Is Your Second Life Woman a Real Life Man?

by Alphaville Herald on 04/05/09 at 10:01 pm

SL sex fraud victim Mandy Dorfler loses money on wedding, asks Linden Lab for gender verification — Is species verification for furries next?

by Tenshi Vielle

We've moved from being butthurt on the Second Life forums to being butthurt on the Linden Lab public JIRA – now the site of choice to whinge if you've been slighted in some manner in the fictional entertainment that is Second Life.

For instance, consider the plight of SL lesbians who feel 'raped' when their SL female partner turns out to be a real-life male. Heterophobes, if you will. If that is not bad enough, imagine the hurt and rage in the fur community when a certain special SL snow leopard turns out to be something else entirely. Will this outrage never end?

Mandy Dorfler leads the charge to clean up the metaverse with a recent Jira entry: "Use the Age Verification system already in place to do a voluntary Gender Verification to protect against the fraudulent use of female avatars by RL males. Many lesbians regard this practice as a form of cyber rape. SL should be cutting edge on this.

Description: Too often women are violated by men in SL. Men come to women only areas and use a female avatar to cause troubl emotionally and in other ways. This is a form of cyber rape. Second Life has age verification in place that could be used to voluntarily allow residents to become gender verified. It's not foolproof but it would allow female users in SL to feel safer. As an owner of a women only venue this would be a tremendous feature to have. I would be able to allow only gender verified people on the sim. Also, the gender verified option could be shown on the profile page. I was a victim of this fraud myself and it happens often. I married what a thought was a German girl. Spent a fortune on the wedding and other things then "she" confessed to being a rl male. I lost REAL money here through this fraud. Please consider this feature."

So… you met someone who was not what they claimed – and now you want compensation? What are they going to do, take off their pants and send a picture to Linden Lab? Have a crotch inspector? Oh, I know. A USB device. Don't the Japanese have something like that in development?

The comments on Mandy's Jira proposal are golden.

Marx Dudek added a comment – 30/Apr/09 01:27 PM
1. This problem could have been solved by the OP with a video-chat request with her bride-to-be.
2. Equating misrepresentation of gender in a video game to rape is an insult to anyone who has ever been a rape victim in real-life.
3. If you want to be sure that the person you're in love with is the right gender – date in real life.

Beezle Warburton added a comment – 30/Apr/09 02:03 PM
How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.

Siobhan Taylor added a comment – 30/Apr/09 11:57 AM
I wonder how something like this would affect transgendered people?Should they have to verify twice – once for the gender they werelabeled with at birth, and another for their true gender? Or is thisgoing to force them into a "not until you've had all your legalpaperwork sorted out" box?

No, this is a feature we definitely – as LOLCats would put it – DO NOT WANT!

One should also note that this JIRA, as of the writing of this article, has no votes. Guess no one is concerned.

98 Responses to “Is Your Second Life Woman a Real Life Man?”

  1. Ayumi

    May 4th, 2009

    I invented a gender-detecting device. It looks a bit like a vacuum cleaner + a blender’s love child. Unfortunately its still in the testing phase, as I’m having problems finding any male specimen to test it on.

    The obvious answer is to kick everyone you meet in the crotch, and see who winces.

  2. Adric Antfarm

    May 4th, 2009

    About time!

    After that we can screen out all these tigers who we all know are not really tigers followed by those “vamps” who I know for a fact have never downed anything but tomato juice.

    We can wrap up with that flying thing because I sure as hell can’t fly in RL.

  3. Jessica Holyoke

    May 4th, 2009

    I love how that JIRA is essentially saying, “I would like a feature to discriminate against a user because of their gender.”

  4. JayR Cela

    May 5th, 2009

    Hell, I am male in RL and have used a female avatar since day 1. However I do inform people I meet that I am actually a man in reality, either as soon as I meet them or shortly afterwards. If they have a problem dealing with this, is no big deal to me. I also have a male shape and skin, along with a dragon avatar that I use when accessing live voice chat. Someone foolish enough to spend big bucks on a virtual reality wedding, then publicly complain, and request further intrusion into our virtual lives, sounds like a dimwit to me. She could have easily confirmed her partners actual gender with live voice or skype. Perhaps next time she will think twice before falling hopelessly in love with pixels on a computer screen.

    JayR Cela :_)

  5. At0m0 Beerbaum

    May 5th, 2009

    sorry but

    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

  6. Stephie

    May 5th, 2009

    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.
    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.
    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.
    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.
    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.
    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.

    I cannot copy and paste this enough.

  7. Rodan The True

    May 5th, 2009

    Yes, this is one step in the right direction. It is nowhere near enough though.

    How about the men who have been violated? Not by other men, but by the fat, the ugly, the middle-aged or even worse the elderly.

