Sex and the Gendered Body: in LambdaMOO and Second Life, Too

Boyd’s, Dibbell’s, Manovich’s and Burgin’s texts all argue for the Internet (or new media more generally) as a special type of space. Choosing the one you find most compelling, explain their conceptualization of online space and what’s at stake in it. To address why you find this concept persuasive, relate it to either one media object studied thus far (Douglas Engelbart’s Demo, Liz Canner’s Symphony of the City, Second Life, Time Code, the CAVE) or an example from the current new media landscape. In your analysis, explain how your media object both exemplifies and complicates this argument.


Julian Dibbell grounds his analysis of Internet space, rape and the gendered body within the Multi-User Dimension (MUD) called LambdaMOO. Dibbell himself experiences LambdaMOO as a space in a very literal way - he writes movingly about Lambda’s “rambling landscapes” (7) and the way that words in the chat room can “fill up the screen like thick cigar smoke” (21). When confronted with the physical reality of the computer that contains and maintains LambdaMOO, all Dibbell can think of is “how impossible it was to ever quite believe the place was not, in fact, a place… he could never quite shake the sense that LambdaMOO existed somewhere in a concrete sense… an X on the map of the material world” (7). LambdaMOO is actually composed of a series of virtual “rooms” defined only by textual descriptions and a limited set of programmed interactions, but Dibbell makes it clear from the start that LambdaMOO is to be conceived of as a very real space in the minds of its user community. One of Dibbell’s main analytical focuses is on the possibilities of the space to free users from the physical conventions of the “real,” physical world and the constraints of the human body - a focus that can be brought to bear meaningfully on the more technically-complex MUD that is Second Life.

Users of LambdaMOO define themselves however they want, by writing a short description of the appearance of their avatar. There are no limits on how a user can approach this description - Dibbell himself sometimes appeared as a dolphin. This freedom presents a proliferation of possibilities, which appeal to Dibbell as a challenge to transcend our real-world physical bodies. LambdaMOO, he writes, “asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones” (12). One of the socially meaningful differences between the virtual body and the physical one is that the virtual body need not necessarily be gendered in the conventional sense - characters have no sex, so the social requirement for gender is naturally somewhat loosened in LambdaMOO. One user, taking advantage of this freedom, crafted her character accordingly: a “South American trickster spirit of indeterminate gender” named exu (13). However, the total freedom afforded to Lambda users began to reveal its dark side when a rogue user, Mr_Bungle, exploited the system to orchestrate the virtual rape of two other users, including exu. Ironically, although the liberties of LambdaMOO afforded exu “a deity’s freedom from the burdens of the gendered flesh,” they ultimately led to her painful experience with “a brand of degradation all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied female” (15).

exu’s feelings of violation and of outrage may seem strange to those unfamiliar with the emotional power and realness of a virtual community - no physical contact was made, no law was technically violated. However, it is telling that the rest of the LambdaMOO community responded with strong emotion and the united conviction that the actions of Mr_Bungle represented a serious transgression against the community as a whole. This can best be accounted for by the redefinition of sex that is necessary to comprehend its role on the Internet. As Dibbell writes, “sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as it is an exchange of signs” (17). Sex, in the physical as well as the virtual world, is highly symbolic: this explains the ease and speed with which it has become a staple of online life. The woman who created exu was forced to respond to the rape both for herself and for exu - that is to say, in the contexts of both the real and the virtual world. Her response, Dibbell writes, “made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them” (16).

Today, the average Internet user is more likely to gravitate toward the immensely popular Second Life than to visit a text-based MUD like LambdaMOO. The experience of playing Second Life is more appealingly visual and more interactive than the somewhat outdated LambdaMOO experience. In some ways, the freedom and possibilities of LambdaMOO are enriched greatly in Second Life. Users can customize their appearance by actually altering or constructing a very sophisticated virtual avatar. The possibilities seem endless - skin color, hair color, size, shape, clothing - there are uncountable options for each. And virtual sex is commonplace, not only in terms of text exchanges between users - Second Life allows characters to use their computer microphones, and some technically ambitious Second Lifers have actually crafted “pose-balls” that allow two avatars to visually mime the act of sex. These incredible options make the embodiment of gender and sexuality in Second Life seem vastly more freeing than within the stale chat room aesthetic of LambdaMOO.

However, the increased complexity of the program does not come without a cost. In the interest, presumably, of making better avatars, Second Life forces you to choose a gender at sign-up. The enforcement of this binary restricts the freedom to transcend the physical body - a character like exu simply would not be fully possible in Second Life. When it comes to the actual act of engaging in sex with another character in Second Life, the sexual “pose-balls” may make it look real, but they are structured to be somewhat limiting - they are often actually pink- or blue-colored based on the gender of the character who is meant to use them. While the bizarre sexual antics of Mr_Bungle may have been offensive and harmful, they certainly pushed the boundaries of the heteronormative vision of “proper sex,” which is more enforced by the pink and blue balls than it is challenged. Second Life is an interesting sphere in which to study the continuation of new forms of liberty in cyberspace, but its increased technical sophistication does not necessarily produce an increase in real freedom.