The avatar gender setup in meta VR forces all users including men into metrosexual/nonbinary style.

a) I really don't like not being able to look how I want

b) this is an insane business decision, to FORCE all users to look this way, for a 200b company

c) by the moral standards of the people who are really into gender stuff, forcing random people to see themselves as other genders physically and by their clothing and makeup, and making it impossible for us to look at all the way we are in real life or as we want, is its own type of misgendering.

There are thousands of posts on various forums, reddit etc of normal guys being like "how do I switch my avatar back to male; everything I put on here makes me look like a girl, even if I have a beard, it just forces me to look like a chubby girl wearing man's clothes and a beard".

Background

I just set up an meta quest pro and the avatar situation is wild. You don't pick gender; rather you let it take a picture. This is me, by the way.

I let it take a picture of me, and then it generated a default avatar. But all the avatars, even male, look VERY female/stereotypically gay in the American style (posing, hands on hips, very tight pants, very sharp points around eyes resembling makeup, very large hips/lumpy non-masculine torsos, small shoulders for all avatars) and all the clothes available are clearly unisex with very baggy areas in the chest to perhaps allow for binders or similar.

It's very obvious in the design of all the helper avatars too.

Now, I went to a liberal college and am with the program. I had gay friends and talked to them, and I worked in a sexual health office around all different types of people and was curious about them, their lives and stories and challenges. Professionally I worked with a bunch of gay/trans people and we got along fine, I was curious about them and they were good to me overall. I didn't think about it too much and liked the work they did towards our shared goals. That's all fine, everyone has their path. And I'm also fine with giving people options. But come on now, the fact that in Meta VR I simply cannot make my avatar actually look like me is nuts. You literally cannot avoid having your avatar look like you are a member of a relatively rare subculture which emphasizes sending opposite gender signals. This group is fine to exist, but I'm just saying, why am I required to have my avatar be in it?

Getting down to business

I cannot imagine that this had no effect on the millions of (stereotypically bearded, masculine-interest focused historical audience for VR). Just thinking about my friends who were into VR from the start - they were: bearded, very non-social and very into math, physics, awkward at dancing, loved building things with their hands. You may know the type - they wear graphic t-shirts from Linux conferences they've been to, play video games all the time - I think you're getting the idea here.

It's really really strange to FORCE this audience to adopt avatars whose style is VERY different than those guys typical personal choice of self-presentation.

I'm also super surprised Zuck hasn't just said like hey wait a second here, I personally look more masculine than the most masculine avatar available on the platform (judging by shoulder:waist ratio, jawline, body shape, shoulder/bicep protrusion, quad size, way of moving/walking), isn't that weird? And just force the avatar team to stop it and add reasonable options.

And like, hey ya'll, I renamed the company for this and took a HUGE amount of flak... if you all don't like, stop making all the avatars look gay/nonbinary, you may have to like, be fired from the company. cause we kind of, uh, want our users to be happy making their characters and stuff, like lots of other games and systems. So like, keep the section for nonbinary people and stuff, but add a section of clothes for everybody else.

Product choices

The design of this system is extremely polarized to a specific subculture in SF. It's a group of people who constantly try to send opposite gender signals. This means men emphasizing their feminine aspects, and women doing the opposite. It's fine that people do that, if they want. But product wise they made these choices which push everyone to doing that type of thing

• No gender chooser - unlike nearly every game ever where people who want to be in a single traditional type, this is gone. You can't start off just indicating "hey I'm a guy/girl, I mostly want to wear that kind thing"

  • This is against every single clothing store in the world, which naturally separates and labels the sections. Anyone can go to any section, and that's okay, but by default, you don't accidentally or consciously have to choose every time. You go to your section if you like and then stay there or leave by making a decision about it.

• Mixed item presentation

  • within the catalog, all items are mixed together. You have male jeans next to blouses next to saris next to cowboy outfits. No real world store operates this way because it's just not convenient, given that 90%+ of people have a policy of nearly never buying or wearing opposite sex clothes. Even if we all think it's fine to do, still, nearly nobody does it regularly.

