Harassment of Escorts, Exotic Dancers, and Sex Workers in SL?

The "proposed or you lose your benefits" kind of proposal.



This is not part of the article I quoted. This bit of information can only be found in a british newspaper. I couldn't find it in any German source.

It is masturbation, nothing more than watching porn. The dangers involved in sex work - human trafficking, drugs, rape, extortion and so on - simply do not exist. The woman is sitting in front of her computer screen. In the worst case you get your full body pic plastered around the web or get online stalked by some idiot. There is no need to "protect sex workers in SL" however, because there aren't any. Any laws about prostitution do not apply to phone sex.

To some degree, this seems to me to be a matter of semantics, although I will agree that those working the sex trade in SL are not in any sense really "prostitutes."

I'm not sure why you exclude them also from being sex workers, however? That sounds a bit Clintonesque for my taste: surely performing naked online, engaged in activities like masturbation, penetration with sex toys, etc., while your audience masturbates IS sex, even if there is no flesh meeting flesh or penetration? Calling it "masturbation" seems like a bit of an evasion.

As to whether those who do chat, voice, or cam work for money here (whatever you want to call them) require some form of protection . . . well, that's what I am trying to find out. Accepting your definition, and conceding that there are no "sex workers in SL," doesn't really answer my question: do these people face harassment, from employers or clients? And if so, is there something that can be done about that?

Quite possibly.


I'm not sure I buy your premise, or your logic. Because there will always be victims, there's no point in trying to prevent victimization? Nor do I accept that curtailing freedoms is necessarily a part of trying to protect people, unless of course the freedom you are curtailing is the freedom to exploit or victimize someone.


Sorry, don't mean to be combatative, but I confess to finding this kind of statement irritating in the extreme, and really quite astonishingly arrogant. "I and any free thinking individual"? With "any" here meaning "ALL" free thinking individuals? You can speak for ALL of them, right, because by definition they ALL think the same way as you?

Sorry, I am sufficiently "free thinking" to have my own definitions of what comprises "free thinking."

The reasons for laws about prostitution lie in the dangers involved in that business, esp. street prostitution, and in zoning laws and similar things. Neither of these are applicable to phone or online sex.



This is not about a psychological definition of what sex is. Of course cybersex is sex. (If you come, it is sex.) We are talking about laws here.



I am sure they do.



Yes, log out.

Role playing political activism is about as real as any of this... one only plays along if they want to..

People don't need a police force to say no for them. It's just an online r/p game, the log out option, or not paying fees anymore, what ever way you stop... kind of says it all.

I was curious about your obsession with FOX news, so I Googled; germany forced brothel work fox news. The only two stories related to Germany and Fox were "U.S. Warns Germany to Do More to Stop Human Trafficking" and "World Cup Sex Industry Uncovered." Searching FOX itself, using; germany forced brothel, also has no relevant hits. Quite a few other sites do perpetuate this rumor, though.

my only comment to this is that as a generalisation, the sanest, kindest and all round nicest group of people I've found in SL are the sex workers.

No dont say that. My Latin teacher was a real wanker. Really sounded like Pep. I used to tear out my exercise book pages coz I had untidy writing and he (yeah, in a girl's boarding school - poor sod) used to go ballistic. Thenn I did this great verb declension -

agricacola
agricacoca
agricacocacola!

I larfed myself silly over it. The class were helpless (true) but I think he thought I was retarded LOL. He said 60% in the exam was a dreadfl mark and said so in my term report so I got blasted when holidays started. Bastard. Spent two weeks in Bahamas - TRUE - wht a Swiss bloke who tutored me for hours on verbs. Now I can only remember e tu brute!

I could entertain you for hours on my school days in real. When the chemistry mistress blew herself up ... (she survived to testtube another day)

"Et tu Brute" actually.

Pep (or perhaps that *was* all you remembered.)

Last night Brann used Latin to tell me I was really hot looking.

What did you google to find other sites that perpetuate that rumor? Do you mean specific to sex work in SL? Or just online? I could find no references that specific.

It is not an obsession with FOX News, it is a distaste for finding the most sensationalistic possibilities as an excuse to protect adults from themselves. FOX News is the most common example of that in the States.

if a girl is -forced- to have sex with someone in front of a camera so that people can watch and pay via webcam..no sex worker? mhm sure they don't exist?I wish it were so simple..

Cheeky sod. (But yes that was all I remembered) Oh and Vidi vinci chichi.
Or is it Vinci, VD, VC?
And to think - one of my antecedents was a "great" English novelist

Vino, vomiti, vamoosi. "I got drunk, I chundered, I ran away".

Maybe it's just the language you are using, but I certainly see a distinction between providing people with a means of redress if they complain they have been in some way victimized and "regulating" everyone's dealings, to prevent their being victimized. I certainly think, in RL, we should have laws against people stopping you in the street at night and demanding you hand over your purse or wallet, but I wouldn't express that as "our behaviour when walking down the street should be regulated".

