A Nation of Sex-Keepers

I started this entry a while back, then parked it, because I was trying to find more statistics. But now I have to finish it as Hamlet Linden has published an utterly preposterous article about sex in Second Life claiming it represents only five percent of the economic activity (!), and Tony Walsh has begun the challenge to this odd claim.

Hamlet uses as his example, of all things, the Barbie Club. My God in heaven, he hasn't walked a 16 m in my shoes or he could never write this tripe. I live and work in the same sim as the Barbie Club has for more than a year until just last week -- in fact, Refugio was my very first sim parcel purchased off the auction.

Night and day -- those times that I and my tenants could even get on the sim! -- Barbie maintained an absolutely 24/7 hopping joint of dozens of avatars -- 28-38 at any given time. There were the lap dancers and pole dancers, the tip jars, the vendors of suggestive clothing, and then the skyboxes, lounges, rooms, scenes, teleports to exotic adventures for 30 minutes for various prices. She had a system where you had to pay the teleporter even to gain entrance to the rooms. She has a sideline in porn movies; yet another booming business giving advice to girls on who to become "bimbos" -- read: whores.

Hamlet's unbelievably, deliberately dense tekkie-wiki literalism, goes something like this: Playboy magazine isn't 30 percent about sex. After all, it is made up of woodpulp and glue. Look at all the white space on these paper pages. Why, there's an ad for cars or make-up, and that's not about sex. Oh, and here, this page has the post office bulk permit information, and that's not about sex. Oh, and over here, there's page numbers, and even look, articles about skiing. So the majority of this magazine is not about sex. How can you say Playboy is even 30 percent about sex? It's only 5 percent about sex. You can't say the woodpulp processing paper industry is about sex, can you? The U.S. Post Office is far from sex. And those cars and that make-up -- these all are industries that have a wider application, not sex. In fact, when you get right down to it, sex is not really involved in Playboy magazine becaue thousands of people make their living in the industries used to produce Playboy magazine, as a kind of afterthought, to their need to have jobs and lives not bound up totally with sex.

You get the idea.

In the same mind-numbingly stupid and manipulative way, Hamlet describes the Barbie Club -- the fucking BARBIE Club!!! -- as being made up of textures, and plywood and um...whatever. You have to read it to get the full monte. It's amazingly dense. The fact is, Barbie is all about sex, and takes pride in it. There isn't a dime dropped at Barbie's that isn't about sex. So this place, and the dozens more like it, are the engines of the sex economy, at one level, but I'd submit that if any five percent is meant, it would only apply to these clubs on the most popular places list. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. And you simply cannot extrapolate that if the 2 to 10 percent of the people who make a lot of the content in SL make it for settings not always used for sex, that somehow, they are bracketed out of the sex economy. The sex economy IS the economy of Second Life and *everything* touches it.

Only dweeby dense Hamlet could look at a scene with nearly-naked pole dancers with dollars on the floor signifying the tips that over-eager horn-dogs have thrown at them, and say that "the money is not erotic".

And here's where Hamlet gets at his most dweeby:

"To express this observation as a rough ratio, every time two avatars engage in sex, twenty content creators have spent untold hours creating and selling aspects of the environment they’re in, most of which having little to do with their chosen activity. In that sense, Second Life porn and erotica are, at best, a niche business dependent on a much larger, much more multi-varied market."

Content creation is only 10 percent -- 20 tops, if we add in more amateurs -- of what the population does. While the debate is now couched strictly in terms of what economic activity is engaged in, to really capture the spirit of SL, it should be seen not only in economic terms. Sex is completely determinant of the atmosphere, culture, and activities in SL. It is the flywheel of the economy, but it is also the underlying substrate of just about every transaction.

So, like I said -- the glue, the page numbers, the bulk permit, the ski articles, and the car ads...and um...all those hours of the day that the dollar-room at Barbie's is used for studying 18th century poetry with Urizenus in a salon...so the Barbie Club isn't about sex.

Hamlet couldn't be more wrong.

My God, this is totally nuts. Five percent? huh?? Even 30 percent is very low. I estimate that the figure is more like 60 percent or more.