• Lack of respect for large groups

  • I've been speaking from my own POV, but let me tell you, there are LARGE groups who are way way more uncomfortable with this than me. Groups which FB loves and regularly appeals to, for example women from religious groups which require them to wear head coverings. Those groups are really, really, really not cool with guys wearing women's clothing or vice versa. Let alone just the majority of the US, and a much larger majority of every country that FB is trying to market their product to. e.g. China which at times has banned gender bender style from TV. And lots of people, pretty rightly, might think it's weird that a game pushed their kid to cross-dress. Like, imagine you send your boy to kindergarten and he comes home in a dress. Not the end of the world, but like, everybody would wonder hmm wait a sec I wonder how that happened, like, what's the teacher like?

• Intentionally pushing people to transform and see themselves as the other gender

  • This app is designed to make it very hard for that not to happen. The design of the icons for eyes, for example, hides the gender signal it's going to give your avatar if you click it. So you end up clicking various eyes, and half of them are super super girly, and the only way to know is by wearing them. It seems designed to constantly trip people into accidentally feeling and imagining themselves to be the opposite gender. This is against what nearly the entire world does. Imagine if when you joined a company or team that had uniforms, they randomly sent you the male or female uniform. And they were like "it's okay, just wear it the first day, if you want to switch, we'll give you a new one". Let me tell you, if you think that'd be okay, you're insanely wrong. 95% of all organizations in the world, of all types and including max diversity would view such a plan as completely and totally unacceptable, including like basically every tribe, every native people, every first peoples group, every military, every religion, every professional organization in almost every country in the world of all politics and race and belief. It's not at all normal or accepted culturally to put people in situations where they express the opposite sex clothing or style or appearance characteristics except in very rare and special, limited circumstances. It's basically a type of force misgendering, in a sense; offensive in the same way that it would be to randomly take a kid who looks and acts like a boy, paint a picture of him as a girl, and send it to him. People would feel that's really icky and weird and unwanted. But that's what this app does.

This image is basically what happens in the app. It's this jarring.

So what's really wild is that this gigantic product launch, which went along with RENAMING THE COMPANY, somehow was also attached to a very very opinionated and unusual and somewhat dismissive approach toward allowing or accepting most of the world (and a very large majority of early adopters personal preferences). This makes no business sense. And the failure of FB VR was kind of a big thing, considering how much money and hope went into it.

Comparison:

Wii

Males look fine; the body is very lumpy but facially they're very clearly male

Roblox

The males look okay, just like kids, which is fine for the platform. Shoulders broad, etc.

Fortnite

Yeah duh Tim Sweeney isn't stupid

Meta VR male characters

1/ The insanely nervous-looking eyes of the first person, no breast line.

2/ That pear-shaped body, no breasts.

3/ Jussie Smolett. Those super insanely tight jeans and skinny quads, matched with wide shoulders, visual focus on the crotch and that knowing, probing, questioning smile and unusual eyes.

4/ That fearful and fake looking cheerleader with a really strange body angle (probably to hide any hint of breast? and a football for some reason? Football is still one of the most sex-polarized sports in the US (compare to soccer, bball) by choice of men AND women; yet this image signals it as linked to both of the female-presenting people).

5/ The skinny, drug dealer looking backwards hat guy with criminal-style 5 o'clock shadow, weak legs, asymmetrical appearance.

These avatars are WEIRD. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it's clearly the product of a known group which has a policy of maximally valuing opposite gender signals. That's just what they love to do, and they do it whenever they can, and they like it and talk about it all the time. Given that, the way the status presentation goes is completely typical and predictable.

This group is fine, whatever - but why should a gigantic billionaire-led company decide that this group should control the way ALL their global users should be allowed to present themselves? Zuck is smart enough to see what's going on here. How can he just not say hey, you guys... stop doing that or you're out and I'll hire another graphic design group which just makes normal avatars, who would accommodate everyone, include everyone, all SF type people, all CA people, all americans, all people of the world, EVEN people who wear clothing which wouldn't be "cool" in SF or whose gender presentation isn't "edgy".

This claim

If, by mid 2024, FB has done the reasonable thing and somehow found a way to ship an update to their avatar system so that out of the box, without spending money, I can just make my avatar look like a normal guy who works in a factory or something. Without lumps sticking out, without super tight pants emphasizing the butt, with just normal shoes, that just looks like a guy who would appear billed in a hollywood movie as a normal role, "truck driver" or "baseball player" in a pre 2000 US movie.

I'm rooting for fb to be more inclusive and let me do what I want here. There is a very easy compromise that doesn't require giving up the freedom of all people, even rare or new groups, to look how they want. But it does require those people to accept my right to control my style, too.