#oneaday Day 888: Avatars, Masculinity, Femininity, Wish-Fulfilment, Self-Expression and Fantasy

My fine friend Jenn Frank (for my money, one of the most interesting people on the Internet, given the many and varied conversations we've had over the years) reminded me of a discussion we had back in 2009. You can find it in the comments here.

Basically, the discussion centred around "avatars" — custom characters that you design to represent yourself online or in a video game. I raised the point that, generally speaking, if given the option, I would go for a female character. There then followed a discussion about the reasons for this.

I'm trying to pin down the reasons for this in my own head and there are lots of them. It's not a simple thing. I can't discuss any of this from a feminist perspective as I'm not well-read enough in feminist theory, nor indeed do I know enough about gender studies and whatnot to draw any firm conclusions. I do, therefore, apologise to those more "in the know" than me if any of this post comes across as ill-informed — but I'm not trying to write an academic paper, here. What I am trying to do is "think out loud" and explain myself a little. Then doubtless someone will come along and make some incisive interpretations of my words. (That or call me something uncomplimentary. Or both.)

Let's start with a little context. I am a man. I identify myself as male and have all the appropriate dangly bits to back up this assertion. (Actually, I feel weird when I hear parents talk to their kids and refer to me as "that man" but that's a whole other issue to do with how mature I do/don't feel.)

Despite my self-identification as male, I don't do many things that I (personally, I mean) would equate with the amorphous and stereotypical concepts of "masculinity" or "maleness". I don't like sports (I particularly loathe the soccerball), I have only a passing interest in cars, I prefer to avoid conflict (and particularly the threat of physical violence) whenever possible, I am not very assertive and I have never been sexually aggressive. On the flip side, I like "geeky" things, I certainly wouldn't turn down the opportunity to drive a fast "small penis compensation" vehicle such as a Ferrari and I find "traditionally beautiful" women sexually appealing. Naturally, there is nothing to stop women from liking any of those things I've just described (and indeed I know plenty of women who do), but let's, for the sake of argument, call them stereotypically "masculine" or "male" things.

Conversely, I do do many things that I (again, using my own personal definitions, stereotypes and prejudices rather than more fair and balanced definitions thereof) would regard as "feminine" or "female". I am emotional and sensitive (though I find expressing some emotions such as excitement to be difficult), I like to talk about feelings and innermost thoughts with people I trust, I enjoy My Little Pony, I respond strongly to works of art (particularly music, film and games) designed to elicit an emotional reaction and, as a child, I always preferred solitary imaginative "narrative-style" play rather than group physical activities.

Somewhere between those two extremes, too, is the fact that I am extremely introspective — to a fault, sometimes — and find myself relentlessly examining myself (not physically, except, you know, every so often to make sure I don't have bollock cancer), attempting to predict the future of social interactions or going over past interactions in my head. I'm not sure if that's a stereotypically male or female thing to do, so I'll call that a neutral influence for now.

On the whole, though, I think the more "feminine" influences in terms of the way I do things and respond to things tend to win out. As a result, despite being comfortable, secure and happy in the fact that I am male (there are things about myself I am not happy about, of course, though those have nothing to do with gender) I find myself somewhat drawn to the female perspective on things. Not exclusively, obviously, but that influence is most certainly there.

Now let's look a little about avatars and what they mean.

An avatar is how you choose to represent yourself. It might be in public if you're playing an online game or using a social network, or you might be the only person seeing it if you're playing a single-player role-playing game such as, say, Dragon Age.

There are several ways you can approach the creation of an avatar, and I find myself doing them all at different times.

Firstly, there's self-expression. Your avatar is used as a means of expressing something about yourself. It could be simply depicting yourself as literally as possible, or it could be using an image to demonstrate how much you like something.

Secondly, there's wish-fulfilment — using your avatar to change your self-representation or idealise yourself.

Thirdly, there's pure fantasy — going completely off-piste and into the depths of your own imagination.

For self-expression, I can think of a number of examples. I use my real picture in a few places, though as someone who is not overly confident in their own appearance I generally try and avoid this whenever possible. Instead, very often I'll use images of things I like to represent myself as — the most frequent ones to appear in the last few years being Phoenix Wright from the Ace Attorney series and Fluttershy from My Little Pony. I use Phoenix Wright simply because I think he's a great character and love the series he's from; I use Fluttershy as a projection of my own real-life social anxiety.

For wish-fulfilment, the best example I can think of is back when I used to spend a fair amount of time in online virtual world Second Life. My avatar there was like me, but not quite. He had a skin that looked like me, but his body shape wasn't as fat. He had hair that I could plausibly pull off, but would never have the guts to ask a hairdresser for. Personality-wise (for it is impossible to play Second Life and not find yourself playing a role to at least a small degree) he was like me — open and honest, a bit shy in new situations — but more confident in who he was than the "real" me. In short, he was my own idealised view of myself — the person I wanted to be. I learned a few things from him, though not enough to overcome my considerable arsenal of neuroses. I was happy inhabiting his skin, because he was me, with a few tweaks here and there.

