Women in the West tend to show more skin in public, weather permitting, than men, and according to a new study they do so even more in online, virtual worlds. Generally, whether a person reveals more or less skin depends primarily on environmental factors like cold weather or intense sun, which may compete with a desire to bare one’s skin for social reasons like sexual attraction, making it impossible for social scientists to isolate the social reasons from the material ones. In virtual worlds like “Second Life,” however, the environmental factors are absent and cultural ones can be assessed on their own.

Using the online virtual world of Second Life, Dr. Matthieu J. Guitton, PhD, Associate Professor at Laval University’s Faculty of Medicine in Québec City, Québec, Canada, and Dr. Anna M. Lomanowska, PhD, a research scientist also at Laval, collected 404 user-controlled avatars (192 male and 212 female) in randomly selected public spaces between January 2011 and January 2012. Dividing the avatars’ bodies into 60 zones, the researchers were able to determine the percentage of skin each avatar chose to expose.

They found that virtual females reveal a lot more naked skin than virtual males. Female avatars exposed more than twice as much skin as males. Among male avatars, 71% covered between 75–100% of their skin while only 5% of females did. On the flip side, only 1% of males covered only 0–24% of their skin while 10% of females did.

As Guitton explained in a press release, “Virtual settings provide a unique tool to study human behavior unhindered by physical and environmental constraints. This tool enabled us to find a dramatic gender difference in the propensity to disclose naked skin.”

The study speculates that this phenomenon is not related to avatar hypersexualization because the shapes of the female avatars were not overtly sexualized by having unrealistic proportions, as is often the case with commercially created female avatars or video game characters. Perhaps, however, this fact is simply evidence of healthy sexuality on the part of the female avatar creators, who are comfortable revealing a lot of skin, but reject the disproportioned body images pushed by the entertainment industry.

-Matt Bewig

To Learn More:

Virtually Naked: Virtual Environment Reveals Sex-Dependent Nature of Skin Disclosure (by Anna M. Lomanowska and Matthieu J. Guitton, PLOS One)