First of all, it's very shortsighted to look at only sale of actual genitalia or X-cite type equipment, or only sale or blue movies. That's only part of the sex economy. The other big part of it is land, sexual furniture of various kinds, poses, outfits, paraphernalia, pictures. When Hamlet lists all these "other" elements of the economy like casinos or furniture or rentals, he is densely missing the point that the overwhelming point of all these things is sex. And I don't mean in some generic way like "love makes the world go round" in some popular song. I mean that people land in the Welcome Area, looking for sex, sometimes naked, with their cheap newbie dicks at the ready. They play in casinos to be able to afford the sex rooms and skyboxes in clubs or even their own little rental. They dress up, go out, socialize purely to have sex. And they do this more and more and more, obsessively and compulsively.

To try to separate out something called "rentals" away from "sex" is an utter absurdity. I've noticed a real change in the way people behave in rentals. Over a year ago, I would actually see people just socialize, with open windows, in PG mode. Or they would build, or make elaborate gardens, or putter around with inventions, amateur or professional. I could always see a certain percentage of people engaged in that sort of creative and PG socializing effort. People also used the rentals to hold events more -- discussions, yard sales, philosophical debates, games of various types.

Today, I see more like 80-90 percent of the rentals involved in saturation sex, in almost a grim mode. You would think, this nation of sex-keepers, planning for, earning, spending, and arranging for sex almost the entire time they are online, would be nicer, because ideally, as do get their partners and they do have sex endlessly (the X-cite parts never wear out!) while online, they should be in a good mood. Wouldn't that make for a sweeter disposition?

You would think that people able to mutually masturbate and come anywhere from 1 to 5 times a day in RL while online on Second Life would be people who are just nicer people. After all, they are getting something that they are deprived of, or don't get enough of, or can't find a partner for, in real life. You'd think all those endorphins released would make them positively a joy to deal with.

But they aren't. Instead, they grow as surly as junkyard dogs. Having found a partner, the men especially, but also some particularly aggressive women, become obsessed with hanging on to them, making sure they don't cheat, and make sure they don't go on alts and have sex with other people. The worry about this can completely sap the joy out of their Second Life -- and judging from all the alt activity and all the affairs and all the secret hideaways people get on top of their main locations, they have every right to be worried.

There are also legions of kids, Peeping Toms, and griefers flying around trying to spy on people having sex since they haven't got the social skills or the money to arrange their own sex in private -- and sometimes merely because they enjoy other peoples' suffering. This spawns more and more anxiety in women especially -- they just don't want strangers to watch them having sex that in fact they have enough trouble being comfortable about doing with an anonymous Internet stranger in the first place.

So that spawns an ever more intense quest of maximum security -- spending on elaborate security systems, watch dogs, bots, orbs, bouncers, and weapons. The thing that makes them the most hysterical is when other people get on their sex pose balls. When that happens, they go into a seething rage. You would think it wouldn't matter, since it's not like a stranger's cum gets cooties on their sex balls, and obviously they can't catch a STD. But they simply cannot listen to reason.

I have to assume that something biological is hard-wired here. That people are coded to try to go and have sex in private, because perhaps in the wilds of pre-history, animals would capture them if they were tied up having sex, and maybe eat them. Or perhaps it evolved as part of the whole strategy to keep paternity a known quantity. Some scientist could surely explain this curious need, while anonymous and unseen online, to further hide the avatar who is going through his paces on the poses.

Of course, we know down through the ages, the institutions of the family and even entire kingdoms hinged on the idea of paternity and keeping the male line. But in Second Life, none of that prevails. There is no DNA; you can make a copy of anything; there are no children, no lines, no dynasties that you don't just make up on the spot in an RP. So none of these factors really can explain this obsessive preoccupation with security and privacy.

But it's definitely all about more sex, more elaborately violent and BDSM sex, more and more extreme and hideous sex, like simulated child rape, and more efforts to create maximum security around the partners and more elaborate gimmicks. Like other island owners, I have only to turn on "top scripts" to get an eyefull, the most elaborate stuff, the most expensive stuff, the wierdest stuff, and the greatest eaters of script time, like a .05 gismo called "cum dripper".

