Let's be philosophical about this problem.

Pearl Dragon received this letter:

Mmmmm, Pearl - that's a tough one:
(left hand) - people should be free to do what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else and everyone is of consenting/comprehending age or mentality. So regarding the inevitable sexual side of role play or even some questionable cybering by individuals or members of a group (any group), I must say the exact same thing I said to an ex-girlfriend when she pulled out a box of coat hangers, a Nazi uniform and a live chicken...."knock yourself out, baby!". As long as no one is victimized or is a minor I FIRMLY believe in the "tug-of-war" principle which states that if I pull one direction your human nature makes it also inevitable that you will pull the other way. From hackers to hippies I have found this to be true. People must be free to decide for themselves, even if they do some harm to themselves in the process, since the burned hand teaches best. Cigarette smokers, heavy drinkers and sex-a-holics always find this out for themselves, and as long as they do no harm in the process I respect their freedom of discovery.

(right hand) - there IS such a thing as coercive seduction, and I'm quite familiar with this process. Some people are naturals at it. They create a scenario or situation, control the rules, apply generous amounts of pressure (political, peer, etc.) and manipulate others to bend to their will. Again....usually....the burned hand teaches best, but what about the 18 year old girl, naive and innocent, who gets manipulated into role play in a cyber environment by a very practiced, very smooth, very manipulative predator? Well, usually I say caveat emptor ...buyer beware!... but I had a friend once who at the ripe of age of 20 committed suicide in a emotionally charged romantic situation, having been completely deluded and exploited. Again we have the issue of harm, and it begins to ever-so-subtly encroach over into that large gray land of "potential harm". Do we protect the innocent in such situations? And by doing so, are we #1.) playing God, #2.) on a power/ego trip, and #3.) preventing the victim in this situation from learning life's hard lessons?

Tough calls. Having never been in the exact situation you described it's tough for me to speak definitively on the issue. As an advocate of freedom and social responsibility I'd say that customers should inquire about products and environments and that vendors have a right to enact controls for safety. Everybody's free to come and go.

BUT, if someone gets seriously hurt, and if someone is at fault in this regard, then the someone at fault should face crucifixion and be eaten by beetles. I speak in less jest than you might think, because I believe (FIRMLY) that the number one problem in the United States is not Iraq, or the economy, or Bush, or the democrats, or the debt/deficit/delicatessen....the number one problem is the sexual molestation and exploitation - RAMPANT exploitation and molestation - of children. It's huge. It's almost totally covert and underground, considering the numbers. And the implications for adulthood and the severe emotional, mental and physical damage is horrifying. And I've simply known too many victims for it to be a series of isolated cases. I could write an entire blog about alternative lifestyles (gay, goth, s&m, etc., etc.) and how the members of those lifestyles unilaterally (in my experience) carry around immense loads of baggage and personal pain from childhood sexual trauma in one form or another. It's one thing to be attracted to a member of the same sex, perhaps even to act on it. It's something else entirely to hurt oneself. In my experience, nobody does that for no reason.

And limping awkwardly back to your original question about my thoughts on this issue, well this pretty much sums it up: Let people be free / those that do harm must pay.

Kindest regards,
S. D.... W.....

----- Original Message -----
From: Pearl_Dragon
To: ..........@......com
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 7:17 AM
Subject: [Lord of Swans] 5/29/2005 05:05:27 AM

Having considered your blog post, I find that I agree with your point about the hypocritical stance of American legislators being skewed to lean towards their financial benefactors, those soulless corporations, while they pay mere lip service to the needs of average citizens without special financial clout. It's an obvious and rather traditional sell out of the "representatives" to power brokers quite as old as democracy by proxy.
The term "cyber-hypocrisy" had other connotations for me, though. We've got a blog that started from a sense of moral outrage at the way a game web site's policy of covert cybering among players seems an established perk of the site's moderators and owner, so that they strenuously resist changing it, or in fact even openly discussing more wholesome ways of handling the inevitable sexual side of role play. Secretiveness seems to us, who are anything but innocent of salacious cybering, a likely cloak for exploitation. The optimum treatment would probably be PG rated love talk (I'm writing several purple-prose examples on our site. LOL.) with double entendres revealing a risque level to the less innocent while the inexperienced would read it in a harmless way. What's your take on this issue?

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Posted by Pearl_Dragon to Lord of Swans at 5/29/2005 05:05:27 AM

We consider it best to hand this topic over to the dispassionately philosophical investigations of Hypatia Theon, who is overjoyed to discover an awesome intellectual that responded in an insightfully serious way to one of Pearl Dragon's blog flirtations. Surely it would be a waste of his talents to leave this exchange in the hands of a woman like Pearl with her constant undertone of sexual seductiveness. Hypatia Theon, on the contrary, is a character nearly 100% role played by Pearl's "real" husband, such that both the character and the player have only academic interest in cyber sexual relationships with men, or women either in the character's case; thus, it seems the greater part of wisdom to consider our dialog on that basis, nicht wahr?

Sincerest Regards, Hypatia Theon