All across Second Life, there are sims dedicated to pretty much anything you can imagine. There are sims dedicated to combat, war, the American Old west, and urban decay and gang violence. My question is simple: where are the protests for these? Is rape somehow worse than getting blown to bits in war? Is there something inherently A-OK with pretending to shoot a rival crack dealer in the head, but inherently evil with pretending to get some rough sex in a dark alley? Is pretending to tie someone up and whip them just more "bad" than pretending to rip them to shreds with your Neko claws? All these would be "bad" things in the real world. But they get RP'd in a visceral way as a kind of release. It's the nature of roleplaying games, you live out something that you wouldn't really want in the real world, going all the way back to kids playing cowboys and indians in the back yard. Does anyone really think a kid would WANT to get shot by a bow an arrow? Of course not. He's playing. He's pretending. The real question is this - since when is rape somehow the WORST THING THAT CAN EVER HAPPEN TO ANYONE EVER? Ask someone who's lost a limb to a Somali warlord if maybe he would have preferred being used a sex slave for a few hours instead of only having one arm for the rest of his life. Ask someone who's soldier daughter was killed by a Taliban sniper if it would have been okay if she had been raped and brought home alive instead. Ask an indian kid who's been blinded by a cigarette because the leader of the beggars knows it warrants more sympathy and money if he would have preferred to perform a little felatio instead. Rape, real world, REAL rape is a horrible, horrible thing. And real world rapists should have their wangs blown off by shotguns. But lets stop putting this crime at the highest point of human atrocities. It's not. And every day, those more-horrible atrocities are played out in Second Life, WoW, Grand Theft Auto and Halo. But there's no protests for that. Why? Because they don't involve that most evil of evils, the unholy of all unholies... RAEEEP! "It makes women sad and feel icky, therefore it's just awful I tells ya! Oh, that kid who just got shot in a drive-by while eating ice cream on the front porch? Terribly sad. But there was no RAPE so it's not that bad." I'm a staunch liberal and I often wonder why american can't see the wisdom of a lot of liberal policies. And I know it's because of stuff like this. Middle america sees this crap and gets turned off by all liberals. This thought-police bullshit is as bad as anything the christian right throws out. Worse, it's right in line with them. Strange bedfellows indeed. I fully agree that the decrease in Rapes over the last 10 years is EXACTLY because of the pervasiveness of porn on the internet. Potential rapists watches porn, potential rapist masturbates, potential rapist goes and takes a nap instead. Rape happens when society is MORE repressed, not less. For the record, I've had a lot of sex in Hard Alley. And a lot of it has been "rough" or "forced" - and after it was done, the women in question (and yeah, thanks to voice, I know they WERE women), each told me they had a good time. And that this was a safe way to enact a fantasy and keep it there - as a fantasy. In fact, I would hazzard to say that there are far more women hanging out at Hard Alley who know what they want than there are men who know how to give it to them. The ultimate irony of Hard Alley is that it isn't Rape at all, and nothing is truly forced. It's just grown-ups playing cowboys and indians with their genitals. And nobody's leaving after it's done thinking they should go do this in the real world. Nobody.