I think it's absolutely safe to say that sex absolutely drives the SL economy in a thousand ways. The main reason people buy land is to have sex on it. The main reason people go to clubs is to find sexual partners. The main reason they show for clothes is to appear sexy. The challenge these days is actually to find the other non-sex related activities. Oh, sure, yeah, we know there is some self-help group meeting, hundreds of universities, blah blah. But this is the minority of activity. And a lot of those actors are out getting sex, too, after they finish their other stuff.

So Intellagirl is asking the right question. And frankly, the Lindens, who secondlifelog EVERYTHING, *do* have these answers, but aren't talking. The answers used to appear as a running ticker on the first page, and you can still glimpse that ticker oddly enough on the sign-ups page. The "last 10 items purchased in world" used to routinely have things like "dancers' tip jar" or "X-cite this or that" or "Barbie club" or whatever.

The Lindens took that ticker off the front page where it used to run, because it revealed that most of the activity in Second Life was sex and gambling. No, people weren't buying little miniature copies of "Snowcrash" and earnestly tipping book club jars...

The lower the class, the less the level of education, the greater the hysteria about hiding, pulling the blinds, locking the doors, making sure no one barges in, making sure no one ever uses those balls in the owner's absence, and having sex until some RL event or necessity forces them to log off.

As a rentals agent, I accommodate this to the extent possible, but like other rentals agents, I don't allow security orbs because they are nasty, aggressive weapons bouncing and banging other people around merely for dinging the edge of your parcel, when they may merely live next door to you. Hamlet, do me a favour and count the sales and ownership of the economy of Psyra Psyke's Defense System and the other security orbists whose products are 98 percent about security sex. And drop any silly notion of 5 or even 30 percent.

I don't know if the surliness involved is related to people staying up all hours with no sleep; with the irritability they get for fear of being discovered by partners in RL; with the anxiety they develop over security, security, security (which is merely about the privacy of sex, except for that .000027 percent of the population scripting). It may well be that all the whipping, chaining, beating, collars, and torture on wierd implements also begins to take its toll on people's minds and characters.

I constantly find people now bleeding over all that aggressiveness, arrogance, violence, and servile attitudes of BDSM into other ordinary transactions. That's always been my concern, and fortunately, most BDSMers seem to keep it inside on their own lots, and not force it on you. There'd be a minority who would clank around in their collars and chains at public meetings and refer to themselves in the third person, but you actually didn't see too much of that.

Now, with the more organized and "quality-control" BDSM becoming more and more diluted, more and more mass, more and more departed from its "classic source," if you will, you see more and more of this "lifestyle" bleeding into every other aspect of SL, whether or not consensual.

The other day this BDSM ass tried to harangue me for an hour over a simple matter: following up on my notice to the group, which he had received like all other tenants, I was raising the rent in one building where it had previously been discounted due to lag (thanks to the Barbie Club -- which had a veto on my land and its use for more than a year, and which has left behind in the form of Stacey Sugar's partner's store, a laggy, ugly mess of an animated gifs store. I rarely call for boycotts; I heartily endorse the notion of boycotting the Barbie Club for this act of nastiness they perpetrated on the other owners of the sim all that time -- and continue to perpetrate even though they've now left for their own island. Seriously, until people everywhere begin to stand up to these club-thiefs and bully-clubs that put 38 avatars on dance pads on a sim and suck out its CPU and FPS, we will never get anywhere. Boycott them, take your custom elsewhere.)

So not only do I refund this dweeb, I explain to his subserviant collared idiot girlfriend that the rent is going up, just as I explained to him in IMs, and that refunds and credits are being given. I refund him all his unused time, plus the cancellation fee. Then, because he had just hastily paid my box when I arrived to reset other empty boxes, and was engaging in the usual tactic that tenants always do when you notify of a rental raise -- namely try to pay ahead to beat the increase -- I notified him that I was making the change right then and there, so that I didn't forget, as he had attempted to pay ahead.

I told him I was giving him right then and there a credit for the difference between the two rates fo the 2 weeks before it would go into effect. I sent him cash then -- so that he had 3 cash transactions from me. He told me he was busy but he wanted to TP in and "talk to me". There was nothing to talk about. The rent was going up. Hey, $1.50 US month rent was a bargain, but so is $2.70 US a month, dude, heck, drink one less latte and STFU for God's sake.

