Burka Babes of Second Life
Protest Unfair Treatment

To men (and women) who believe in tolerance and respect,

we are a group of god-fearing Afghan women currently living in Tora Bora. We discovered Second Life recently, when the CIA installed wifi for us in our mountains, and immediately loved it because, as you probably suspect, our RL (Real Life) world is rather grim and we welcome those escapes in our world, our imagination.

We, like anybody else, aspire to use virtual universes to live our dreams and fantasies as (we checked) there is no mention of acceptable behaviour in digital worlds in the Koran. However, despite Second Life being "your world, your imagination", we reckon that the acceptable imagination in SL is essentially derived from Western culture, that is, for us, an unbearable oppression, or even the digital re-creation of the idea of colonization and its "civilizing" principles, truly outrageous and shocking for a company like Linden Lab that boast of the resident-ruled nature of the universe they've created.

We are just asking for tolerance, is that too much to ask?

We thought tolerance was something Westerners value but, on Sept. 18th, we went to two different clubs in SL, just for having a little fun between ourselves, and got banned twice. Or, as we call it, "talibanned" because on both occasions cultural clash was clearly to blame.

The fact that we’re obviously not getting out much didn’t make the people around us feel empathy at all. In the first club, a jazz lounge called Blue Fusion, we tried to participate in a trivia event but the questions were all about things rather alien to us and we quickly found ourselves ostracized (“we're trying to have trivia tonight in a peaceful, respectful environment” said the host to one of us). It turned out that the answer to “What occurred in the Atacama Desert for the first time in 400 years, in 1971?” was not “someone not humping a camel” but how could we know that it was a llama.

And the “Beatles song that advises: ‘One thing I can tell you is you got to be free’” is not, as it happens, Just Kidding, Slut!. But then, did we complain that they were drinking alcohol? No. Clearly the bigotry only went one way because, on the other hand, they got instantly upset when we threw acid at the face of one of us - for revealing her ankle by mistake, which was clearly done in good-spirited humour.

In the second club, Loco, some of us got thrown 2,000,000 metres in the air just because we were saying how we enjoyed dancing, which was causing the itchy burlap of our burkas to chafe against our bodies, arousing us despite our clitorectomies. Now we would like to remind those western culture centred bigots that we enjoy having things thrown at us and not the other way round. Again, is a stoning too much to ask? We would even be glad to help and provide people with our self-designed stone-thrower attachments and HUDs.

We hope that you will make this scandal public. It would be the perfect occasion to raise awareness on the broadly offensive intolerance that is lurking everywhere around Second Life.