Sex Controversies about Second Life

This morning Jurie Horneman commented on his personal blog Intelligent Artifice about an article Warren Ellis wrote for Reuters on Sex in Second Life, which ended with the quote: “I’m just saying: 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.”

Many of you will note that I have on several occasions stated that sex is not as big an issue in Second Life as it is made out to be. I have never said sex was not an issue in Second Life, but I believe it is not that much of a bigger problem than you will find in any active community any where in Europe, the North American continent, or most of Asia. What I have repeatedly stated is that sex appears to be a bigger problem in Second Life than it actually is because of the way traffic is counted for the search engine.

If one could simply type in a keyword for their community looking for accurate honest results for sex that is actually happening in that community. I am confident they would get back results which might skew what is the actual perceived reputation of that community. Now if those …ummm…”perverted” happenings actually paid people to sit in a chair on their property to increase their traffic count to get a much higher listing in the search results… then the whole community would appear perverted when in all actuality it is not nearly so prolific. I simply think it a shame that, anytime someone new comes into Second Life and does a search looking for what should be the better places, skewed results artificially show shabbier places as the more popular. That system is simply horribly wrong.

In Mr. Ellis’ tale of woe, sex closes in all around and even on top of him. I am not about to say that could not have happened, but Mr Ellis seems to have a track record of looking until he find some really “icky stuff” and linking to it, which is the reason Jurie Horneman states, “I stopped subscribing to his blog ages ago because of the stuff he links to.”

Is Mr. Ellis controversial? I will only say read him yourself and make up your own mind.