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I Feel
Pretty
From Chapter Four of Julian Dibbell's My Tiny
Life, ©1998
I should tell you now, I guess, about Samantha. Or
tell you, anyway, as much as I know about her, which is
either precious little or nearly everything, or maybe
both, depending on how you look at it.
I know, for one thing, exactly what people saw when
they glanced her way: It's really her, the brief
description read, twitching her nose just like she did
on the show. You see a light dusting of white powder on
her upper lip, which might explain the nose-twitching,
and an anxious dream of power in her eyes. I know,
too, exactly what she did the first time she showed up on
LambdaMOO. And exactly what she did on the last. And
roughly what she did on every visit in between. I know
that no one on the MOO knew her better than I did, or had
ever been closer to me than she was. Not exu, not even
Ecco.
But I may never know, I think, in any final way, the
things it mattered most for me to know about Samantha. My
intimate access to the facts of her online life was a
trivial achievement, after all. I'd made her, named her,
crafted her appearance and animated her every step, her
every utterance on the MOO. How could I not have known
her in the ways I did? To put it plainly, she was me: a morph,
in MOOspeak, or in a different language alter ego.
An "other self." And if the self I'd lived with
in RL for over thirty-one years remained in many respects
a mystery to me, I can't pretend my brief acquaintance
with this new one ever really let me grasp much more
about her than the basics of her virtual biography.
Precisely who she was to me, and to the world she lived
in -- these are the things about Samantha that I struggle
still to make some satisfying sense of, and suspect I
never will.
I'd had other morphs, of course, and would have more.
There was the dolphin -- Faaa, I called him, after the
tragic, finny hero of the 1973 movie thriller Day of
the Dolphin -- and the rest: a handful of text-bodies
I'd written and erased on the fly, or kept around for the
purposes of an occasional, joking transformation. But
prior to Samantha my morph-making had not yet crossed the
gender line, and from the instant I first stepped into
her, I felt the difference that same unsettling way you
feel the sudden lightness when an elevator starts to
drop.
The moment still lives fresh in my mind. I created her
one winter evening not long after the toading of Dr.
Jest: replaced my hefty description of Samantha's cousin
Dr. Bombay (I'd written him as a walking optical
illusion, oscillating randomly between the sitcom's
plump, pseudoscholarly fop and the image of a lean old
streetwise back-alley medic) with her four-line wisp of
text (It's really her...), typed a brief command
that rendered the sex change complete (@gender female),
and saved the persona to a new file under Samantha's
name. And then I headed out to show my creation to the
world.
Or more precisely, I headed out to show her to my
friend Sebastiano. Not that I wanted him
especially to see her, but someone had to, and Sebastiano
happened to be the only MOOer of my acquaintance logged
in just then. Besides which, I'd been meaning to pay him
a visit for some time. Sebastiano lived in an airy
cottage in the middle of Weaveworld, a rolling, woodsy
region of the MOO tucked in amid the fibers of a tapestry
hanging from a wall inside the barn, and he had promised
to show me around the neighborhood someday. The place had
been conceived in part, Sebastiano told me, as a sort of
subcommunity for Lambda's queer contingent, a realm where
the sympathetically oriented could build their homes and
fill in a landscape together, and I was curious to see
how this experiment in creative sociogeography was
working out. And so I joined my friend that night, and we
went walking, he and I -- a thirtysomething gay computer
scientist wearing the shape of a sullen teenboy
lust-object, and a heterosexual adult male wrapped in a
childhood recollection of pop-iconic femininity -- along
the leafy, moonlit pathways of Weaveworld.
At least I remember them as moonlit. I have a
lot of memories about that night, not all of them quite
accurate perhaps, but all still remarkably, sensorily
present to me. They linger largely as a series of lucid
images, the vibrant residue of a long and long-forgotten
scroll of monochrome text: our hike from Sebastiano's
cottage down a rolling green hillside, our pause amid a
tidy, village-like cluster of little sandstone buildings,
our passage through the small town square and on to a
vaguely tropical forest's edge, where we sat on benches
beneath the stars, watching an automated monkey
(Sebastiano's work) cavort among the trees. But most of
all what I remember is the curious, enveloping sensation
through which I apprehended these scenes, a sensation so
delicate I could barely pick it out from the surrounding
swirl of impressions and yet so insistently attached to
all of them I could hardly have failed to notice it.
