A Gallery of Toxic Femininity:
Video Games and Virtual World Avatars

© 2011 Max Dashu

Second Life and others feature glamor girls as the basic prototype for female avatars

These at least make no pretense of being anything other than cheesecake. There are TONS like this out there; they are the norm. Just google-image "video game girls."

There's a whole industry selling these rigidly stereotyped templates for women playing Virtual Worlds to use as their alter-egos. "This set of sculpted prims is based on the default Second Life female avatar, and can be used for all sorts of applications - statues, shop mannequins, figurines and more." Stick arms, and a thong that is way tight in the crotch. Ouch.

Did I say templates? To the max. These 3D primes are the base for the "variety" of female types, from warrior to demoness to witch or whatever. There's a name for this: cookie cutter avatars. Google female avatars second life, and you'll see how bad it is.

I found out that there is a whole genre of beaten female avatars (bloody men exist too, but what we are looking at here calls up the well-known, extensive, historic, horrific pattern of woman-battering). Look at the weird proportion of shoulders to head-width...

	And then there are the zomboid robotic figures, like this "blood-elf"-- more demonic fare. (This one had the Cher rib-extraction surgery, and closely follows Barbie proportions - no hips, pointed chin, protruding rocket breasts, spindly arms.)
There's a lot of bleedover from Anime, which has its own porn-charged imagery, like this "female dragon." The usual posing self-exposure, and with a waist narrower than her thighs. These anime types are extensively used in rape video games, known in Japanese as hen-tie games.

I protest!

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