    While we’re at it, I also want some proof the woman I am with is hot. I know, she says she is and she spent a lot of money in SL to appear so, but I want to know for sure. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve woke up in a cold sweat, worrying whether my hot blonde bombshell is really a 45 year old, 300 pound divorced and unemployed housewife with a striking resemblance to Boris Karloff.

    Please help us LL! We all know this is supposed to be the perfect life we don’t have in the real world. And I want to be sure the lesbians are really lesbians, as well as being female. And I want to watch, just to make sure.

    Either that, or just forget it and let’s go back to this being a game, because I can deal with that.

  8. kicked in the crotch

    May 5th, 2009

    i once got sold a strawberry ice lolly in sl, only problem was when i edited it, it turned out to be cherry flavour. I filed an report to LL, they did not help me! Boo hoo hoo! Hope the lesb’s have more luck than me. I felt so cheap!

  9. Pappy Enoch

    May 5th, 2009

    Time tu come kleen wif y’all: I ain’t a man.

    I are really a Vicktoria’s Secret supermodul in RL. I are typin’ this-hear response frum mah Sugar-Daddy’s yacht at Monte Carlo.

    An’ tu think y’all believed I are a fake hillbilly, livin’ in a wrecked Chevy Monte Carlo, hoo writes fo’ the Herald fo’ fun an’ drinkin’ munny.

    Well, back to RL: while my old rich boy am off playin’ Canasta wif them crowned heads o’ Europe, me an’ Brad Pitt am gonna du sum nekkid sunbathin’ on the poop deck.

  10. Satan

    May 5th, 2009

    This is sad. I don’t think people should be e-dating if they are unable to consider the possibility that the person they are speaking with may not be who they seem to be. There is certainly something unethical about a person deliberately deceiving someone else as to their gender when there is MUTUAL romantic interest between the two individuals but I think that in the end, the biggest tragedy here is that somehow people have come to regard love as being conditional like this. If you really like a person, why then does their gender play a part in this? Call me an idealist, but one of the most important things I have learned is that I like who I like, no matter what. I have been romantically involved with both men and women in real life. I don’t even have any gender preferences, believe it or not. No, not even when it comes to sex because it can be just as hot with either gender.

    Main Entry:
    1love Listen to the pronunciation of 1love
    Pronunciation:
    \ˈləv\
    Function:
    noun
    Etymology:
    Middle English, from Old English lufu; akin to Old High German luba love, Old English lēof dear, Latin lubēre, libēre to please
    Date:
    before 12th century

    1 a (1): strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (2): attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3): affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests b: an assurance of love 2: warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion

    Romance is already so complicated so why do we make it more so? The dating world is already filled with people with conflicting agendas. People who just want sex and fun but nothing serious, people who just want money or success, people who just don’t want to be alone and will take anyone without any serious consideration at all, lack of common interests, etc. It’s terrible that people limit themselves this way because real love is just too hard to come by without this extra parameter. When did love become conditional like this? When you really consider it, it’s actually pretty unnatural. What a strange world we live in. We’re actually conditioned to think this way.

    Not too long ago I struggled to categorize my own sexuality. Gay, straight, or bi? I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I ended up realizing that I just believe in unconditional love. How many people really want to miss out on something so special over something so shallow?

    I can’t help but lament our world and what it has become. There are people out there who still have the chance to find what they’re looking for and they’re just throwing it all away. There are few things that I am so passionate about but love is one of them.

    And the rape comparison was absurd. There is definitely something wrong with the whole ordeal on both sides of the spectrum, but it certainly isn’t anything like rape.

    The furry comparison didn’t do this article much justice either since it is unlikely that any furry actually believes that their e-mate is actually an animal.

    I realize that rape and furry apologists are going to rush in here and try to claim that my argument for love applies to their weird fetishes but those fetishes are sexual and sex and love are two distinctly different things. The idea of screwing animals is revolting and it is unlikely that any human with an IQ over 60 is going to be able to actually ‘love’ an animal in a romantic way since an animal has very little in common with a human due to vast differences in their intellectual capacity. Not to mention their inability to communicate. Simulating rape is far more terrible. This sort of violent act has nothing to do with love at all. In fact, it seems like quite the opposite. People don’t enjoy inflicting pain (or imagining that they are) on the people that they love. Such a tendency is contrary to the concept of love. That isn’t to say that people will not sometimes hurt the ones that they love. They do and they will, but they certainly don’t enjoy it or find it arousing in any way.

  11. We

    May 5th, 2009

    “i once got sold a strawberry ice lolly in sl, only problem was when i edited it, it turned out to be cherry flavour. I filed an report to LL, they did not help me! Boo hoo hoo! Hope the lesb’s have more luck than me. I felt so cheap!”