Or ultimately to have identified it. For though at
first I couldn't have begun to say just whence this gauzy
feeling came, by the time Sebastiano and I reached the
monkey trees I knew there wasn't any mistaking its
source: it was Samantha's skin -- a woman's skin -- and
the feeling was that of being in it.
I hadn't expected anything like this. I hadn't
thought, in fact, that I'd really be aware at all of the
particular morph I was in. I'd hoped, of course, that
Sebastiano might take note of my makeover and say
something appreciative; and I felt gratified when he did.
But I'd assumed that after that Samantha's presence would
fade from my imagination, coming quickly to feel the same
way my other morphs tended to -- like costumes, donned in
the spirit of the vast, extended costume party LambdaMOO
sometimes seemed to be, but easily ignored once they'd
made their splash.
Not that I didn't feel a kind of closeness to those
masks, or sense certain deeply embedded aspects of myself
carved into the surfaces of some of them. My attachment
to the dolphin Faaa, for instance, was surely not without
some lurking totemic significance. And as for Dr. Bombay,
my core persona, I had no doubt that the flickering
ambiguity I'd written into his description -- its uneasy
suspension between intellectualized ridiculousness and
hardened competence -- encoded all sorts of conflicting
and barely examined truths about my self-image, both in
VR and out of it. But in the end, however meaningful the
statements these morphs made about me, in my mind they by
and large remained just that: statements, attached to the
phantom body I projected into MOOspace no more or less
intimately than any slogan I might wear on a T-shirt.
Whereas Samantha -- well, Samantha fit that body so
closely I couldn't really detect the place where she
began and the body ended. Nor did I very much want to.
For here was the second surprise about being Samantha: it
felt delicious. It felt soft, and graceful, and
sexually alluring. It felt receptive, and charming, and
poised, and several other ideally "feminine"
things I'd thought myself too sophisticated to imagine as
the defining aspects of a woman's inner life. Yet here
they were, defining my experience of virtual womanhood in
ways my intellect seemed to have nothing to do with, in
ways that bypassed all the layers of irony built into my
half-parodic identification with a half-parodic TV
witch-mom and went straight to whatever part of me it was
that found the fictions of gender as solidly believable
as the ground beneath my feet.
Was I at all embarrassed then, that night, walking
around possessed by so predictable a notion of what it
felt like to be a woman? On some level yes, I suppose I
was. But mostly, I confess, I was enchanted. Enchanted
with myself, no less -- or with this temporary
self, I should say, though it came to essentially the
same narcissistic thing. I chatted amiably enough with
Sebastiano about the sights and social affairs of
Weaveworld, but the truth was I'd lost all interest in
the questions that had drawn me there. By now I was
talking mainly just to hear myself talk, to hear the
words pass through my head in Samantha's voice, and if
there was anything in particular I wanted those words to
be about, it really wasn't anything but Samantha. I would
have liked to say exactly what it was I felt as I typed
the text that moved her body around, to say just what was
going on in my mind as I stood up playfully on one of the
benches, walked along its surface, threw my head back to
look up with a quiet smile at the stars.
But the words were slow to come, and when they finally
did arrive they were not any I could call my own. They
lent themselves to me, is how I'd put it -- rose up into
my thoughts out of the same basement warehouse of
mass-cultural memories I'd borrowed Samantha from. For a
brief Technicolor moment I saw Natalie Wood dancing
self-enchantedly before a mirror in her finest party
whites, and then the sentence just popped out, apropos of
nothing my friend and I happened to be discussing right
then but somehow, evidently, very much in need of being
said:
"I feel pretty!" I declared, to the bemused
Sebastiano, to the unhearing robot monkey, and to the
warm night breezes I swear I felt caressing the smooth
skin of Samantha's outstretched arms.
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