Shocking update: people do bad things anonymously on the internet
Published by punkass marc November 1st, 2007 in Technology, another fucking sex postVia N4G, Britain’s Sky News is up in arms over a playground location in the video game Second Life in which child avatars perform sexual favors:
Getting off on pixelated children humping your digital avatar is both twisted and sad. I get that. If someone I knew confessed to this sort of behavior, I admit I’d be pretty appalled. Ditto trolling Second Life rape clubs. But is anyone surprised by this? I think I’d be more surprised if it turned out that absolutely no one in all of Second Life was trying to fuck people and things they shouldn’t.
Whenever enough humans assemble in one location, be it digital or tangible, weird and/or disturbing activities will occur. This will only be exacerbated if people can do it anonymously, which is certainly the case in Second Life. Plenty of people are repressed, or their curious, or they’re simply deviant, or whatever — and this is no fault of Second Life. The game is merely a reflection of our actual society and the desires of the people living in it. Millions of people on this planet want to fuck kids. *Of course* some of them play Second Life. Has Sky News clued into how much pedophilia and rape/sim-rape happens online involving *actual* people? Perhaps they should send their smarmy investigator to track down people who’ve already passed through the supposed gateway drug of Second Life and are molesting more than 1s and 0s.
I fail to see what Sky News hoped to accomplish here, other than being linked by Deviant Titillation Central… which they were.
I wish a dispassionate examination of this issue were possible. Nothing shuts down rational discussion like invoking child porn. If we knew more about what people are thinking when they do stuff like this, we could probably as a society figure out the damage and how to stop it better, but the moral panic issues preclude that a lot.
Ah yes, a scathing investigation of pedophilia on SecondLife. Surely, this is a problem requiring immediate attention. Unlike, say, actual child trafficking, actual sex tourism, and actual use of children for prostitution. Pshhh, the rape of brown children by white business men in countries we don’t usually go to is so boooooring. Look, the internet!
oh, there was the funniest Law & Order SVU about this a few weeks back (L&O being a measure of cultural zeitgeist and all that), where the detectives were all up in arms because you mean a grown person can make their avatar look like a kid? and then other grown people pay this kid avatar to have sex with them? and oh, the horror, and whatnot.
“and oh, the horror, and whatnot.”
That is the tightest summary of this hysteria I’ve seen.