    I laughed hard!

  12. Jessica Holyoke

    May 5th, 2009

    I think not only does this define down rape, it also defines down fraud.

    Because after thinking about it, what Mandy seems to be describing is she feel in love with a woman on SL. She loved her so much she married her. The wife ended up being a man in RL. So its the wife’s fault that Mandy lost her money on the wedding? The wedding still happened. The two things that disturb me about this is first, what fraud is there in this case? Mandy was still married, probably more so in some people’s eyes; there was no loss. More importantly, it sounds like Mandy ended the relationship. The wife told her the truth and Mandy dumped her. Nothing changed with the wife, except she revealed more about who she was in RL.

    The reason why we want age verification is because showing adult material to minors is a crime, sometimes without even knowing that there is a minor involved. There is no such provision with gender.

  13. janeforyou Barbara

    May 5th, 2009

    1.will never happen
    2.Everyone want to be anonym
    3.SL/LL wil loose costumers
    4.27% of SL useres are men in fem avs 8% are fem in male avs.

    That was the facks,, and we all know it.lol.Now to how you avoyd messing up with male/male female/female

    -Do not partner any you dont know from Voice or Cam or phone.
    -If you meet a fem av that calls her self “stripparelle wetpanties” or some like that, 99% shure it a man, the problem seam to be fem/fem/male not men/men/fem

    Besides this HOMOFIBI aganst GBLT are same as racism in SL. There are sexuall harrsement and there will allways be, even here on this pages. I got nothing agaist men at all, i got lots of male friends hetro and gay as loong as thay keep there “willies” in there pants! lol.

    Now, this stories on “whos who” and “who do what with who” are a debate that pops up here in The Herand 2 times a yare,your sexuallety are your private matter and its nobodies business!Just be carefull.
    I am lucky i got my RL partner in SL and thats all i need :-)

  14. Emperor Norton Hears a Who?

    May 5th, 2009

    Rodan The True @ “While we’re at it, I also want some proof the woman I am with is hot. I know, she says she is and she spent a lot of money in SL to appear so, but I want to know for sure. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve woke up in a cold sweat, worrying whether my hot blonde bombshell is really a 45 year old, 300 pound divorced and unemployed housewife with a striking resemblance to Boris Karloff.”

    I hear you Rodan. Being tricked into cybering with a 40+ year old fat chick pretending to be a hot young thing is just disgusting. End the abuse now! Avatars should look like the users.

  15. LOL

    May 5th, 2009

    Like OMG, SL is full of Digital Crossdressers, it can not be!

    Point #3 is my fave!

    “3. If you want to be sure that the person you’re in love with is the right gender – date in real life.”

    SO FUCKING TRUE, If you are so pathetic that you need to have pixel sex, then you deserve what you get!

  16. Uccello Poultry

    May 5th, 2009

    /me holds back an opinion one way or the other for now but has questions:
    1) Sure, the proposal is for “voluntary” verification, but what sort of stigma would be placed on conscientious objectors? Could this lead to discrimination?

    2) Wouldn’t this infringe on the rights of a property holder to govern their land as they see fit? Age-verification is a process imposed upon SL by out-world forces and so could hardly be avoided. Gender verification is purely an in-world issue.

    3) How would one verify?

    4) Who would pay for the added costs?

    AFter this article was published Prokofy Neva votied in favor of the issue. Go figure.

  17. Alyx Stoklitsky

    May 5th, 2009

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Holy shit, excuse me while I laugh myself silly.

    ‘SL fraud victim’? More like a victim of her own fucking stupidity.

    ‘This is a form of cyber rape’ There is no such fucking thing as ‘cyber rape’. This is the fucking internet, where all that can happen is images, sounds and text. There is no fucking ‘rape’ on the internet. There is no ‘rape’ in secondlife.

    Mandy successfully identifies herself as suffering from severe butthurt and possible delusion by making her post completely female-centric, as if the only people who ever fell for a trap are lesbians, when ofcourse this is complete bullshit, and men posing as women just as frequently (if not more frequently) fool other guys into e-lationships. Not only this, but she also ignores women masquerading as men!

    Her post on the jira is less a feature request and more a sexist tirade of butthurt and hate against men. For shits and giggles, I think mandy should go through her entire group and list of friends and remove every ‘female’ that won’t talk over their mics – I imagine that’ll be about two thirds of everyone she knows.

    The only fucking truth in this article is this:

    >How silly. This is the internet. 80% of the females are really guys.

    More or less the old 4chan adage of “THERE ARE NO GIRLS ON THE INTERNET”.