For fantasy, I turn to everything else. The first time I played a female character in a video game was the original Baldur's Gate. At the time, I didn't have any sort of ulterior motive in mind, I just thought it would be an interesting change from the usual musclebound male hero. Of course, in Baldur's Gate, your choice of avatar is largely confined to the portrait you use, the colours you have on your armour and the voice set you use, but nevertheless, this is where it started.

Thus "Amarysse" was born, and this remains the name I have used for pretty much all my female protagonist characters in every RPG I have played since. (If she has a surname, it's always "Jerhynsson", because "Jerhyn" was the name of the only minor character from Diablo II I could remember. There is literally no logic more complicated than that at work, though I'm not sure why I chose Diablo II as source material.)

Amarysse doesn't have a specific personality as it depends entirely upon how the protagonist character in these RPGs has been written, but, depending on the customisation options I have access to, she usually has long red hair, a curvy (though not fat) figure, a lot of charisma (in BioWare titles, this means taking as many points in Persuasion as possible… always) and a seductive voice. She is several things to me: firstly, and most shallowly, she's my fantasy woman in every respect; secondly, she is all the things that I am not. She is female, attractive (according to self-perception — I have a distorted and negative view of my own aesthetic value meaning I consider myself unattractive even though I know there are people who disagree), confident, assertive, dominant, in control, flirtatious and often sexually aggressive should the game provide the option to act in such a manner. She kicks ass, takes names and isn't afraid to say exactly what she wants, in short. I admire her a great deal, both from a shallow, libido-led red-blooded heterosexual male perspective, and from the angle that I wish I "was her".

I've taken this somewhat further on a couple of occasions in Second Life (though not for a good couple of years now) by creating a female avatar alongside my "regular" male one. (She's not called Amarysse Jerhynsson there, though, so don't go looking for her.) This female avatar began as an experiment. Second Life is about doing whatever you want, after all, so I decided I wanted to see what life was like as a woman. I wasn't going to be a man playing a woman; so far as everyone who met my female avatar was concerned, I was all woman. No-one ever called my supposedly female gender into question once, despite the fact that I said prominently in my profile that I would not talk about my "first life" (a Second Life term to describe "reality") at all — which, in the strange world of Second Life, usually means that people have something to hide. I even made a few friends (all female — or at least represented as such) in the process, though eventually I felt bad about deceiving them and disappeared quietly.

My conclusions from playing this female avatar were interesting. Like Amarysse's many forms, this avatar was pure fantasy. But since there was no prescripted "narrative" to follow, I had to choose how I was going to represent her. This attractive, curvy redhead didn't look like the sort of person to be a shy, retiring wallflower (especially not in the clothes she tended to wear in the locales she frequented) so it made no sense to overlay my real-life (or wish-fulfilment) personality over the top of her. Instead, I decided that here was a woman who was confident in herself and assertive enough to walk into the middle of a room and simply start talking to someone she liked the look (or profile) of. Sometimes she was ignored, sometimes she got into a good conversation, sometimes things took an altogether different turn which we shan't get into here. The important thing is that it felt different to be her. I wasn't me, suffering from crippling social anxiety when faced with the prospect of talking to strangers. I was this strong, confident woman. When ignored or rejected, it didn't hurt, because that wasn't what she would feel — even if it was what I would feel. She was not only my fantasy woman, but she was also my own fantasy personality — perhaps the person I wished I could be, or simply a person I knew that was very different to who I was. I'm not sure.

Anyway. There is a point to all this, at least I think there is: the reason I like to play female characters. I've already said it, actually, but I'll repeat it for good measure. There are two reasons, in fact: firstly, it's a simple, shallow expression of my own fantasy woman; secondly, it allows me to truly be someone that I am not in almost every way possible. I habitually use games as my primary form of recreation and a means of escapism, so I find a good way of escaping everyday life and the things I don't like about myself is to play someone that is so completely different from me. I don't feel any "dissonance", though; it simply becomes an alternate persona.

Perhaps the character traits of my fantasy female characters lie dormant within me after all, and all I need to do to feel better about myself is figure out how to coerce them to the surface. I did, after all, say at the beginning of all this that I identify more strongly with the stereotypically "feminine" aspects of my personality than the "masculine" ones (and, as I've said, I use those terms loosely as gender definitions are somewhat fluid in this more enlightened world we live in today) so perhaps there's something to this.

Working all that out, however, is probably something best left to someone with a qualification in psychology!