Topics Sex

Question My question relates to Second Life and sex. Many people in Second Life gender-swap - that is, men create female avatars and women create male avatars. It is estimated that up to 80% of the "women" in Second Life are actually men. Some heterosexual men who engage in sex in Second Life worry about having sex with female avatars who are actually men. Is this logically and philosophically consistent? Given that Second Life is a virtual world and that nothing is real, is there any point in worrying about the real sex of an avatar? If your male avatar is attracted to a female avatar, what is the point in considering the real sex of that person? Shouldn't the relationship be taken at face value, the same as the rest of the (virtual) environment?

Accepted:
April 10, 2008

Comments

This is, I think, an utterly fascinating area of philosophical inquiry, and some new work is tackling this very issue. (David Velleman, for example, has a paper draft on virtual agency that considers what it means for an avatar to do things we ordinarily ascribe to real people, like "have sex" or "be attracted.")

I think a virtual relationship (or a real relationship in the virtual world, which may not be equivalent) needs to be understood in the context in which that relationship exists...as you say, "at face value." But as a matter of actual fact, the reason and will behind the avatars belong to someone else, who then have a kind of derivative relationship. So we can understand what's going on in three ways: what are the avatars doing; what are the real people doing; what are the real people directing the avatars to do?

The relation of these two relationships -- virtual and actual -- to each other is something that needs exploration, and this exploration may well alter our more general understanding of such concepts as gender, identity and action.