    Also, I think this article needs an SL section:
    http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Unrealistic_Expectations

  18. LOL

    May 5th, 2009

    @janeforyou Barbara

    your points #1,2,3 is the EXACT SAME WAY EVERYONE feels about this Age verification shit

    1.will never happen
    2.Everyone want to be anonym
    3.SL/LL wil loose costumers

  19. Jumpman Lane

    May 5th, 2009

    shit pappy we KNEW yo werent a man! hehehehehe. anyhow until you get Turdleh Linden fired you are gonna get no help from The Lab! he’s the gatekeeper AND the keymaster! hehehehehehe

  20. Ari Blackthorne

    May 5th, 2009

    I am a guy in SL, but I’m really a chick in FL. Just like Tenshi’s really a guy in FL.

    So, if this new feature is going to affect Tenshi by forcing him… I mean her to divulge and all that…

    Is it going to affect me, too?
    And… and … and isi it going to show that I’m really an elderly 300-pound chick that looks like Boris Karloff, too?

  21. Pappy Enoch

    May 5th, 2009

    Jumpman dun sed, “shit pappy we KNEW yo werent a man! hehehehehe.”

    Dagnabbit, he dun figgered me out. Now I are a-gonna have to kiddy-nap Jumpman an’ make him my sex-slave in SL.

    Or hand him ovur tu Miss Peetoonia Courtinyou Amorous Tallyho, cause I JUST KNOWS she wants Jumpy tu play motorboat in her watermelum patch.

  22. Sigmund Leominster

    May 6th, 2009

    The ability to create your own gender identity within the Second Life environment – or any other virtual environment – is an inherent feature of the system. In my visit to Barbiegirls.com on a Herald mission some months back, there was no problem signing up and becoming a teen girl. Nor was there any way of knowing whether the avatars I saw were teen girls in real life. For all I know, 90% of the Barbieworld.com inhabitants could be men above 40.

    The underlying issue is that virtual worlds such as Second Life encourage people to be “something else,” and that “something else” can be animal, vegetable, or mineral. The “Other” can also be male, female, furry, androgynous, or whatever. This ability to create the “Other” is part and parcel of the environment. Gender bending is an emergent property of a virtual world – it’s built into the code, if you like.

    The problem comes when we use our real life psychological constructs to judge the virtual life avatars. These constructs are, in fact, not adequate for the job. If we meet, say, Suzy Floozy in Second Life, who offers a lap dance, we can’t assume she is a “she” just because she has all the attributes of our real life construct of a lap dancer. She may tell us that in real life she is a housewife with two kids but that could easily be a lie. In truth, there is no truth!

    So we interact with folks in Second Life without having any sure-fire ways of knowing what is true and what is false. And the only way to deal with this is to take things as they are and choose whether to accept it or not. You can either live the dream and have the lap dance from Suzy Floozy, blissfully unaware that she is being controlled by a macho one-legged, one-eyed Colombian trucker, or you can try to look behind the curtain to see the man hidden there, and hence spoil the illusion.

    It’s your choice. But there’s no way to legislate against real life people creating a virtual identity that bears little resemblance to their actual persona. Is it lies and deception? Maybe. But then again, you have a choice not to engage with people except on mutually agreed terms.

    I’m off to find Suzy Floozy. I can choose to immerse myself in the dream and simply live for the virtual experience.

  23. FAIL-O-RAMA

    May 6th, 2009

    “3.SL/LL wil loose costumers”

    Isn’t everyone that logs into SL wearing a costume?

    Not laughing at you, just laughing with you.

    OK, OK.
    I lied.
    I’m laughing my ass off, and so are my RL friends who came over to drink some beer…we are ALL LAUGHING AT YOU!

  24. Melissa Yeuxdoux

    May 6th, 2009

    UPDATE: the JIRA entry, when I looked, has one vote: that of Prokofy Neva.

  25. Archie Lukas

    May 6th, 2009

    Just a thought:

    We have VOICE on SL

    Microphones cost £1 (a pound or $2 dollars) sold in all major supermarkets
    and PC stores, their PC cost 500 to 900 times that; of course they can afford one!

    Remember rule #1

    “If you haven’t heard your lovers voice – ‘she’ is…. a man.”

    .

  26. Ajax Manatiso

    May 6th, 2009

    Was it Torley Linden? I notice on many of his tutorials he is using a female avatar. Arrest that Linden!!

  27. Sphynx Soleil

    May 6th, 2009

    Oh My Fsking Gawd…… BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!

    I just don’t GET what the big deal – it’s all pixels, why should I be limited to just one gender or species?? So many avatar types… <3 <3 …so little time….

  28. Anon-y-mouse

    May 6th, 2009

    @Archie – agree.

