Yes, but not only!
Second Life has been given the image of being a single large sex playground for all imaginable fantasies and fetishes, including pedophilia.
The media, especially in the USA and Germany, are not entirely blameless for this image. Individual cases were exaggerated and sold to the reader as typical for Second Life.
That’s of course nonsense!
Maybe some of you remember the beginnings of the WWW. Around the mid to late 90s. Back then, there was exactly the same outcry against the evil World Wide Web.
The perceived anonymity of the Internet tempted many users to try or look at things that they would probably have avoided in real life. Be it SM games, BDSM, group sex, or whatever. Did the Internet therefore develop into a single large sex orgy or porn factory?
No, of course not.
These contents are available on the Internet. Basically, there is nothing wrong with that. Where there are people, there is also sex.
That’s normal, natural, and the reason why there are so many of us.
For me, porn movies are anyway an inexplicable phenomenon: No one watches them, but the operators count their clicks in millions.
Erotic content represents only a small part of all content available on the Internet.
The same is true for Second Life.
Like the Internet, Second Life is just the medium. The content is created by the users themselves. The users decide what they use this platform for. If that’s sex, then that’s the way it is, as long as you stick to certain legal regulations and don’t bother anyone – literally and figuratively.
In Second Life, things run the way we Germans love it: regulated!
To understand how this works exactly, I need to elaborate a bit and explain how Second Life is structured:
Mainland Versus Private Estates in Second Life
The operator of Second Life basically only provides the surface. By that I mean, the server, the software (simulator also called SIM) and the virtual land area (also called “the Grid”).
There are two different types of land. On one hand, the so-called “Mainland” and the “Private Estates”.
The two differ mainly in that on the Mainland, the individual parcels (also called “Regions”) are combined into a large landmass and divided into continents.
The “Private Estates”, on the other hand, are independent, privately owned regions of the respective user that are neither connected with Private Estates of other users nor with the Mainland. A “Private Estate” thus has no neighbors and is only accessible via teleport, and only if the owner has made access public.
Age Ratings in Second Life
Age Ratings Anyone who acquires such an Estate must classify it. You have the choice between 3 classifications: G = General, M = Moderate, A = Adult.
If you want to create and publicize erotic content on your Estate, you MUST therefore mark your region as A.
When a user enters such a region, a small red A appears at the top of the viewer to remind him that he is entering a region where content may be provided that is only suitable for adults.
If you don’t want to see that, you just have to leave. On the Mainland, it’s even simpler. The Mainland consists of 9 continents. One of them, the “Zindra Continent” is entirely marked as A, while all others are classified as M or G.
So, if you want to open a swinger’s club on the Mainland, for example, you have to acquire land on Zindra, as such content is not allowed on the rest of the Mainland.
Most of the land area on the Mainland is classified as M = Mature. If you want to know exactly what is allowed and what is not in the respective classified regions, I recommend reading the
Second Life Wiki under “Age Ratings”.
As I said: It is exactly regulated what goes where and what doesn’t!
But it goes even further:
By default, the viewer’s search function is set so that A-classified content is NOT displayed. To change this, you have to log in with your account on the secondlife.com website and verify your age.
That’s it for anonymity, to the horror of data protectionists, and still not enough for youth protectors.
After all, everyone who could theoretically access erotic content is now recorded with at least their email address, but usually also with payment data (credit card).
But that’s not all: You must now change the settings in the viewer to be able to view Adult classified content in the search or to be able to teleport to such Estates or the Zindra Continent.
If you want to buy erotic items on the online shop for virtual goods, the so-called Marketplace, you must also be logged in and age-verified – otherwise, nothing works.
So, no one who doesn’t explicitly want to will ever see sexual content in Second Life, and those who do have to put in a bit of effort to even be able to find such content.
“So the stuff” is not only well hidden but also very sparsely represented on the Mainland and more likely to be found on Private Estates.
Nevertheless, we encounter the paradox mentioned above: Supposedly no one goes there, but the regions enjoy very good traffic.
What’s the thrill? A lot has already been written about this, I don’t need to do it too. Here are a few links on the topic for those who want to delve deeper into it:
More Ressources About Second Life Sex
John Rider on the Psychology of Cyberspace: http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/getneed.html
Study by Stanford University on the topic.
http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2013/fox-chb-sexualized-virtual-selves.pdf
An article about it in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/04/virtualworlds.secondlife
What kind of content can be found on the A-Rated Regions, one might ask. Pretty much everything that exists in real life, including the oldest profession in the world.
If you want to know more, you have to sign up and look.
If you want, you can contact me, I’ll then be the “tour guide”. Also open to interested bloggers or journalists.
Inworld Name: Caroline Takeda
Yes, I am available as a guinea pig (Fees apply)
Sources and Further Information:
Age Ratings in Second Life:
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Deutsche-Knowledge-Base/Alterseinstufungen/ta-p/700197
Database of all Second Life Regions:
http://gridsurvey.com/)
Der Spiegel traveling in Second Life:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/spielzeug/second-life-tagebuch-sex-am-strand-a-465413.html
First-hand: Discussion of Second Life residents about the topic of sex in Second Life: http://www.slinfo.de/forum/showthread.php?t=1323
Interesting interview with a disabled person: Second Life as a substitute for sex: http://www.vice.com/de/read/second-life-als-sex-ersatz
My “Guide”: How to have sex in Second Life?
https://www.second-life-adventures.com/second-life-sex/
Marketplace for virtual goods:
http://marketplace.secondlife.com
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