@Skylla
Um, you really don’t understand the difference between arrests and incarceration, do you? Arrests show how often an activity is being reported and a suspect is taken into custody for it. Incarceration rates show how many people are in prison for past incidents that resulted in conviction. So, incarceration rates say absolutely nothing about current trends in criminal behavior.

The rate of incarceration for drug offenses climbed seven fold through the 80s and 90s. Does that mean that drug use is rapidly increasing? Or does it show increases in police and court activity against drug offenders? Is it more a measure of an increase in draconian drug policies? Surveys show that, while individual drugs go in and out of fashion, drug use rates have been relatively flat throughout the war on drugs. You really don’t comprehend this? Is anyone else having trouble understanding this relatively simple explanation? For those that aren’t, you’ll understand that incarceration rates for rape say *nothing* about rates of rape over time.

And that in itself, even if it isnt your or anyone’s attention, can be enough to make Linden Lab take a good look at what causes this bad press and act upon it.

I just want you to concider the implications of your actions.

The ban on sexual ageplay as an example: Linden Lab was aware of it happening and has let it go on for a long time, but when finally the RL press found out and made it public that pedophiles ran wild on Second Life, that meant bad press for LL and they were quick to swing the banhammer.

LL doent care about it’s customer’s opinions. They only care about RL press, they are a company and need good advertising not bad. Wether or not SL residents want something banned, doesnt matter to LL. The possible bad press they cause for SL, matters everything.

An alternative would have been to have the protest in the public welcome areas, and not point any blaming fingers (literally or by the chosen protest location), but just call attention to the growing problem of violence and rape against both women and men.

I have a set of those. I call it my concience and my moral compass.
Those who dont have these, did not lose them because of porn or any images.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect the number of perverts and killers who are using SL “as a trainer for doing it in real life” is about zero. I wish it was more because this sort of ‘training’ would be useless and only lead to them being caught. If someone objects to this sort of roleplay then fine, I disagree but that is their viewpoint. But what you describe only shows you have no idea how this form of role play occurs.

In some places I rp as a dominant, in others as a submissive. In the first case no one has to play with me, and in the second if I don’t like what’s going on I’ll either ignore them or tp out. No one can force another person to do anything in sl. The people who go to these sims go there because they want to go there. They enjoy these fantasies. You don’t and that’s fine. But the people in these sims do enjoy it.

Notice the critical difference between SL and RL: People may play the part of a victim but it’s roleplay, it’s all pretend. The “victims” *want* to be caught. The setup varies from sim to sim, but at least for the ones I have been to, its not that hard to catch someone who wants to be caught.

The other idea, one that others mention too, is that somehow the men are going to come away from all of this thinking that women are sluts, they all want it, etc. etc. I find that rather unlikely. There may be men who think that, but I’ll bet they thought that long before they landed on Help Island.

In some cases, and this is not just for me, their may be vicious role play in open chat while friendly, gossipy IMs are going on at the same time.

But there is also the fact that the vast majority of people have limits. Often they are stated on the profile, or in notecards that are filled out as part of the process of joining a group in the sim, which list these. If you go beyond someone’s limits, they might tell you in IM, they might just leave, they might report the person to the mods.

If you look at the profiles of many people who rp in Gorean sims, I’d say most of them, they list their limits. There is a wide variety, sometimes people might get mad and say someone’s limits are invalid or whatnot, but in the end it doesn’t matter. If they don’t like what is going on they can leave.

The bottom line is that for two people to roleplay they have have to be cognizant of the other person’s mode of play, especially their limits. This is very much *not* the case in RL. Someone pushing the boundaries in RL doesn’t have to worry about them tping out. Someone being violated in RL can’t just ignore them and pull up a browser until they go away.

Hard sex rp in SL is *not* going to help anyone to do this in RL. If anything, its the opposite, though I doubt it matters one way or the other.

((There is a caveat to what I said. There are some people who don’t get out when another person is going beyond their limits in a way that they really don’t like. Not everyone reports to a mod when some asswipe sends obnoxious IMs and won’t let up, some women (and maybe men, I have no idea) are so submissive they feel they have to go along with it, and in other cases they may be so invested in long term rp (for instance in a Gorean sim) they don’t want to break character during a sex scene.

So while anyone can tp out or otherwise end an rp they don’t like, and most people do, there are some, not many, who do get pushed to far.))

Because LL didnt want to deal with bad press from some German newspaper who tried to make SL look like one big child porn trading ring. It has little to do with any laws or LL’s stance on it, they were happily letting it go on before the German reporters dregded up some real child porn.

(according to laws that matter SL’s sexual agepay was perfectly allowed – nothing ‘undestinguishable from real photographic material’ in SL’s crappy rendered AV’s.)

The question of what is acceptable in roleplay is as dangerous as the question of that is acceptable for people to fantasize about or think about: the answer obviously should be ‘anything and everything’

For a company that boasts about the freedom in it’s ‘game’ (Your World, Your Imagination) I think its odd and frankly wrong that they would go out of their way to take away said freedoms. And it’s sad that some residents like to enjoy their own freedoms but dont want others to enjoy theirs.

I fear for the concequences if LL starts listening to these kind of protest groups. I have already packed my bags, just in case. (read: backed up my inventory so I can use my stuff on Open Sim when Second Life turns DisneyLife.)