    @Ayumi – no worries about perfecting new device.

    sl already has a gender detector – its called a microphone.

  29. Witness X

    May 6th, 2009

    What’s even more sad is guys going for what they think are chicks, where the chicks are named “Roger”, “Steve”… how many stupid pills to you have to take?

  30. otakuman523

    May 6th, 2009

    I honestly think this is silly. sure it sucks but you dont hear any of the countless men on the net who dated a girl to find out it was some guy coming up here whining about it. truth is it happens.

    secondly. your stupid. hate to be so blunt but you really are a moron lady. if the wedding, partnership was so meaningful to you why not confirm that the person you held so dear to you was so close.

    thirdly and this is where I think this takes the cake. if you cant verify for yourself in your own second life profile that you are indeed a woman why the hell should anyone your dating make the step to? and I now quote from your own first life profile because I just had to look

    “Yes, but it’s usually not as fun as my second one.
    So don’t go there.” also there is no image present

    so in the reality of it who is so sure your not a man yourself in RL, maybe your just crying in the end because your so called wife who felt they loved you enough to essentially come clean with you and be honest to mention he was in fact male irl ended up being bigger then you and it just made you jealous.

    honestly for someone who is so concerned with how SL and RL should blend together the fact that you put up a wall in your own profile saying that they should be seperate makes you a hypocrite

    lastly I will say to you this . the fact that you feel you were raped in essence because of this is shameful to you. I have family who have gone through being raped and for you to even come and consider the feeling is the same is a slap in the face to any woman who has and I have no respect for a woman such as yourself

  31. Izaea Qinan

    May 6th, 2009

    Just one more example of gender and sexuality discrimination on the part of the gay community. As a bisexual man, it sickens me – it’s not bad enough that I get shit from straight homophobes, but I trip your heterophobe alarms as well.

    I’m bisexual not because i like men and women equally – I don’t. Much prefer women.

    What makes me bisexual is the fact that, if I love someone, I don’t give two shits what’s down their pants. Unless it’s two shits. Because that ain’t my bag, yo.

    If you loved this “german girl,” when she was a woman – if you wanted to spend the rest of your second life with her, if she comforted you when you were sad, if she was there with you when you were happy – then what has changed now that you know “her” to be him? Sure. There’s emotional trauma over being lied to – and that’s something you need to work out between the two of you – but that person you married is the same person he’s always been.

  32. jomin

    May 6th, 2009

    @Izaea

    While I sympathize with the idea that this woman’s claims are quite ridiculous (cyber rape? reeeeally? >.> ), it probably does mean a great deal to her that her sl women be rl women. since you’re bisexual, you have no problem with such switching of sexes, but for her and other lesbians on that preference scale, it does make a difference.

    however, they could work through it and be friends, but that’s it.

  33. Anon-y-mouse

    May 7th, 2009

    I remember in the old IRC days the experienced guys used to advise the newbie guys to ask the *girls* what color the maxi Tampax box was. I don’t remember what was supposed to be the right answer, but it was supposed to be something a real female would know without hesitation.

    I do know that whenever I asked they just told me to fuck off, lol.

  34. Satan

    May 7th, 2009

    @jomin

    This is going to be long winded, because anything worth saying is worth saying properly and this is something that I feel is particularly important. This attitude is prevalent in civilization as a whole and it’s terrible. This person met someone that they couldn’t see or speak to in real life and developed feelings for them. Was gender REALLY what made that relationship so meaningful? Did it have anything to do with it at all really? If it did, then obviously this wasn’t a relationship at all. They were just e-fuck buddies. The sad thing here is that literally ANYONE can get laid in both real life or SL. The fat chick with mental problems, the stereotypical perpetual virgin/neckbearded geek. Why is it that so many people in both real life and second life spend enormous amounts of time pursuing sex? And WHY is it that those very people waste the time of people who are actually searching for something meaningful??? The idiots that spend their lives trying to fuck everyone they can are a dime a dozen. Why the FUCK don’t they just fuck each other? I want to tell you a story about the sort of impact this very attitude has had on my life.