He then proceeds later to write me this ridulcous imperious BDSM-laden screed, using these typical tactics of the BDSM scene:

o repeated, escalating humiliation attempts in imperious fashion
o exaggerated, emotional, escalating drama
o repeated, haranguing, humiliating references to one's ostensible wrongdoing in making a third party suffer
o use of dramatic all caps
o completely exaggerated description of the situation, rendering himself as extraordinary victim
o dramatic threats
o running to the rentals group of 620 people to tell them to boycott me

These, of course, are the stock-in-trade of every drama queen in SL, and ever tenant facing his miniscule Linden-script rentals getting raised. I've seen and heard it all. But the BDSM memes and scripts and acts are more and more widespread, precisely because the BDSM people cannot or will not stop their consensual role-play with others, and cannot cease using it on ordinary people -- like a landlord -- who aren't in their game.

So this dude first tells me that I am a THIEF and have committed THEFT, shouting in all caps. Here's a guy who just got hundreds of my Lindens dollars ROFL, calling me a "thief".

Even after I carefully write him about his refund, his return of his cancellation fee, and his payment ahead with a credit (which he might have just run away with), and he learns, for the first time (this is often the way people do it) that there is such a thing as the transaction record, he still keeps up the harangue. How could I do such a thing? Leaving his girlfriend anxious about the loss of their home as she went on a 16-hour RL double shift. The shame! The horror!

Naturally, I *did* have to wonder why said girlfriend couldn't muster a lousy 75 cents US -- three quarters out of her waitress job or whatever -- to pay ahead on this now-expired box that sat awaiting in the apartment to be paid -- by a guy who said he was coming right back. Honestly, people are fools.

Naturally, I *did* have to wonder why, if the apartment has a locked teleporter, with shades down, and the ad has the apartment number now removed from it, and if there is no advertisement for that number, then how could you portray the apartment, my property in any event, now "stolen" from the tenant. But let's just say it could be (I have a rule that anyone can pay a box that has expired and ask to have prims removed). Answer: since I've already *given a credit* to a guy to enable him to *pay with* and talked to him and his collarree about how they now had to pay the new rent as I was not going to risk forgetting to come back and reset the box, he might imagine that, hey, if someone accidently did grab the box, I would remove them and put them in another *empty apartment on the other floor*.

Lots more haranguing, lots more idiocy, lots more of surly threats and pompous, imperious asshole hectoring, whining, and sounding off even in the group, saying "Please speak to me before renting here ever again" blah blah. And...why? Because I raised my rent a bit, and *gave the guy a cash credit to pay it with for 2 weeks*. Most landlords would just blow ever single prim instantly off the land and reset the box and not even discuss it lol.

But why all this angst? Why would a grown woman going to a RL job to make presumably at least enough to pay *a $1.50 US for her SL rental per month (!)* ever WORRY about her apartment? Because her boyfriend spread his worry and obsessiveness to her, and he had only one thing on his mind: how to secure his sexual security and his prey so that no one else could get at it.

I have to tell you, this makes for a real, real, REAL nasty way of life and society in Second Life. So much of the round of security-shooting-angry-fighting originates in such deeply assholic type needing his sex pad wired down. It permeates everything. It is hard to get anything done without going around this. You call up someone to do a job and their partner tells you frankly they are cybering -- which they do for hours, addictively.

In RL, sex is attached to reproduction, or to part of a greater emotional relationship creating companionships and shared interests in other things besides sex, and even with 1/3 ending in divorce or more, sex is attached to marriages. These marriages and children or partnerships built around some sustainable project higher than either individual, and higher than sex, involves things like making a RL household, like pursuing a career, or companionship, or raising the children. All that is different than what happens in Second Life, which is only about sex, and the accessories to sex, and more sex, and securing the means and place and way to have sex. Little else matters.

In Second Life, the epitome of the awfulness that happens is that 2000 people or more join the club of the tyrannical Angel Fluffy called Capture Roleplay so that they can, dressed as animals, run around a maze or woods and RP the capture and rape of another animal. Angel Fluffy, as a result, has become diabolically obsessed with security -- not only to strain out ever gnat that doesn't abide by his elaborate capturey rules, but also anyone attacking furries or deviants as griefers.

