The Alphaville Herald

Red Light Center Exposed — Part 3: Unhitched

by Jessica Holyoke on 26/05/08 at 12:27 pm

Red Light Center leather clad dommes, furries hard to find
The Herald explores worlds beyond Second Life

by Jessica Holyoke, virtual world explorer

I know everyone has been dying to find out more about the kinkier side of things in Red Light Center. Believe me, so do I. Tracking down the kinkier side of things in RLC is harder than it seems. First, the furries. After many months of careful research, I found one furry and one neko girl. Even though they have Dimes dedicated just to them, those dimes are really just a resting place for others. If you want to get away from all the sexiness, all one has to do is go to the Furry dime.

Now bondage is somewhat prevalent. There should be plenty of bondage enthusiasts as evidenced by all the submissives I’ve seen with their names changed to reflect their Owner’s. Finding out more about them was a different story.

It was easy to find the shared bondage furniture in the care free environments. You strip down, chose a partner and whoever clicks on the furniture first gets to be on top. Which means if you are in a room with a robot and you want to use the bondage furniture, the robot is automatically on the bottom. Just another weird thing about using the robots.

Now as a matter of how things are done, the bondage furniture bothered me because it did not allow for clothing for anyone. Because everyone was naked, there was no leather clad dommes or silk clad males — not that they had silks, but a girl can dream.

And people openly talked about their bondage experiences in the open streets of the BDSM dimes. But again, no one wanted to be officially interviewed about it.

While I was digging around, one user private messaged me and suggested that I use a RL picture in my profile. Now as I was trying to clearly identify myself as Jessica Holyoke and I wanted people to read about their world on the Herald, I did not include a real life photo, but rather used a SL photo of me. Looking at a number of people’s profiles, it was more likely than not to see a picture of a real person in a profile. Sometimes that person was doing things I only do as an avatar. The cross over of real and surreal took me by surprise after spending so much time in a world that can be seen as encouraging you to be what you are not.

Beyond the basic click and spank rooms, with the accompanying creepy speed chat of “Harder, Yes Master” , with no regards to the gender of the top, I looked for a place like our Roissy, Beauty or even Gor. Unfortunately, either everyone clammed up at the sight of a reporter or the places that sound like a bondage place, like Leather and Lace and Kingdom of Hearts, weren’t into bondage so much as they were social gathering places or self help providers, in the case of Kingdom of Hearts. Even the tribes and groups operated more as families or gangs and not bondage at all. They said that they helped their members by being there if they needed them. When pressed on what does that mean, the members were still very vague as to what they really did within their group.

I did meet a few submissives and dominants. None of which wanted to go on the record. But I saw that same range of joyful and broken hearts that I’ve seen in the D/s community on SL. People talking about their new collar tattoos or when the system would allow them to kneel beside their owner’s.

In wondering around RLC to find the true bondage community, I ran into a few Goreans. While they did not dress like we would expect Goreans to dress, they still swore by the basic etiquette and tenets of what those on SL would call lifestyle Goreans. Men and women who were free were greeted with Master and Mistress, slaves were still addressed as such. I didn’t see a serve, the gorean staple where a slave girl types out getting food and drink, but in a sexy way, but the people I talked to said that they were living the lifestyle.

Now if they are Gorean, why aren’t they in SL? The answer to that lies in Part 4.