    In late July of last year, I began dating a man who managed the most well-known gay club in Augusta, GA, called Club Argos. He was a little older, but he was young at heart. He was fun and he was the life of the party. He had his own ideas about life that he obviously formulated on his own, based on his own experience – a very attractive trait IMO. Within a few weeks, I moved in with him. As much as I liked the guy, there was only one thing that mattered to him and it wasn’t my mind or personality. He wanted to get laid every single night. Normal people might have sex 3-4 times a week after things get settled and I didn’t have a problem with that but on nights were he didn’t get what he wanted because I had to be up early the next morning for work,etc. he would complain about it the next day, even in front of our mutual friends. As time went on, I became disgusted by his behavior. He was acting like a pig and I began to realize that this relationship was going nowhere, however, I stayed and tried to work things out because I knew that I could have been wrong. In mid August, I became deathly ill. I had terrible night sweats, a persistent fever that remained around 102-103 degrees, oral thrush. I was so sick that I would wake up every hour or so to become violently ill in my bathroom. During this time, he asked me to stay in my own apartment and I obliged, being a little embarrassed about being so sick and understanding that it really is kinda gross. I ended up being hospitalized after passing out at the wheel of my car at a gas station at a Kroger on Columbia road in Martinez. I ran the vehicle into a guardrail that was protecting the gas pumps, thankfully. I spent about a week in the hospital while docs pumped me full of antibiotics, tylenol, and ran a bunch of tests. Anyway, I appeared to get better for the most part and before long after I was discharged I was hanging out at the night club every night while he worked, and back at his home with him whenever both of us were off work. Another few weeks passed before he suddenly started having difficulty breathing. They ended up putting this guy on an oxygen tank within the week for ‘pneumonia’. I took care of him during this time, feeding him, doing housework for him,etc because he literally couldn’t even walk across a room without sweating profusely and completely losing his breath. I drove him wherever he needed to go and took him to his doctor’s appointments, where strangely, I wasn’t allowed to sit in (it was his decision). One day in October, I came home from the newspaper and he was upset. Told me the doctor’s said his pneumonia was untreatable and that he was going to die. Then he told me he wasn’t ready for any ‘commitments’. I packed my shit and left immediately. Now in today’s world, it’s pretty unusual for someone to die of pneumonia in a country like this. That is, unless it’s a specific type of pneumonia that effects people with autoimmune diseases such as PCP (Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumocystis_pneumonia) PCP is specific to people with problems with their immune system. It was beginning to look a lot like he was in the final stages of AIDS and THAT was why he didn’t want me to sit in on his appointments.

    After getting an urgent letter from a physician I had seen in August stating that my labs were abnormal and that I needed to see a primary care physician IMMEDIATELY, I went and got my medical records from the hospital I was in in August. I read in their notes that though my HIV test at the time was negative, they suspected that I was ‘seroconverting’, meaning that I had been recently infected with HIV and I was in the process of becoming ‘HIV positive’ which for some reason takes awhile. I didn’t believe it for a minute so before I actually took another HIV test, I went and got checked out for cancer. Finally, at the urging of my mother I got tested again for HIV and the results appeared to confirm that my ex-boyfriend was indeed in the final stages of AIDS. Later, my first cd4 and viral load tests came back confirming that not only do I have HIV, but it is also in the advanced stages. My immune system is utterly failing.

    This guy not only inflicted the pain of a broken heart that comes from getting ‘played’ by someone who only cares about sex. Sex was so important to him that my life as I knew it is over. Gone. All of my plans for the future disintegrated just because he was so fucking selfish.

    That is how I view people in the real world and Second Life whose whole existence revolves around getting laid. They are fucking pigs who hurt other people. A broken heart is bad enough by itself but I could have gotten over that eventually.

    The fact is that humans are unworthy of trust. We are all predictable, deceitful and selfish creatures. Someone who likes you will usually tell you what you want to hear or say nothing at all. Someone who doesn’t will attack your credibility whenever possible and be deliberately oppositional or say nothing at all. Civilization is just a nice word for a system of self-perpetuating bullshit that revolves entirely around having unoriginal views. People adopt perspectives all the time without having any sort of clear understanding of them. More than %95 of people are completely superficial (Noam Chomsky and Peter Ludlow have a nice word for this. Read: Conformist). Then some of you have the gaul to be amazed at me for being flippant about AIDS at times. But to me, those people are the suckers who have to stay here and live in this putrid puddle of piss that we’ve all helped create. The real world is every bit as depraved and pathetic as Second Life and then some and AIDS is just my permaban. Good fucking riddance, who wants to be a part of this shit anyways?

    This stuff never applies to everyone. If the ‘norms’ for a specific social group did, then they wouldn’t be called norms because we wouldn’t need to make the distinction. Anyways, now you know why I loathe the types of people that are spending all of their time on sex, inside SL or not. Because whether or not it is actually true, I see each and every one of those people as being capable of destroying my life in the way that Bobby did, just for their own selfish pursuit of pleasure. I am absolutely disgusted with humanity.

    And if this huge screed makes you angry, then good. It needs to make people angry. We need more angry people because if more people felt passionate about this then the world would be a better place. Fuck each and every single one of you that this stuff applies to. Get mad, and make the world a better place.

  35. Ava Cartier

    May 7th, 2009

    I try to read jane4you Barbara’s posts and the same thing happens each time: I become disoriented and nauseated. Is there any way to segregate her posts from the rests or change the font color to white so those who want to read it can just scroll over it? Seriously. My head hurts.

