Erika Thereian is blonde and sports a California tan.  When playing online in Second Life, her avatar is a Pamela Anderson look-alike.

But for a lark, she recently remodelled her skin so that she looked more like Serena Williams, and spent three months in the digital world that way:

Some of her friends shied away, she believes. Then there were the "guys that thought I was an easy lay, for lack of a better term. It scared me honestly, some of the assumptions made. …I lost a couple of what I thought were good friends [who] stopped IMing and chatting. They were polite to a fault when I showed up, but [it] was weird.

Full story here.