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Years ago me and my lady -- R.I.P My Angel -- joined a social network that was akin to Myspace or Facebook, but each profile was given the ability to be voted on. One vote per member. I started to quickly gather many more votes than she did, simply because I offered a lot of tech support for the people who wanted to customize their profiles using CSS.
My lady was pretty disheartened, thinking that people didn't value the things she had to say (it was mostly a blog platform). I felt bad for her because she always put so much thought into all of her posts.
Fast forward to one afternoon; me and her had been out on a photo walk. I started focusing more on taking pictures of her rather than the nature all around us. We got home and she just instantly loved how one turned out and set it as her profile photo -- it was pretty much just her in some short hiking shorts and a tight fitting top. Tasteful, just normal outdoor wear. But wow, the flood gates opened. She started getting upwards of 50 votes a day on her profile and within just a few months had more than twice what I had.
After she tripled, then quadrupled my votes, she eventually took it down and put up the non-personal avatar she had in the first place. She said people were basically voting for her skin, not her thoughts and she was tired of the non-related, rude, even obscene comments that were being directed at her. Since then neither one of us had used personal photos as our avatars. We wanted our words to live on their own, rather than our looks influencing what people might think.
It was enough for us just for people to know that I was a guy, she was a girl, and the two of us were in love. Our opinions had nothing whatsoever to do with our avatars.
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