He gets on every single Ban List. He advocates more and more and MORE fine granularity and endless control and vetting and screening to keep out anyone interrupting his intensive brand of sex-obsessed role-play. I catch him telling other groups that I am "a notorious griefer" because he doesn't like my expose of his coup in SL. He prides himself on his enyclopedias of BDSM for sale, and he is what you might call a Captain of Industry of the Metaverse -- but a captain of an industry with no manufacturing or goods in the real world, only the satsifying of the violent, over-sexualized imaginations of those on line.

I wish we could say there was something redeeming about the sex of Second Life. I do keep hoping that in fact it may turn out to be, though I know better. Indeed, I often tell myself, according to some ancient teachings, sex and creativity are centers or parts of the human psyche or being that are very close to each other, or even interchangeable or symbiotic. Part of the reason that Second Life unleashes so much sexual energy, so some spiritual theories go, is that this is the raw and crude form of what could be a finer and higher creative energy. Perhaps it will be channelled in the right direction eventually.

But this sort of fictionalization of human behaviour aside, I think you have to document what is really going on, not what you wish to be going on. In part because there are more masses of people in SL, but in part because the diluting of the intensity of the higher artistic and technical networks (that Urizenus imagines occur on a wider scale they do) ultimately, the story is that sex has utterly corroded Second Life. It is now no longer redeemable. Only by opening other PG grids on completely different principles could you pry it apart. And would you want to?

The Lindens unleashed this increasingly violent and extreme sex (of the kind you can read in this awful article ), and helping BDSM to spread virally in SL as well as RL culture, did so in the name of creative freedom and unwillingness to censor or block anything anybody wanted to do. Fuck-you hedonism is the credo of Second Life that the Lindens believe must be the foundation of their world.

Why that would make for a *better* world, however, escapes me. What we have is a worse world -- more surly, nasty, hateful people not forming networks or societies, but forming sex nests in 2s or 3s or larger groups utterly devoted to gaining the most personal pleasure by using the most people, often as violently and as humiliatingly as possible. It is sex shorn of all human dignity, and of all communion of the souls -- with a giant NO ENTRY or YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO CLEAR THE AREA shouted at anyone who comes near.

Comments

[Economic Mip]

Well that was informative, if long. I have to hand it to the Fortune article a few issues back which contained the line "... and sex clubs, lots and lots of sex clubs." For the first time the truth was out in the mainstream print. Why would you want a non-sexual area of Second Life? The answer is in retention. (Currently only about 1 of 10 users stay on for a month, likely those other 9 found something so repulsive they ran).

[Desmond Shang]

Meh. I was hoping you would post about this, actually:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/09/state-of-the-virtual-world-%e2%80%93-key-metrics-january-2007/

(State of the virtual world, key metrics Jan 07)

Wondering if you see the same thing on it's way in the next year or two that I do, buried in the numbers.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, I'm still studying those spread sheets. I posted a bit to Raph Koster's blog.

Um, I dunno, why don't you enlightend us as to your big insight , Desmond.

[Mierin Sodwind]

All one has to do to get a good view of how sex-preoccupied SL is is to click on 'popular places' in the search menu. That, in and of itself, speaks more powerfully than anything you have argued here. Second Life is largely synonymous with Sex, though not without exceptions. Given the fact that almost all people (Lindens included) are embarrassed about sex (let alone fetishes), one can see how this gives groups like the W-Hats a perfect environment for teasing others.

Hamlet Linden is almost certainly one of these people who is embarrassed about the presence of various forms of sex in the game his company has developed. The figure of 5% is absolutely absurd. Granted, that figure might actually represent the amount of money that is spent by players on sex-related items such as dildos, nipples, poseballs, and whateverthehell else they buy, but, as you say, that completely disregards the existence of virtual prostitutes, cover-fee charging clubs, perverse textures, etc. People like sex, and they want to have as much fun as possible while having it, whether virtually or in real life.

Hamlet’s figure of 5% is almost without a doubt an attempt to ‘sanitize’ the sex-driven economy of Second Life, at least with respect to PR. The Lindens want to make their game look innocent, a desire that is understandable, but as any long-term player of the game will tell you, this attempt is almost laughable. I’m fairly certain that they gave this figure with good intentions in mind, but as you say, it is totally misrepresentative of the game’s (virtual) reality.