  36. Ava Cartier

    May 7th, 2009

    **that should read “from the rest”.

  37. Vamooz

    May 7th, 2009

    @janeforyou Barbara

    Considering you’re the owner of the grandfather of “lesbian” sims full of dudes pretending to be ladies banging other dudes pretending to be ladies, you would of course be opposed to this.

    Also, plz lurn to spell. thx.

  38. HAHA

    May 7th, 2009

    i needed a laugh thanks!!!

  39. LOL

    May 7th, 2009

    @Vamooz

    SOOO TRUE! HA HA HAHAHAHHAHAH

    Isle of Digital Crossdressers

  40. janeforyou Barbara

    May 7th, 2009

    @Ava Cartier
    If you dont understand my posting.. dont read it, it take a class in human behivior and repeckt for others, thanks.

    @ Vamooz
    You got no idea on any of this? Plz go learn what GLBT are? And show respeckt for others that dont got same oprinion as you, IOL are 6 islans,, there are 4 islands for mix fem/males.. 27% are Males in fem avs 8% are Fem in male avs. So 73% are fem in fem avs and 92% are male in male avs it that hard to understand?

    Now you go ahead and wrighte to me in Norwegian ( right spelled) cuz thats my lang :-)

  41. janeforyou Barbara

    May 7th, 2009

    I dont understand why ppl here need to be rude and insulting cuz thay dont undertand others? Is it a fetish? lol
    I wish you all can be more tolerant? Harrsement cuz of sexualety or gender are the same as racism and are illigal.I talk bout SL and RL.. look it up.
    And if you critizise namegiven persons here use your real nicks, stop hiding.

  42. We

    May 8th, 2009

    Cyber-rape is supreme LOL here.

    I don’t quite understand why people freak out about gender so much, I don’t really care what people look like in real life, or if they choose to look completely different from their real life self in Second Life, but then I don’t use SL as some sort of fantasy dating service.

    I do think the “NO MEN!!” Lesbian areas are pretty hilarious, since that seems to me to scream Homophobic men who want to play lesbians. I never see any “NO WOMEN!!” Gay men areas.

  43. LOL

    May 8th, 2009

    This article is about how MEN play sl as women avatar’s and LIE about it to people who trust them and consider them friends, like that poor sap who married a fake in SL (still pathetic but I can see how feelings get hurt)

    so to quote Miss Jane here

    “I dont understand why ppl here need to be rude and insulting cuz thay dont undertand others?”

    Yeah I like to insult people who LIE about who they really are to people they call friends. I have been in this situation, not sexually on SL, but I met some one on SL who I enjoyed talking with, and spending time with. We swapped Real life pictures (NON NUDE) and shared information about what I assumed was real life. Then after 1 year of being friends I found out this person TOTALLY lied to me about thier Real Gender. They had sent me Fake pictures of some girl they found on myspace and facebook. Basicly the ENTIRE friendship was build on a LIE and I felt hurt\pissed off at this person. so Yeah I am going to be RUDE and INSULTING becuase I DO NOT UNDERSTAND OTHERS and the reasons they have to LIE about thier REAL GENDER.

    “Harrsement cuz of sexualety or gender are the same as racism and are illigal”

    WTF does that mean? it is against the law to get mad at a person who LIES about who they really are so they can get a little lesbian pixel action. So tell me, what am I harassing? a man, a woman, a transvestite, or just a bunch of lieing pixels? I have been to your Lesbos sim MANY TIMES, and it is helarious how easy it is to pick out the FAKES. yeah, You know who I am talking about. so “Harrsement cuz of sexualety” is ONLY Harassment is the person being harassed is actually aware of what thier SEXUALLITY is.

  44. Satan

    May 8th, 2009

    @LOL

    I could understand that fear that everything might have been a lie, but in the end you have to consider how close you felt to that person. Did it feel real to you at the time? If it did, then it most likely was real and the person you were with was being sincere. Their biggest fear was that you wouldn’t accept them for who they are if you knew their gender and maybe they were right about that.

    What I said about gender preferences only applies in certain situations. The vast majority of people have been conditioned to think the way that they do. They adopt these standards unconsciously and the conditioning makes diverting from those standards seem unthinkable. Because of that conditioning, they are unable to develop feelings for someone they know to be of the forbidden sex and so, many of them go through life without knowing any better and it isn’t their fault. There is a lot of social pressure keeping that conditioning in place. In real life people interact under circumstances that typically make gender pretty obvious, but this case is unique because it didn’t happen in real life. Someone developed feelings for someone else without knowing that person’s gender so they should know better. Sure it SHOULD come as a shock to realize that the other person isn’t what they claimed. I think it’d be normal to be hurt for a time under those circumstances and this of course would apply to a friendship as well. In the end, I don’t think that this sort of thing accurately reflects the validity of a friendship or romantic involvement with a person. It only reflects the other person’s fear of not being accepted and your own fears of their lack of acceptance for you.

