Ageplay is a difficult subject to write about on a blog which does its best to be office-friendly, but I will do my best to keep to the issues surrounding it, and no salacious detail.
It has been on my mind, firstly because it is surfacing often on the soon-to-be-closed general forum; secondly because of a prosecution recently in the UK; and thirdly because of an experience I had when I was running Slave City in Bragg. I'm thinking out loud here, but indulge me.
SL does enable people to be whomever they like. As long as you're above 18, you can be a predatory vampyre, or a fluffy bunny, and you can look and be whomever you want. People choose for themselves whether to play a role, or to play themselves, to look like their RL self, or find a younger, slimmer, furrier incarnation for our virtual world. Often, that pretty girl is a guy. I'm not sure the reverse happens a lot.
So, you sort out your own presence, decide how you want to look, and be, and whether you will live the dream of being a sexy 25 year old, or own up to your age and real life photographs. Then you have to start dealing with the other people and their choices about who and how to be, and how you feel about them.
There are some pretty high-profile girls who are guys in real life. Some are upfront about that, others less so. Unless you are in a deep and meaningful relationship with them, I don't see that this is anyone's business but their own. Some people, you know without asking that they are not what they seem. Obviously that vampyre Fox gor master is not likely to be many of those things in RL.
Then you come to age play ... and it starts to get difficult. I play an avatar who is 25, despite being 47 myself. I don't lie about that, but I sometimes refuse to answer if a person I don't know starts firing questions at me about my real life. I can choose not to answer, so can anybody. There may be people who are prejudiced against older residents, who would want to know me if 25, and not if 47, but I don't see it is anyone's business until I make it so. I have met residents much older than myself, playing in avatars 40 years their junior. It is a hard thing to work out for yourself ... should it matter? If your friendship is virtual and restricted to a world where you can be whomever you please, should real age be relevant?
It is this which leads to the 64,000 dollar question. What if you are 25 but play 10? What if you are 25 in real life, but enjoy a sexual relationship in SL as a 10 year old girl engaged in activity with someone playing an adult male? Is that wrong? Can any harm come from it? Is it anyone's business but your own?
It's a hard question to answer even in the theoretical case where you assume that you know the child avatar is driven by an adult, it gets even trickier when there is a possibility that the child avatar may be driven by a minor. I understand that some of the most active escorts in The Sims Online were purported to be minors in real life. I can't deal with that here. Let's assume that the child avatar is driven by an adult.
At present, LL seem to be living by the principle that it is our world and our imagination in these areas. They don't have the manpower or will to police the grid in this way, snooping into people's houses and roleplaying. They have even encouraged people to make their own child avatars -- the second anniversary SL birthday celebration required residents to make a child avatar and join in some harmless non-sexual fun.
Is pretend child/adult sex in a game harmless? To be honest, I don't know the answer to that. It seems to me that there is a possibility that it may not be, not for the player fantasising about being a child, but for the player fantasising about being in a sexual relationship with a child. On the other hand, better that they act it out in Second Life with an adult than in RL with a real child. I suppose the question which we must all ask is whether the opportunity to do this in SL makes it more likely or less likely that someone will put their fantasies into reality. As a mother, I'd like the answer to that question. Possibly the answer is different for everyone who engages in this activity though. What will satisfy one and ensure they don't bring it to RL, may encourage another to do so. I don't have the answer, only questions.
When I ran Slave City (which was supposed to be a fun place to explore your inner slave or master, and not hidebound by all the conventions and rules which are found in many of the Gor and BDSM sims), an avatar arrived, wanting to be a child slave, taken from one of the Japanese Hentai stories. Before I arrived in SL I had seen few Japanese cartoons outside the mainstream Pokemon/Digimon stuff that was popular a few years ago. I knew little about Anime, which seems much more popular in the US, and absolutely nothing about Hentai, which is, as I understand it, an X-rated version of Anime.
I tried extremely hard to respect the wishes of this avatar to play a character who is supposed to be hundreds of years old, but looks like an eight-year-old girl. It made me very uncomfortable though, especially when graphic images from Hentai were imported into her room, showing the Hentai character apparently being assaulted by adult males equipped with very large attachments ....
Eventually, acting on a complaint that these images, although kept in a private room, constituted a breach of the "broadly offensive" rules, Linden Lab insisted that they be removed, even though they looked no more "real" than two avatars involved in the same activity, and involved no real children.
The avatar concerned was angry that her (actually his) rights had been infringed by the removal of the material, and claimed that there was no chance of hurt to any actual child in the course of the age play that he wished to enact in Second Life. I felt very confused; I wished to defend the rights of residents to be the people they wanted to be, but didn't want to defend something that made me feel very uncomfortable and anxious about the potential for harm.
However, it seems odd that LL will force the removal of cartoon images of children and adults engaged in sexual activity and not avatars doing the same thing, when the images are very similar. I'm not saying they are wrong in either case, but it does seem inconsistent.
Which leads me to the last thing. A computer expert was convicted a few days ago in the UK of possessing pseudo-photographs of children. He hadn't taken pictures of any children, he had used pictures of adult females and morphed them to appear like children. He is to expect a prison sentence, he has been told.
I can't help thinking that his offence pales into insignificance next to the sort of activity that happens in SL.
1. I have a hard time with ageplay. I play my own age pretty much, if not maybe a little younger. I just don't see the fascination with an adult wanting to relive their childhood. And the whole sex thing makes it even worse, because that to me is pretty much bordering on virtual pedophilia.
I guess to each their own. I may not like it, but people have their choices and I have to respect that.
Posted at 7:31AM on Aug 15th 2006 by Michael Cela