I am still unidentified

Another good question from Alicia Chenaux for the Big Bad Blogger Challenge:

SL Bloggers - Is your avatar more or less your current biological age? Do you portray a younger avatar, or older? Why is this?

This is actually an interesting question. When I first started in SL, I was in a standard avatar and had no real plans on age in the least. Then I became a stripper at the Enigma, and to my mind, I wanted to portray someone who had a little polish from experience, but not a large amount. Far enough from eighteen to be believable, but not too far to put gentlemen off who might want to tip.

I picked 23 as a good, stable age, and--at least officially--that was my age. It went into my escort bio, when I started escorting, and I did my best to 'play young'. Perhaps I did too good a job, because my first few years on SL saw me making all the same mistakes I did at 22.

In order.

It was somewhat maddening.

But since then, all I've altered is my behavior; when I stopped escorting, I stopped playing deliberately younger, but I never changed my look. Or, well, I changed my look nearly every day, I am a shapeshifter after all.

But SL is curiously ageless in this way; if we want to appear older, we have to find one of perhaps three skin designers who have made elder skins. Miss sachi Vixen is the person I always mention, but truthfully, there's not a lot of call for it. Everyone wants to look younger than they are, they say; the problem is, I look younger than I want to in real life, so why would I want to look younger in SL?

I think that's one reason I still get so upset when someone calls an avatar I'm in a child; outside of one specifically child-shaped, child-sized avatar--whom no one ever sees--everyone else I am is adult. I may be short--and, as SL spins on, growing shorter--but I am not a child.