Gender Roles

Gender and sex are two different things. Gender is social and sex is physical. Where I grew up, and many other places, there are two genders, male and female. Most will be brought up and socialised according to one or the other.
During the past decades there has been quite big changes to the female gender role, however one can question whether the same is the case for the male gender role. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen by the University of Oslo published a book called Modern Girls a couple of years ago, where she concluded that over the past three generations the gender roles are becoming wider and almost meeting in the middle, however the point farthest apart is further apart than it used to be. I think this is very positive as it increases the individuals options in terms of choosing a life of their own. Why are gender roles negative? Because they decrease each individuals opportunities and possibilities in making their own life.
One can question whether is makes sense to speak about sex in a virtual environment. You obviously have no physical body within the virtual environment, in part that is why we like it, so maybe it becomes a bit strange to talk of sex, which is physical gender, within a virtual environment? However when making a character in Second Life I have to choose a gender (sex) for my character very early on, and the alternatives are only male/female. In a world which should open up possibilities to humans, we are limited to being either male or female, a limitation which doesn't exists in the real world, physically we are all a little bit of both.
Trying to move this on. I have come across several discussions on whether or not you are obliged to say your real world sex in a virtual world community. I don't think so. You wouldn't have to tell your neighbours would you? Virtual worlds as an arena for playing with gender, identity and sexuality is both incredibly tempting and to me little bit frightening. To some it is very negative to find out that the person they have been speaking to is not what they thought they were. We make assumptions based on peoples gender and expect people to act accordingly. It is not necessarily immoral to break these assumptions and question why we have them. Some moral codes and boundaries must exist. At what stage would you be obliged to tell your gender to the person you are together with?
Within Second Life I note to myself that I wanted my body to look like it doesn't in the real world. I died my hair blond with a purple sheen, I became thinner and stronger, and was very worried about getting my boobs right. I play on stereotypes of what kind of female I would like to be.. not what kind of human I would want to be. Had I gotten a male body I suspect I would have been less concerned with how he looked, because he was never going to be a representation of me or a perfect version of me. even in Second Life a lot of the notions of how a woman "should" look is perfected by the avatars, or rather, the people behind the avatars.
Second Life offers opportunities to explore and play with gender, though set within the frame of male/female. The frame is easier to manipulate (the look of your body, your clothes etc) through different signifiers of identity. A conflict can arise when you are another gender in Second Life, than what you are in Real Life. Should one need to tell people about ones real gender? Does real gender has any significance in the relationships that are built within Second Life? Are there other rules in Second Life? After the ethical questions are answered, what is gender, what does it mean to you to be a male/female, would you change your gender in second life, would it make you behave differently?
Some of the articles I have read on the subject are posted on http://delicious.com/thirdlife_chitchat/gender