    We’re all taught that a man and a woman must reproduce. This is true, reproduction requires a man and a woman. Then we are taught that God (whom I don’t believe in) sees anything else as being profane, which is really pretty primitive when you think about it. No one can ever come up with a logical reason for this. Of course a man and a woman have to reproduce. And reproduction (the sex part of it anyway) is pleasant because as beings with higher intellectual capacities it has to be or else the species would likely have become extinct thousands of years ago. But why is diversion from our programming supposedly profane? No one has a logical answer for this question. This is the straight mentality that people struggle with. The gay mentality seems more complex. They still see the need to choose one gender to become involved with, and it happens to be the exact opposite of the almost-universal standard. Could it just be because these people are often hedonistic and the whole thing revolves entirely around ‘forbidden sex’? Maybe, maybe nor. Maybe this tendency is influenced by some sort of trauma someone experienced at a young age? I have no earthly idea but I don’t believe that anyone’s sexuality, straight or gay, is biologically programmed. If it was, then no one would be diverting from this programming at all. I believe it is something that is learned and sadly, this programming creates a lot of problems for everyone involved.

    I do think that the people who are just out looking to get laid are shallow dirtbags though. They’re little more than animals and their own desire for temporary fulfillment controls them, driving them to hurt others in exchange for a few fleeting moments of pleasure. It’s really pathetic when you consider it.

  45. Satan

    May 8th, 2009

    Meh, I made a mistake when I said that sexuality isn’t genetically programmed. When it comes to ‘just sex’ it is absolutely genetically programmed. What I meant to say it that we are not genetically programmed to ‘love’ only one gender. Sex does not equal love. The capacity for love should theoretically set us apart from the vast majority of species on our planet. Most of these species do not choose one mate and live out their lives with them. For them, sex is only reproduction and they are programmed to reproduce. Maybe it is the same way for many humans and THAT is the problem. Obviously we have not evolved as much as we like to pride ourselves in believing.

  46. Jessica Holyoke

    May 8th, 2009

    Lol,

    If you asked her for her picture and showed her yours, would you have wanted her to come clean then, if she wasn’t ready to tell you, or would you be as pissed off if she just said no to giving you her picture?

  47. Jessica Holyoke

    May 8th, 2009

    Lol,

    forgot to tag on, if she gave you a picture to see yours, to establish she’s a woman when she’s not, then yes, she is a liar.

  48. janeforyou Barbara

    May 8th, 2009

    General comment
    The reason we got a rule ” women only” in 1 (one) island are the horroble haressment we had there from men in 2006, we dont want men like some of you to run round chasing other women (or men in fem avs 27% are) So we realy proteckt you from the situation some og you men can get in to with other men in fem avs, same time we proteckt the fem 73% of them to be haressed by men in fem avs,, so you se we do the right ting here as we trye to proteckt bouth genders!
    I been critizised for this,and ok thats your right to critizise it. As i informed there are 4 Islands that men can be at in IOL.

    The problem many of you got are that you dont understand that as soon as a man comes to SL he look for sex, there are tons of sexclubs, Hetro- bi-gay-trans-shemale-lesbian, and this is ok.. its not up to me to deside your sexlives, and its your private matter to be carefull woth who you get involved me,, i do all i can to proteckt MEN and WOMEN in my places. Is that wrong?

  49. The Grown Ups

    May 8th, 2009

    @Satan

    Thank you for telling your story. I know I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but I’m sorry for what happened to you. Your writing is excellent and your post moved me.

  50. kellie ryba

    May 8th, 2009

    @janeforyoubarbara

    I look forward to reading your posts, don’t let the trolls get you down.

    @Vamooz, @Ava, @LOL
    shame on you, your English skills aren’t great, and most of you spent at least 12 years learning it in a classroom full of other English speakers, at home with parents (or whatever hatched you) who speak English, and hanging out with English speaking friends.

    The number of people who can speak Norwegian is small, but French, Spanish and German are all standard second languages, so we should be able to ask you to read and write in any of them. Is your education up to that? I’ll bet Pix would let us follow you around and record conversations any of you might have in foreign speaking sims for a story…are you up to that?

    If not, please be a little more respectful of people who are brave enough to participate in a language they didn’t grow up in. America’s image overseas is bad enough without assclowns like you making us look even more intolerant, ignorant and generally Bush-tastic.

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