Do us a favor and stop trying to argue that these protests are ill founded.

Your one anecdotal story — even assuming what you say is accurate — shows absolutely nothing. Sure there are some women who make false accusations of all kinds. There are some wackos all over the place male and female.

But to imply that the majority of women who go to the police because of sexual assault are just trying to “”get back” at their ex’s.” is fucking bullshit. In RL this **is** a goddamn serious problem, no matter what you saw (or rather what you say you saw) with your neighbors. But there’s no point in trying to explain that, you’ll never get it.

And to top it off you toss in, “I bet you don’t have sex often so you? Your the kind that cries rape after having sex too i bet.” Jesus Christ! Am I missing something here? is this supposed to be a parody of some misogynistic asshole? You certainly do a good job of sounding like one.

Wait, there’s more, the kicker is at the end:

“So I have no care for you girls who lie and cheat and use the system to your advantage. Don’t say you don’t,you do just that.

Yes there are real bad guys. But a lot of whats happening is a females control issue nothing more. The older I get the less I trust woman because I see they are by their very design, mentally unstable.”

Oooo. Methinks brandon has been burned by the ladies. Could it be… oh, hmm, perhaps — and this is wild speculation here — just perhaps, brandon, you don’t have a fucking clue how to relate to women? And so when one tells you to fuck off for any of a dozen reasons the only possible explanation for her rejecting such a fine hunk of manmeat is that she’s “mentally unstable.”

I disagree with these protests in SL for all sorts of reasons. But this sort of attitude is exactly the sort of thing they are talking about. They certainly have a point about men who have this sort of anti-woman attitude. And yet, I am sure you were an asshole long before you came to SL.

Sorry, I forgot to reply to your post.

PETA is the province of my sister Charybdis. I have alerted her to your concerns, and you can expect to be hearing from her shortly.

My goodness, but you are a card-carrying member of the knuckle-dragging troglidytes club, aren’t you? Women are “by their very design, mentally unstable”??? Nice: we really should be paying you for exemplifying so beautifully the kind of mind-blowing ignorance that made the protest so necessary. With enemies like you, who needs friends?

@ Persephone

No, I am not “ignoring” the fact that “rapes are down,” because they aren’t: YOU in fact are ignoring the stats from the U.S. Department of Justice on convictions for rape, provided in comments on the other story by Bear Jharls, which show no such “drop”:

2004: 12,310
2002: 10,980
2000: 10,600
1998: 11,622

Let us suppose, as you seem big on fantasy, that rapes actually were down. There is a logical fallacy known as “post hoc ergo propter hoc”: “after this, therefore because of this.” This fallacy involves linking a prior event with a subsequent one without actually demonstrating that there is any causal relationship. Exactly as you have done, in fact: if rapes HAD dropped (which they haven’t) there might have been any number of possible reasons for that. It might even be that the increase in porn use had pushed them up, but that other developments had more than “corrected” for that tendency. In other words, you might as well argue that an increase in cheese consumption is pushing rapes down: you are “proving” nothing.

It is, in any case, academic: the stats demonstrate that rapes are NOT down.

@Darkfoxx

We can argue about the semantics of the word “tolerate” until the cows come home, so let me just make this absolutely clear to you. I am not, was not, and will not be calling for a “ban” of rape role play. Nor have I seen anyone here, or at the protest do so. There, nice and unambiguous isn’t it?

You’re response to the studies is facile: some of these survey sex offenders, but most do not. The essential tendency of all of these studies, regardless of whom is being studied, are the same: porn, and especially extreme porn, makes the acceptance of rape myths more likely.

And again I’ll ask: if images and words in the multimedia have no impact upon the minds and attitudes of those viewing them, why are untold billions of dollars annually spent on advertising? Or does the human brain have a special ability to screen out the impact of messages conducing towards violence against women?

@Keithunder

I suspect that depictions of violence are helping to make our society more violent. In fact, there are many studies that show this. However, in response to your analogy:

1) If you can’t see the difference between the violence in King Lear (a play that employs violence to make an anti-violence message) and the gratuituous violence-for-violence’s-sake of many video games, for instance, then I’d say you need to sharpen your skills as an interpreter of not merely art and literature, but of all media.

2) To repeat yet again, for those who apparently don’t read very well: no one is calling for a ban on rape role play. Stop trying to play the “censorship” card: that only works when someone is actually proposing to censor something. We are not: we are asking everyone to consider the implications of these actions. That is all. If I ask someone to consider the impact of voting Republican or Conservative, am I trying to “censor” them?

3) None of those involved in the protest is “sex negative.” Speaking personally, I love sex. If we were out to stop sex, we’d be protesting against the latest version of “lovescene” at Bits and Bobs. We aren’t antisex: we are antiviolence.

4) Your imaginary alliance between feminists and Christian right is not merely implausible: it is actually offensive, rather as it would be to suggest that someone of the Jewish faith was cosying up with a neonazi. The attitudes of Christian far right on just about everything, INCLUDING this issue, are anathema to any feminist I’ve ever met. It’s one thing to critique what we actually stand for; it’s quite another to simply fabricate an association that doesn’t exist, and use it to attack us.