[Prokofy Neva]

Mierin, the popular places are gamed by having people log in alts and having the camp chairs where people sit on them or dance on dance pads in order to generate traffic.

When I asked to get a different figure from the dbase, what the ranking was of what people put in their own picks, which isn't as gamed by any stretch, it was interesting to see that more sort of generic PG places landed in the list then, like The Shelter or The Lost Gardens of Apollo or the Ivory Tower of Prims.

So I wouldn't let that be the metric. Still, no question that most of the top places, even taking off the camp chairs, are going to be about sex. That's what people are there for. And who could stop them, or should stop them?

what will likely happen is that Hamlet will really dig in on this, he's stubborn, and he'll keep insisting that what he means isn't even the economy per say but the activities people are engaged in. So he'll try to say that what he meant is that people spend hours creating textures, pieces of furniture, vehicles, and that isn't having sex or directly related to sex, but just a texture.

Of course, most people will find this utterly lame as a concept LOL.

Yes, he is eager to sanitize the game for his old masters. And I recall he told us quite frankly at the SLCC and I think even in columns that while he was a Linden, the only topic he was warned to stay "off" of was sex -- that is, it goes without saying that sharp criticism of LL wasn't on as a topic, but he was warned not to excite the prurient interest of the media by focusing on the sex. So...he didn't. And still doesn't, wandering around in a haze in his white preacher's suit lol.

I want to be clear on one of your points. I'm not embarrassed by fetishes that involve violence and slavery. I condemn them as intellectually and morally indefensible in all my writings. Big difference. And what W-hat does isn't called "teasing", it's called "griefing" -- another big difference.

Among the things the Lindens do to make their game look innocent:

o feature the uses of SL for the disabled, recovery, mental health, etc.

o feature charitable contributions made to non-profits

o feature education

o feature big business

I just think they will have every motivation to open up an SL 2.0 grid somewhere, that they'll keep PG to look better.

[Maklin Deckard]

Hamlet is nothing more than a pet propagandist for LL, even as a so-called independent blogger. You never see him report on ANYTHING that might negatively impact LL's bottom line (griefing related to free accounts, for example) unless he can minimalize it and marginalize the people ingame experiencing it and glorify the company line of LL.

I've never much trusted his objectivity, and this article has utterly destroyed what shreds of objectivity I might have though Hamlet had. My god, there is no way it can only be 5%, just walk through any mainland sim and most(not all) private ones and its closer to 50% slutware, body parts, magazines, sex clubs and toys. Even a cursory glance at the top places should show him non-sexual places are either not on the list or WAAAAY down there with perhaps a tenth of the traffic as even the least busy sex club.

[jamie bergman]

Good article, as usual Prok. I enjoy reading your fine work.

[Lord Pluto]

FLASHBACK to Prokofy Post "Is SL Machinama Any Good?"

----
Prokofy: "I often see the newbie arriving naked with the woody and going around hitting on people in the WA who are grossed out. I find even without Lindens or mentors responding, they don't bother to as much any more, the people seeing the asshat going around like this are peer pressure that often gets him to stop or at least fly away from PG.

Really, it's merely the Time magazine knock-on affect that makes every blogster and wire reporter come looking for this.

***I agree with Ace, that I go for days without seeing any of this anywhere. Sl is what you make of it. It is a reflective mirror.***"
----

Prokofy: "[I]f people who shit on themselves do so out of the public eye, filming them is in facting shitting on them more and saying,wow, the face of SL -- just because you forced the impression by hunting for it and filming it."
-----

Ordinal "Please visit my Lighthouse" Malaprop: "The number of sex-related groups in SL certainly does draw the attention of the immature who giggle at the very idea of sex anywhere, or those who can't possibly entertain the idea of people expressing sexuality outside of culturally-approved settings (imagine! sex on the _internet_!) but I must say, for the rest of us, the occasional view of *gasp* a _strip club_ is not all that shocking. I see more shocking things on the way to work every morning." If anything, the mainland is characterised by 16m2 ad plots; where are the exposes of those? Oh, sorry, that wouldn't be so titillating to the finger-waggers, would it, and allow the producers to believe that they are exposing some dark secret."

