Warren Ellis has been day-tripping into Second Life, and god bless him, he seems to honestly making an effort to scratch beyond the surface. This doesn’t change him from having to solve some problems unique to Second Life.

I went in-world on Sunday evening to pick up messages and to look for some music to stream while I worked. Materialising on my new land, I immediately noticed two pings on the “minimap” radar screen that’s placed in the top left of the Second Life viewer. There were two people on my land….

The first thing I saw in the blockhouse was the avatar of a naked man strapped face-down over a piece of sexual apparatus that presented his backside. I then realised that the blockhouse had been filled with dungeon toys. A couple of dozen of them. And, sitting on a chair I didn’t recognise, was a dominatrix with long dark hair, idly waving a riding crop.

“Please be quiet,” she said. “We are busy.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I typed.

“Go away,” typed the slave.

“I not tell you to talk,” the dominatrix tapped out.

I resisted the urge to pull a weapon and blow them off my land like an enraged farmer. Instead, I used the Land tools in the menu. You can select every object on your land that doesn’t belong to you and send it back to the inventories of the owners. Therefore, Slave Bill flopped on to the floor as his wooden sex horse vanished from under him. The Land tools also let you ban individuals from entering your space. If they’re already on your land, it takes a moment; and then they quite satisfyingly fly through the roof and are dumped on the nearest available adjacent parcel.

It’s been a couple weeks since Wagner James Au tried to claim, bizarrely, that sex in Second Life was overstated with the most disingenious argument since a sitting president debated the word “is”.

Were you to count the sexual content in this most adult of places, only the dancers’ costumes, their sensual animations, and their avatar genital attachments would qualify. (And that is stretching the definition, and assuming that wearing genitals is only for sexual expression.)

But look closer: entirely non-erotic are the furniture, the money, most of the textures, all the construction materials of the building, the fixtures, and more. Don’t believe me? Teleport there, and have a look for yourself.

Seen this way, maybe 10% of this location depicts commercial content that is unambiguously sexual. (And this in a white hot center of avatar-based sensuality.) If it’s just 10% here, how much smaller is it across the wide swathe of the grid?

Uh-huh. In Wagner James Au’s world, people go to strip clubs for the music and read Playboy for the articles. Warren Ellis rejects this argument.

Sex is indivisible from Second Life. It’s an aspect of the broad freedoms allowed its users. Frankly, if it’s on the Internet, you can be certain that sooner or later (and usually sooner) it’ll be used for shagging….There have been attempts, recently, to downplay the role of sex in Second Life. Anyone’s who’s spent more than a day in-world knows those attempts to be disingenuous at best. The mainland is divided into Mature and PG areas, and any tour of the Mature regions will inevitably feature a collision with the sex business. A longer tour will illustrate how little of it is vanilla.

This Toothpaste For Dinner article would seem to support that.

Everything in Second Life seems to be coated in a preteen’s understanding of sex. It was very titty-booby pee-pee doo-doo. From the fantasy asses to the cyber-ruins surrounding Freebie Warehouse, there really was nothing but clumsy cybersex. I wandered through this wasteland for a while, until I finally came to a normal-looking store, with windows, and people inside, so I went in.

The store sold penises, and penis avatars. I didn’t actually get to see what they looked like, because I didn’t have any fake money to spend (and I wasn’t really interested in chipping in twenty bucks to these cats’ weird sex trip.) A pet penis, which would follow you around and “come on command” (I’m guessing you have to right-click and load a script and wait thirty seconds is what they mean by “command”) was 100 fakebucks, which converted to US$0.68. Okay, that’s not bad.

But buying penises, again, isn’t sexual. Wagner James Au, in the same article, explains, for example, that being able to buy penises and nipples isn’t even sexual.

If you did, you’d understand why it’s dubious to equate avatar genitals with avatar sex. Like the angels in Kevin Smith’s *Dogma*, SL avatars come into the world without genitals (or even nipples), so the choice of adding those is often for aesthetic or even gender identification purposes. (I’m met a lot of users who have them solely for either purpose, but not for sex.) Then there’s social activities which aren’t necessarily sexual, but are clothing optional, where wearing genitals is just part of the roleplay fun dresscode.

Meanwhile, back in Warren Ellis’ world, he is attempting to do what environmentalists do in the Real World – buying extremely offensive land plots in order to break down the seedier elements of the world.

The first land I owned was bordered by what looked like an empty parcel. Six hundred meters above it, however, floated an airborne house designed to facilitate what is called “age play.” Couples would attend the house, invariably one avatar looking like an older man and one avatar designed to resemble a small child. The house was full of toys loaded with scripts that animated avatars, placing them into sexual poses and running them through looped sexual motions. It was, bluntly, a place where people could simulate having sex on children.

Using donated money, I eventually bought the parcel and destroyed the place. Intolerant? I have a young daughter. I have no tolerance for even simulation and roleplay where paedophilia is concerned. I also decided I was doing Linden Lab a favour — sooner or later, the current swell of media attention to Second Life is going to bring the simulation of illegal sexual activity before a court.

Unfortunately, Ellis couldn’t keep up and was forced to sell his own land, as his land was eventually abutted by what appears to be an extremely popular bestiality simulator. What was built on HIS land he was unwilling to describe on Reuters. He concludes:

anyone who says that sexual activity is a tiny part of the SL experience is either stupid or knowingly lying. Further: anyone who thinks it’s not going to lead to trouble down the line is just an idiot.

Original comments thread is here.