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Is Second Life only a haven for kinky sex? Presented by Theodore Wright, Programmer/Analyst (a.k.a. California Condor in Second Life) Dec. 20, 2006 |
In his article ( http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570708,00.html ), Joel Stein does not appear to be saying that Second Life® is nothing more than a haven for kinky sex. Nonetheless, some might esteem such about Second Life who have read his article or those like it. Granted, many have concluded that already without having even read his or similar articles.
Second Life is for you what you make it into and make to be for yourself. If you don't like what someone else makes it into, there are other places in SL to go. As for Joel Stein it is a place to develop a story for Time. He gives the testimony of his own experience. Howbeit, his experience is far from the only one, even though it is not the only one of its kind.
Is there a lot of sex to find in Second Life? Well, yes, but the same can be said about the internet as a whole. If someone were to say that all they find in SL is a lot of sex then that is because of themselves discovering their own dark side, not because of SL itself. Yes, you can stumble on such things, but you can also avoid them. Do we not do the same with the internet itself? Does not a similar measure also apply?
Those who think Second Life is only about sex is somewhat like the man taking the Rorschach Test to describe all the inkblot cards as filthy images, claiming it is the psychologist, not himself, to blame for it. If all you look for is sex, that is certainly all you will find.
Has everyone else in SL had the same kind of experience that Mr. Stein had? Certainly I did not have Joel's experience. No female avatar of an awfully pretty woman in real life came up to me to show me around the kinkier side of SL. Yet, I must say that I had not hung around such avatars like that long enough to know if they were really going down that path. Maybe that could have happened to me if that is what I was looking for. I suppose that I don't find pixels all that exciting. Joel Stein mentioned that he was coming into SL thinking that he would want to have a lot of sex. What happened instead is that he discovered that, deep down, he is a journalist at heart.