Prokofy Reply: "*Perfect* comment, Ordinal!"

[Prokofy Neva]

And your point? I realize you enjoy having little paroxysms of glee over the idea of playing "gotcha," but wrong once again.

1. Yes, indeed, the Time magazine knock-on effect *makes everybody come looking for sex*. And that's why Hamlet decided to try to buck the trend in the interests of trying to improve LL's image.

2. Yes, indeed, sex is everywhere to be found in SL. You do not have to look hard. This is self-evident.

3. This is what people wish to do with SL. *Shrugs*. It's not a judgement. It's a report.

4. But not everybody choses to live saturated in sex in SL. So they look elsewhere. And it really isn't hard, then, to find other occupations, interests, and sites to see once you make that decision. And that's what Ordinal is talking about, and I'm talking about.

5. If you pan around the mainland, you don't see explicit sex everywhere, in the form of sex clubs or XXX ads on 16m2, you see a lot of houses. But take the walls off the houses, you will see many people cybering and using all their sex gadgets.

That's how SL is. You can chose to be a part of it as much or as little as you wish. Fortunately it has points of entry for all.

[Yumi Murakami]

I've always believed that the reason sex, and role-played BDSM, wind up becoming so common on online games is that they serve as motivators for the real-life peeople to be prepared to play certain roles.

For example if you want to be an exotic dancer in SL, then someone else has to be the guy/gal who watches you exotically dancing, and probably they will be prepared to do that because it has that motivator.

On the other hand, if you want to be (for example) a James-Bond style spy (ie, not a LITERAL spy who would be classed as a griefer), then someone else has to consent to play the person James Bond is spying on, and why would the real-life person want to spend their entertainment time doing that? What can you make their reward be? Pretend power/status is the classic motivator for online gaming, but to reward them with that would mean they would have to defeat James Bond and probably you don't want that, since you want your pretend power/status too. Money is another possibility but then you lose the money you pay. Alternatively, you find someone who gets all excited by the thought of being spied on by James Bond, and presto - there's their motivation to join in and support the role you wanted to take.

As an even better example of this there's a text-based game called "Shangrila" where basically, people propose playing anything and everything on that basis. They had personals ads for (for example) someone wanting to play an invisible woman who would play tricks and mess with someone in their house - on the underlying basis that there would be SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE who would be turned on by that. (I don't advise visiting Shangrila at this stage though, as it now has an even worse population of ageplayers than SL.)

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, it was always hard trying to play Wizard of Oz with my little brother. We both wanted to be the tin man. Neither of us wanted to be Dorothy. We both knew early on that Dorothy was a chump. If a 4-year-old neighbour wasn't around to be pressed into service to play Dorothy, we'd have to make Raggedy Ann be Dorothy. I would only agree to be Dorothy if I also got to sit in the big chair. The cat refused to play Toto, too. It was hard.

[Psyra Extraordinaire]

''Hamlet, do me a favour and count the sales and ownership of the economy of Psyra and the other security orbists whose products are 98 percent about security sex.''

Uh... what?

(1) I've never used security orbs before. I've never walled off my places either. They're public for all, unless they prove to be a disturbance to the enjoyment of others.

(2) I make avatars, not ... whatever 'security sex' is about. I happen to *not* be a fan of the porn industry at all and I don't create anything rated mature and up.

I really gotta ask now... where did you get *this* information? Or has someone created a *sim* named Psyra that I need to look out for now?

[Lord Pluto]

Prokofy: yet another booming business giving advice to girls on who to become "bimbos" -- read: whores.

Prokofy: they grow as surly as junkyard dogs. Having found a partner, the men especially, but also some particularly aggressive women, become obsessed with hanging on to them, making sure they don't cheat, and make sure they don't go on alts and have sex with other people. The worry about this can completely sap the joy out of their Second Life -- and judging from all the alt activity and all the affairs and all the secret hideaways people get on top of their main locations, they have every right to be worried.

...

Prokofy: This is what people wish to do with SL. *Shrugs*. It's not a judgement. It's a report.

[Caliandris]

Prokofy, repeat after me: I must not believe the sex industry's own distortions. The level of involvement of the sex industry is not what it appears to be, they use every way of gamaing the system to make it appear that the places are far more popular than they actually are.

