The Wife and I made a foray into Second Life a few years ago.

No doubt you've heard of it, even if you've never been.

Must have been my birthday.

If not, imagine: virtual 3D world, free to join and participate, heavy demands on computing power, a steep learning-curve for the interface and a steeper one for designing 3D objects. You can buy land and other resources with a virtual currency, and if you design a virtual 3D object, and someone likes it enough to pay you, you can sell it and make money.

Economically, Second Life sits somewhere between your needs-driven scarcity model and your post scarcity, no-boundaries wonderland. (Like a hybrid of Minecraft's survival and creative modes.)

My wife is the personification of haute couture.

What we mostly wound up doing was hanging around one of the "Orientation Islands." This was a public space in the game where new players started out. It had a little course laid out to teach the basics of the game's challenging controls, and not much else - save a view of the water.

For whatever reason, it became the spot for a rotating group of regulars to hang around and chat, play music, and get into arguments. There were people there who had spent a fortune on developing private virtual property, which sat vacant because what people really wanted to do was hang out in the park.

And Orientation Island turned out to be one of the few places where you could have a halfway intelligible conversation. Halfway.

Orientation Island's welcoming committee.

We made some good friends there, and interacted with some personalities that I still remember six years later.

I never really got the hang of putting together a decent outfit (or body), and just settled on selecting a few of the objects that came with the default inventory.

But I did enjoy taking photographs. I appreciated the way you could move your vantage point from first to third person, even as your avatar sat in place. It was great fun zooming around and watching what other people were doing. (All photographers are voyeurs, I suppose.)

Boys being boys.

I found the choice of avatars so interesting. In many cases, people had invested a ton of time and money into them. Every element of their projected selves had to be chosen and constructed. And while the male avatars were all over the place: tattooed thugs, 1970s rock and roll getups, monsters, animals, and robots - the women chose to be - and please forgive me for saying this, because I'm only referring to the vast majority here - sluts.

I say, my fair lady, that I shall upvote that post!

Now, I'm not sure I want to get into an evo-bio versus rape culture debate here. Or maybe I do? If you'd like to get one rolling in the comments, be my guest! My reputation score would certainly welcome the activity.

Aggressively slutty sluts.

What's so fascinating is that Second Life, as much of modern technology, frees us to explore our fantasies and desires without any boundaries - physical or moral. And for many (most?) of the women there, they do this by inhabiting bodies that are so perfect and exaggerated that they could never exist in reality. But, perfect and exaggerated for who? For the men around them?

And the clothes! These avatars could wear anything, and be as elaborate and as fanciful as the least practical runway model. So why do they dress as they do?

Girls being girls.

At first I suspected that many of these players were actually men. I'll often choose to play a female character in a video game, especially if it's got a third-person interface. Because, why would I want to stare at a hunky male avatar for dozens of hours? (This is a corollary of Karl Pilkington's observation: "I'd rather live in a cave with a view of a palace than live in a palace with a view of a cave.")

Oh, Marmalade Writer, if you ever find your way onto Steemit, say hello. We both miss you.

But Second Life has voice chat as well as text, and my assumption was proven wrong again and again. Either voice modulation software had become ubiquitous and flawless, or these were actual ladies.

The conclusion (since I'm foolish enough to draw one here) is that women want to have the same sorts of bodies that men want them to have. For whatever reason: advertising and conditioning, social pressure, historical oppression, or maybe just the evolutionary necessity of attracting a mate (whoops...)

As a man, hey, I guess it's part of my sinister privilege that the vast majority of women work so hard to keep themselves hot. Does that mean I shouldn't look?

But once you project this impulse into a world with no limits, the desire for perfection converges on a dreary sameness.

That's why The Wife decided to break the mold and go for a more mature, dignified look.

I guess that, once you've attracted a mate, there are better things to do. Like riding horses.

Or transforming into a giant monkey head with wings and flying around the place.

Because, really, if you can be anything you want to be - why should you feel constrained to have anything recognizable as a body at all?

Question time!

• Have you played Second Life? Do you still play today? This site suggests that there are still 40,000 -ish people on at any given time. Are you one of them?
• What does our choice of virtual persona have to say about who we are? And should it matter?
• With so much stunning high fashion to draw inspiration from in the real world, why does the virtual one end up so skanky?
• Should I have chosen a thumbnail with a sexier avatar? Would virtual tits have brought in more votes?