InsaneJournal

Gaia, creating our own mirrors and choice.
One opinion that has always stood out to me as being particularly freeing and wise came from my best friend Catherine, concerning Gaia. I don't even remember how this came up (though I can imagine a context up pretty well), and it stood me good ground to this day.

'I've seen kids cosplaying their avatars, and that's kind of horrifying. You aren't your avatar. You aren't.'

With the fluidity of identity that's being thrust upon us with the new options of online identity and interactive social areas like Gaia or NewLife, a person whom isn't completley (or even on a process of) loving their own physical identity can be caught up in a very, very dangerous context. Gaia, for example, offers thousands of options in terms of manipulation of your basic avatar - changing skin, eye, feet... you name it, and you can most likely change it.

What can't you change?

Your default body shape.

Think about the above in this manner - no matter what choices you make or the like in terms of altering your digital physical appearance, Gaia (and any other site which allows as such) has forced upon you a default body type. That default body type? Thin and gendered. For women, it's dainty posture. For men, it's flat-footed fight-clenching posture. The posture for the women indicates daintyness; this isn't posture that communicates action. The men's posture does. It falls back into basic gender codings via Male Gaze - women are for looking it, and men are for doing things.

Even Gaia (which in terms of clothing option and the like is wonderfully progressive) falls to such a practice, for many reasons (technically, it's incredibly incredibly difficult to create pixel-based clothing which can be manipulated in size, and in terms of production time as a business, it's far quicker to do it for the one body type). Gaia does not exist in a vacuum; it's art team pulls inspiration from many sources and they are clearly learned in terms of art history and various cultural aesthetics. They've also come quite a way since 2003; actively altering their designs (or, in some cases, leaving them the same) for each gender identity to be inclusive of various body types and postures. It's always very fulfilling to see a design team recognize and work towards being more inclusive of their userbase. Another indicator of such is when Gaia introduced two more skin tones for it's avatars (bringing the total up to six). This was the first time I'd ever encountered anything actively including more diversity in skintone rather than decrying such an act. Considering most pixel avatar sites still only have 1 or 2 skintones, this was more or less the act that solidified me to Gaia in an ideological way.

In terms of paper mirrors and affirming one's identity through media however, this system of choice can be very dangerous because this can affirm the detrimental belief that if you don't have this body type, your body is wrong. When new users sign up for Gaia, a great number of them - trained via media and cultural consumption to hate their bodies - will find solace in the option that they can make their body as they please. They can latch on to what they feel their body should have been, as opposed to loving one's body for what one is. It reminds me of a quote from Kate Harding (via Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere) that I use frequently;

There's a big difference between saying you can't be anything other than what you are right now and you don't have to be anything other than what you are right now.

While Gaia doesn't actively decry other body types, it does little to nothing to glorify or celebrate fat bodies or bodies with limbs missing or the like. Furthermore, while the amount of choice available does create cognitive dissonance with those whom are very much structured to conservative heteronormative practices of Gender clothing coding - it doesn't actively encourage cognitive dissonance when dealing with body shape. Gaia's a playground with invisible rules - follow this body shape, but everything else is up for grabs.