Alright, for those who know me in SL, I wander around mostly topless because…I like to. I always accepted that it was understandable that it was “Mature” to do so until a few days ago when I realized, after putting up a poster of a topless guy on XStreetSL, that it was rated PG whereas I was rated R for showing my nipples.

At that point, I took a bit of a turn and got a little bit angry. Whereas I was forced to blur out my own nipples if I wanted to be listed as PG, I didn’t have to do the same thing for the picture of the guy.

That really hit me very hard. I never really considered it much in RL, though I always knew it was silly, but suddenly I was actually being treated differently than a man simply because my nipples are female and not male.

So I’m starting an educational campaign which, I think, will demonstrate exactly how stupid this distinction is. I came up with the following poster to show off this incredibly fucking stupid ideology which divides topless women from men and puts us in a “different” category.

People may wonder why this hit me so hard. Well the point is that the two people in the picture are really one person: Me. I’m the guy in the picture. I made a male shape to model male stuff in SL and that’s when it hit me. You see, I’ve never been a male before. I never really was on the other side of the fence. It’s one thing to know something is really stupid your whole life, and it is another to actually realize how different it is when you just change your shape and are treated differently because of it.

Imagine, for a moment, changing your skin color, and people treating you differently for it. Imagine how people would be screaming holy hell if society said that black people had to cover up or be listed as Mature. That is exactly what this is like. It didn’t hit me until I had to post two basically exact same pictures on XStreet with me as the model – one as female and one as male, both topless. The male one can be listed as PG content when the female one cannot. Both are the same exact fucking person, the same avatar, just with a different shape. That’s when it really hit me, and that is when I got very angry.

Now I’m going to try to reshape people’s stupid little predelictions about the differences between the sexes and what constitutes as “offensive” or not. What I think is offensive is treating me differently because I suddenly have a different human form. That is offensive to me, and I’m tired of it. I hope this picture demonstrates how utterly stupid and insulting this current societal point of view is, at least in the digital world, where I don’t want to be treated differently.

It’s time to move beyond that.