Now, as to SL, seems to me the question is whether any particular extra remedy is required when, as has been pointed out, you can always log out if there's a problem (or TP away, mute people and so on), and there are -- though perhaps not well-enforced -- already sanctions against harassment, griefing and so on.

To my mind, it's far from clear that anything much is needed, while there is a very clear danger that any cure involving "regulation" by Linden Labs is likely to be far worse than the ill it seeks to remedy.

For what it's worth, back when I was working as an escort -- before I discovered scripting is far more fun, interesting and lucrative -- I ran into a few people who were genuinely being exploited by unscrupulous folks who'd taken advantage of their naivety to convince them that they were somehow in the hands of master hackers who could compromise their accounts, fry their computers or otherwise make problems for them if they didn't comply with whatever demands for money or services these creeps were making.

In no case did it take more than a few minutes' reassurance to persuade them that they were the victims of a cruel hoax. What more do you say is needed?

You are probably right: I think my language is either unclear, or I am not being specific enough.

By "regulated," what I mean is simply that more effective tools be put at the disposal of victims to end the harassment. In practice, this would probably mean nothing more than a) being somewhat more specific about forms of harassment and exploitation in the CS and/or ToS, and b) ensuring that ARs resulting from cases of these are actually taken seriously and responded to.

For instance, would a demand that employment be contingent upon providing sexual favours for free be AR-able now? I suspect not. I think it should be. (Sorry Pep). Would the case you describe below be punishable under the CS or ToS? Perhaps, but I bet not.


I think it is great that you rescued these people, but overall I'd say something more was required, if only to prevent these jerks from simply finding new victims. The next batch might not be so lucky as to run into someone as helpful as you, or might, at least, suffer far longer.

It's quite amazing what one will believe when one is new to SL. I remember being told that, while avatars generally couldn't "die," there was a mysterious form of "emote" that could delete an avi forever. I only half-believed it . . . but am still somewhat embarrassed by my gullibility for even accepting it as much as I did.

I agree to the extent that I would certainly counsel someone being harassed to log out if there were no other way to immediately end the griefing.

Generally, however, this seems to me a rather inadequate response. To begin with, the creepy jerks who do this sort of thing aren't role playing at being harassers: it can be a full-time job for many of them, and logging out is going to do nothing to prevent the harassment from continuing later. Must the victim keep logging out every time she or he is harassed?

One partial answer is, of course, "mute," but there are a number of methods of harassment for which that provides no remedy, most notably stalking. I've known personally of two cases of in-world stalking, and second-hand of a number of others: muting someone isn't going to prevent the stalker from simply appearing at the well-known haunts of the victim, or positioning himself (or herself) where he (or she) can use cam to watch and listen in (sometimes without the victim being aware).

Overall, I have some ethical issues with the "just log out" response: it cedes too much to the harasser, and, in a sense, re-victimizes the victim. The onus is on HER to run away, which hardly seems just: it's like abandoning the playground to the bullies. Why should the harasser be allowed to go wherever she or he likes, while the victim's enjoyment of SL is seriously impaired by having to leave, and possibly deal with future harassment?

FOX News is only regarded as news by a small lunatic fringe of the very far end of the right wing in the US. Everyone else just looks at it and see "Jerry Springer for Conservatives."

Generally quoting FOX news in any way attributing to it credibility is a good way to destroy one's own credibility, kind of like if a liberal were to quote from KPFA or Hugo Chavez as credible sources.

You're entitled to your opinion, but it is the Lindens' interpretation of harassment that matters, and I am pretty sure that they are not interested in legitimising the sex trade by specific pronouncements; rather they would prefer to obfuscate its existence, the ghettoising of it in Zindra being a prime example.

Oh, and perhaps I should throw in that in real life in the UK immoral contracts are not legally enforceable.

Pep (But this is not real life. )

That's an excellent point (the one about legitimizing the sex trade), and one that had not occurred to me.

It seems to leave us at an impasse -- at least until such time as media attention focusses on the virtual sex trade here, and LL scrambles to perform a perfunctory and utterly inadequate clean-up as part of a PR campaign.

The same as quoting ABC,NBC,CBS, or CNN is regarded by most fair people as the Jerry Springer of the left.

There is no "left" in the US. There's centrists, fascists, religious nuts, and libertarians. The so-called "liberal media" in the USA tends to take a more conservative position than the BBC, and the BBC is a pretty conservative player on the world stage.

Oh, I don't know. We have communists, and socialists, and the green party, and moveon.org. And MessNBC is little more than PR outlet for the DNC.

And the "liberal media" consider them all cheap humor.

What's that got to do with the "left"?