Can Someone Please Explain Virtual Sex To Me?
August 11, 2007 (6 Responses)
OK. LET’S START WITH the basics. Phone Sex – I get it. Your bored, probably lonely and missing your other half who is probably away on business. A phone call late at night turns into something a bit more… pleasurable. No problem – makes perfect sense to me.
Internet/Cyber Sex – I’m not completely down with it, but I think I get the logic of it at least. It’s back to the lonely thing again, and you meet someone over the net and suddenly the texting turns to sexting and away you go. Again, no issues there – not my thing but I get it.
But can someone please explain this latest Virtual Sex thing to me? G’wan – I dare you to try to make sense of it.
Perhaps I should clarify. I know that people lead a virtual existence online, on the ‘Net. This started out as having a persona, a kind of alter ego/identity which people used to post messages on forums, enter chat rooms etc. Technology improved, that then progressed to online gaming and eventually moved into the whole persistant universe thing (World of Warcraft being the largest example of this type of culture). The thing is I can kind of understand that to a point. I’m not really into it myself, but I play enough online games to understand the attraction of a permanent online community and persona. But this then gets too weird, even for me…
This moved to the next (and weirdest in my opinion) level with a game called “Second Life“, which is basically an entire society lived out completely online. Your online ‘character‘ does pretty much all the things in this game that you yourself might do in real life, and more recently this even includes holding down jobs, going on vacations, buying and selling real estate and… well, you get the picture. What’s got me in a twist however is the latest development in this area… Virtual Sex Lives.
Now where as Phone Sex and Cyber Sex kind of end up delivering the goods (by manual intervention if you get my drift), Virtual Sex takes place entirely within the game itself. In other words – it’s not actually real. It never happened. Your fake character within a fake environment will engage in fake sexual relations with another fake character… and to make things even freakier a company has decided to sell code extensions to spice up your imaginary online sex life. Examples include new and more explicit ways to animate your online character (or avatar), adding more realistic genetalia to your character and so on. Hell, there’s even a law suit (in real life) going on about who owns the rights to the virtual sex devices.
And get this… people are paying REAL MONEY for these things. They pay hard cash to play the game in the first place, then they pay more real money to spice up their imaginary characters within this fictional environment so that their imaginary sex life between their character and some other fake avatar can be more… real I guess? Why would you pay real money for imaginary orgasms?
It just doesn’t make any sense to me, so someone please explain to me why you would pay hard earned cash to have fake virtual sex by proxy in an online world that doesn’t actualy exist. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more effective to just go out and find a hooker?
Most of the virtual sex going on is the same cybersex that took place in MU*s and chatrooms prior to Second Life. The avatars are just there in lieu of lengthy descriptions of oneself – instead of trying to distill your persona into something short enough that people will read it but interesting enough that people will care, you can blow a few dollars (L$1000 is about US$3) and just look like you want to. SL is a MUCK with a graphical interface, arbitrary 3D spaces, and lag. No more, no less.
The people who tend to use toys alone or with a friend without putting any actual effort into writing for the scene (i.e., engaging in ‘traditional’ cybersex) tend to be idiots. They write like idiots and have the most Barbie-doll avatars and will almost undoubtedly have whorishly makeup-smeared custom face textures and ‘bling’ that blinks and shines every few seconds. They’re probably still doing all the work by hand, wink wink nudge nudge, but to a polygonal porno flick instead of words, pictures, or drawings.
This is unbelievable – “A 16-acre virtual island costs $1,675 plus monthly maintenance fees of $295. Virtual money, called Lindens, can be exchanged with real dollars at an average rate of about 270 Lindens to the dollar”.
I certainly was not aware of SL and just could not believe that people are so much into second life after spending hours n hours in cyber sex in chat rooms or phone sex.
To second your opinion, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more effective to just go out and find a hooker?”
In a phrase: those are NOT “imaginary” orgasms. Plus, you can get all for free, if you want.
In the USA it is against the law to “go out and find a hooker”. Our nation believes in the right to kill an unborn baby, “It’s her body”, but not in a women renting “her body” out for someones pleasure.
The ban on prostitution plays a large paart in why Americans lead the way in pursuing pornography and weird substitutes for normal sex.
There is no possible justification for a prohibition on prostitution except that women abhor the competition as they go about marketing their asset.
need to talk to women
…sick, seriously, just sick.
The worst part about this is anyone pretending to be anyone – Can anyone imagine how many underage girls (And / or 70 year old grandpa’s) are out there doing this?
Yuck.