Also, thanks for the congrats! It is my first. Here’s hoping for more :-).

I’m not “into” virtual pornography: not due to any distaste or what have you, I just haven’t seen anything worth spending my attention and time on. But the things that might attract me to the genre would be the ability to experience “virtually” physical forms that might not exist elsewhere. Humans are sort of “dull” to me, I guess. I’m not a “furry” exactly, not in the convention going, dressing in strange costumes sort of way, but I guess I do find the animal side of things intriguing. A world where people could build their own highly-varied non-human forms…that might just attract my attention.

Honestly, though, I’m not sure whether the “porn” part of it would really appeal to me even then. Too much of a sexual nature in virtuality becomes just crude and disgusting in the hands of a certain percentage of the audience. Naturally, what constitutes “crude and disgusting” varies by person, but all it takes is a small percentage of people to turn an otherwise appealing experience into something to run and hide from.

Are people substituting images of real women to transform these polygons into attractive images… again, I don’t know. I would say no. Real pornography is amazingly accessible; why go to the trouble. Unless there’s something in that process that’s attractive.

“After a while though, after I personally signed up for Second Life in order to research the article, I began to care less and less about the people, and become interested solely in the avatars.”

Interesting, but do you mean that you were interested in the avatars as if they were the “real” objects, or that their status as objet d’art became more prominent?

The fact that they are already objects is a good point. But does that mean that they can’t be objectified? I wonder. I feel like the avatars are meant to be symbols standing in for something else–perhaps when someone looks at them, they’re “embellishing” them in their mind, removing the rough edges of a crude-compared-to-reality presentation.

If you manage to get a follow-up opportunity with people who are consumers of this material, I’ll look forward to reading it.

So let’s look at the points you mentioned. Female customization: I think you’re right here. It’s not really about options (There are just as many male options as female options.) it’s about “good” options. That, of course, is linked to what we consider inherently sexual, namely female forms. It’s a bit like seeing sexy women in men’s magazines, and the same sexy women in women’s magazines. As a consequence of our one-gender fascination, the manifestation of all things sexual in virtual worlds has become female (Think only female nude skins, and the fact that both men and women play as women).

Next, are we attracted to the avatars, or the people behind them: You know, I don’t know. I tried to get more revealing quotes here, but I think, at a certain point, if you’re deep enough in virtual communities, it becomes harder to tease these ideas out again into the real and the virtual. Personally, as I was looking at these images, I underwent a shift. At first I thought, How interesting; I wonder what these people really look like. After a while though, after I personally signed up for Second Life in order to research the article, I began to care less and less about the people, and become interested solely in the avatars.

Lastly, is this an extreme form of objectification because it moves so entirely from the integrity of real forms: Yes, and no. On the one hand, it reduces real human bodies to polygons — easily manipulatable, easily taken for granted. At the same time, it represents the presentation of bodies that cannot be objectified because they are already objects, already not real, and what’s behind them isn’t real human flesh but a willful, human subjectivity that chooses to place them there.

It’s a complicated subject. Personally, I’d love to hear from more people that find themselves attracted to this sort of stuff. How do you they feel, I wonder.