Teaser

So, I'm going to be straight up with you: I am not feeling my best. It is only a cold, but I'm tired and my brain seems to be a little addled. I managed to lose my student card in the library today, which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't used it to get into the library in the first place. I need my card to check books out, and to exit the library - so that was a fun experience, let me tell you! 

Onto the SL stuff: I had it in my head that I had read a fantastic piece about nudity in relation to comic book characters and how suggestive nudity is relative. Clear as mud, I know. Allow me to explain.

The idea is that, if you are used to seeing someone completely covered up, the slip of a bare shoulder, or a flash of ankle, becomes much more provocative and flirtatious than a semi-naked character becoming nude. It comes, I suppose, from the allure of the unknown, and wanting something that you potentially cannot have. There is also a shock, I think, created by being given an image of somebody that in some way does not adhere to the usual image you have of them in your mind. You are being forced to acknowledge that person in a new way - forced to look at them in a different way - and that multiplication of contexts, if you like, can be intriguing. You've been given a teaser and you want to know more and the same goes, I suppose, for the exposition of a freckled shoulder or curve of calf muscle.

This is not an idea adhered to often in Second Life, at least in my experiences. There is the question, as ever, as to why a person should feel the need to cover their body, and I am certainly not an advocate for closeting people, especially women, away because something they are wearing (or not wearing) might be deemed sexually provocative or revealing. We shouldn't be ashamed of our bodies. On the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to be introduced to your virtual vagina by your skirt-belt and lacking underwear. There is a time and a place for that kind of thing. As you might remember, I was confronted with this issue on my first outing in SL (if you don't remember, click here) in a space that I did not expect to be, though the outcome was more amusing than anything else. 

I appreciate that, in SL especially, people have the right to exercise their free will (to a certain extent - sim owners still have control over what happens on their land!), but I would perhaps urge people to consider how they are using their bodies, and to what effect. Maybe this isn't a message that I really ought to be giving out, but (I think) all of my readers are adults, and you can handle it. If you are trying to manipulate the response of others, using your body as a weapon to attain something, even if only attention, be smart about it.

If after consideration, full nudity is still what you want to go for, then that's just fine.

Did it work here? Ah, possibly not.