Most of the people I have contact with in game are grown up about the sexual content. They don't deny it is there and a normal part of both SL and RL, but on the other hand it isn't what they spend most of their time doing.

I have no time for Hamlet or the sanitization of SL, but I do think that he is right. For most people, the sex industry in SL is a very minute part of their experience, and is not what they are looking for.

The shame is that when people are interested in so much else, the poverty of the search experience means it is impossible to find it. Most people nowadays stumble over good builds and experiences by tripping over them in other people's profiles.

If the sex industry was a big part of the experience, there would be so much creativity and community in SL. And that's what I and a lot of other people have found. Creativity and community.

[Ace Albion]

I'm wondering if Prokofy mixed up "Psyra" with "Psyke" which I think is a brand/person? to do with "security stuff". Probably just a typo?

I was talking to a librarian last night at my store. She was nice, looking for something to use as a library/gallery type thing. So there's a chip at the percentages back in favour of the not-sex commerce.

[Prokofy Neva]

Caliandris, if I didn't look at thousands of rentals constantly and what's in them, I could buy your line, but I can't. I personally find much more to SL than to sex, as for me, there is a lot of interesting political discussions, architecture, art, story-telling, etc. But I don't pretend that these higher interests are somehow prevalent. They aren't.

You seem to be in denial. That is, you seem to concede that there is a lot of sexual content, but then blame other people if they report this or contemplate it. But it's there to be reported. People are invited to raise their sights. Not all do. That's their choice. But you can't then blame the media for covering sex in Second Life, when it is there to be covered, in spades.

Otherwise, you are taking away the freedom of the media, and trying to ascribe to it a social mission, the mission to uplift people. Then media becomes religion, and not media. Hamlet is engaging in this practice of a religious scribe when he makes these false claims.

Caliandris, you are so typical of the FIC and the elites of Second Life. You make this blanket claim about "most people," by which you mean "my inner circle of friends in the arts". But you are a tiny elite. Look around. See the masses of people. See what they buy, and what they do. What they're here for is sex. To pretend otherwise is to be blind.

Much of the creativity and advancement of technology of Second Life has been driven by sex:

o Video -- rushing to put in video, and the major use of video, has been for porn, mild or hard, but porn it is

o Poses and animations -- the cutting edge, smoothest, most realistic poses are all in the sex department. You cannot find a pose to shake a hand with another avatar or walk down the street holding their hand, but you can find a pose to fuck them three ways from Sunday with four other people in three of their orifices. What does that tell you?

o Clothing -- the slave silks represent the greatest artistry and most clothing lines sell the most in the sexy lines

o Home security -- orbs, watch dogs, guards, etc. are all about securing privacy for sex

o Houses -- tintable windows, good camera angles when the avatar is lying down, large upstairs bedrooms with bathrooms with jacuzzis -- these things are all about having sex in houses

o Clubs -- more and better entertainment gimmicks are ultimately about creating the platform for people to couple up and have sex

To deny that sex has been the engine of creatvity of Second Life is to deny the nature of Second Life. Whether you find it good or bad, whether you focus on it or not, you cannot deny its essence.

Yes, I made the correction, and posted here also, but I don't see the post for some reason. I did indeed mix up Psyra and Pskye though of course I know the difference, I was just typing fast.

[Psyra Extraordinaire]

Okay, there we go. Yeah... I was wondering if an SL bug had put my name on some "shifty vendors" somewhere else... :)

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Of course, there are psychological theories which say that pretty much everything which we do publicly that might impress anyone else is in fact sexually based; all art is a mating display, conscious or unconscious.

There does have to be a point at which we say "well, this can be reinterpreted in all sorts of ways, but try too hard and it becomes meaningless". After all, one could say that any social area was sex-based, in theory.

[Payday loan]

http://www.netkl.net/warseo/ payday loan

[advanced webhosting]

if i'm not mistaken the internet was designed to transfer naughty pics more quickly between universities offices and military compounds.. err .. jokes aside. it's a safe bet that sexuality and erotica are a key substrate to the entire internet and perhaps most communication networks in more than just a financial aspect, the rest would just be logical progression.