: don’t ask. It’s just rude.
More recently, I’ve doing research for a study on how male players who present female in Second Life use language to perform femininity. The biggest obstacle has been finding subjects who will admit to being male. Or, more specifically, the biggest obstacle has been even asking. Between me and my research alt, we’ve heard countless theories on how to tell if you’re chatting with a cross-dresser. One blog reader even suggested quizzing the player on women’s shoe sizes. Brilliant.
But no one has said, "Just ask." Not only because you’re likely to get an inaccurate answer, but because it’s impolite.
So I decided to tarnish my own good, Second Life name a little and see what would happen if I did the unacceptable. Specifically, I asked thirty players (20 female, 10 male) the same two questions: "Hello, I’m doing some research. Do you mind if I ask you a question?" and then, "In real life, are you male or female?"
Every single player answered. All but one – a real-life transvestite, who cheerfully pointed out the complication inherent in the question – responded quickly and clearly with a gender that matched that of their avatars. Seven of the thirty asked after the fact what the research was for. One asked before.
No one expressed outrage, or even mild discomfort, at being asked, even the five female escorts polled, who could have easily taken the question the wrong way. The only people who could be said to have been offended were those who didn't answer the initial query – "Do you mind if I ask you a question?" – but who, in all cases, were camping for Linden dollars, and were most likely away from keyboard.
Whether or not these thirty players were telling the truth about their genders is impossible to know, but it’s also irrelevant. What’s interesting instead is their nonchalant reaction to the question.
Perhaps it was the sheer bluntness of my asking that kept the question from being perceived as "rude." Or maybe the fact that it was presented as "for research." Also, it’s important to note that my toon had no standing relationship with any of those questioned. If, instead, I had been asking acquaintances or friends, the players might have felt more pressure to answer honestly, and therefore the question might have been more invasive.
It seems though that there’s another issue at work here as well. When we participate in virtual worlds, we create new forms for ourselves, cyber forms, avatars with certain physical attributes, personality traits, etc. These new forms act, in some ways, as shields for our real-life selves. But often, weo create another new form, a non-cyber form, an imagined back story about the person at the key board. The housewife becomes the eighteen-year-old dancer; the eighteen-year-old becomes the successful mother of two. We are not who we are on screen, but, frequently, we are also not who we say we are. In effect, we set up two lines of defense between the virtual and the real.
Maybe this is why asking a stranger about real-life gender isn’t rude after all. What’s rude, in the end, is what cuts too close to the truth. And the stories many of us keep on the tips of our tongues about our "real lives" are anything but. Even if we tell the truth about ourselves, the understanding that our stories may be mere imaginings seems to buffer us from the sting of intrusion, from the imposition of the impolite.
