Inclusive Communities and Representations of Violence against Women

That really depends on the context. If someone enjoys that type of sexual encounter, then that's sextalk intended to arouse; not a threat intended to silence. The people in those "rape sims" want to be there, and leaving is a simple "teleport home" away.



Again--that really depends on the context. If I use a gun to cause grievous harm in my own defense, or in the defense of others, I am using it intelligently and responsibly.

Not platitudes, how I live my life daily. Lines in the sand I have drawn. Principles that are as important as the air I breath.

As I've suggested above, Brenda, if someone has to cam behind a wall, or fly up to your skybox to see it, then I have little sympathy for them. I DO think that there is a workable distinction in SL between "public" and "private."

Don't forget Emo's. Otherwie, I agree with this.

LOL. Thank god you haven't moved from platitudes to cliches, eh?

Only for definitions of "public" that include privately owned land.

Just because you can access a sim, it does not mean it is public. They are still owned by someone that pays for them and sets the rules for the sim or parcel. The only real public lands are owned by LL.

In the 2 1/2 years I've been in SL (for an appalling number of hours per week), I've never tripped across any examples of hatred and violence directed against women while generally wandering about or shopping for shoes. Even when I wandered into highly sexualized RP sims with violent overtones, there was plenty of warning about the nature of the sim, and frankly, not a whole lot of action. Most of the time, any given sim in SL is pretty empty.

So this whole issue strikes me as a trumped up excuse for moral spleen venting.

Frankly, I find talking prim fetuses more of an assault on my senses than witnessing a rape fantasy carried out by two (or more) consenting residents. But I dont' throw a hissy fit when the little horrors start talking about making their mommie need to wee-wee, I just mute them or TP the hell away.

Principle is important to me. I guess it isn't to you. I have faced jail for saying what I think and for standing up for my rights to say it. I walked away a free man. But I would have gladly been jailed rather than muzzled myself. You call them "platitudes" and cliches, I call them life.

I think Ursula IS part of the solution, but I do have some serious reservations about its implementation. In particular, I very much dislike the way that ALL sexuality is being thrown into the same pot, and that sex is also being equated with "extreme" violence. Odd that it's ok to simulate killing someone in "Mature," but you can't make love to them . . .

That's Voltaire; not Jefferson.


Voltaire, letter to M. le Riche, February 6, 1770
French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 177


Though I'm sure Jefferson would have agreed, and it is a high compliment you have paid Chris by associating him with both of those men.

Um, I actually have to go now, so please don't take my silence as . . . anything other than the fact that I have to go now.

Thanks to all of you who have contributed. Please continue to do so. I'm not sure that we've really addressed the issue that I wanted to talk about: how do we resolve these conflicts in such a way as to produce an open, diverse, and welcoming SL community? I would very much like to hear some ideas on this . . .

I don't disagree.

That's a pretty common definition of "in public". If you're in a mall, whether it's posted "private property" or not (and most malls are), and you're obviously stoned to the gills, they'll still call it "public intoxication".

Mmmhmm yeah you're right, and I knew that, even as I hit the 'Send' button. You're also right about it being visceral. My point was though, since it bothers 'me', on a visceral level, I don't have to involve myself with it, at all.

And also that since people are unique individuals, it can't be my world, my imagination, and also be your world your imagination, if yours clashes with mine somehow or vice versa. UNLESS the answer is to stay away from what is offensive to me, which is very easy to do in SL. Why should one have rights to do their thing and another doesn't? That was really my point although I didn't state it very well.

Once again, I don't disagree. There is no bigger critic of the plan than me. And I do believe it is part of LL's plan to eventually remove from view all of the content ticketed for Ursula. At least from all LL maintained land.

Hm.

Scylla, I notice you put a lot of words in quotes. Usually that's an indication that the actual word used isn't intended in its usual contextual sense, but in a somewhat different sense, either ironic or metaphoric.

Not trying to nitpick *at all*, but simply trying to understand. If there are any shades of meaning you are expressing beyond the actual words in quotes, please feel free to expand. I'll read it, even if it is somewhat long.

With regard to content, there are a couple basic presumptions that we do not share. I don't see everyone on the grid as part of one community at all. I'm not sure that the expression "community of communities" makes much sense either. It seems to conflate the definition of community.

Two questions:

1) Let's cut to the chase. What rule would you think would be the right rule for the grid as a whole? Put it on the table and let's discuss it. I may not disagree with you at all.

2) In reference to the Kalash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalash

Traditionally, a boy is sent off all alone for the summer, and upon his return during a festival, he is allowed by that culture (for one day) have any woman he wants. I won't elaborate; that's detail enough.

In your view, what rights does this culture have to exist, outside of our laws and social norms? Just curious to read your honest answer.

Yes, they're called movie theaters. You will frequently see actors and actresses portraying racist characters in films. They are fictionalized accounts, just like the roleplay in Second Life is.

I agree mostly, except that I think there is only so much that authority (whether it's a government's laws, or a virtual world's TOS) can do.

I spent several years in legal representation exclusively of domestic violence victims, and another few years after that in graduate school studying gender equality. One of the things that I witnessed first-hand practicing law- and later found that studies backed up what I had witnessed- was that the probability that an abuser would actually abide by a no-contact order had a lot to do with how fairly the court treated him. If a judge gives him his due process and chance to make his case, he is much more likely to abide by the end result even if he loses. I went in front of some judges who were going to give my client the order or protection no matter what, and even though that was in some sense winning, I always preferred the judges who made me make a good case. In the end, it is much better for my client for the abuser to follow the order voluntarily, than if he breaks it and she faces more abuse and has to call out the police and have another hearing and so forth.

My assessment of laws protecting women from violence in the U.S. are actually pretty good. Enforcement lags behind, because not all police officers (and not all judges) truly believes in the laws. And ultimately, as long as men believe they have the moral right to abuse their partners, no amount of laws will prevent them from doing so. People rebel against laws they find unjust.

So in real life, there is still a lot to be done to protect women from violence. However, generally, I don't see the deficiencies being in the law. The law isn't going to change a person's heart, moral codes, or beliefs. If the laws go too far- such as denying due process in order to decrease violence- then the denial of due process becomes a distraction from the real issue. If a person is sitting in jail for assault, he should be focused on the fact that his assult put him in jail, and not distracted by the notion that he is in jail because he was denied due process.

Legislating against hate speech has the same delimma. Hate is a bad thing. But a broad denial of free speech will take focus away from the hate, and put the focus on the denial of speech. A person in a priviledged group can more easily laugh off a racial epithet than someone who has been oppressed because of his race. So part of regulation of hate speech focuses on the propensity for the speech to lead to actual violence. But hate speech does regulation does not deny speech on a particular topic- it mainly just denies the speaker to force someone who might react violently to listen. Free speech is about speaking, not forcing an unwilling speaker to listen.

And what is hateful depends on context. The reason that Nazi speech is more heavily regulated in Europe than the United States was quite simply that the Nazi empire had a far more traumatic effect on the people of Europe. It's one thing to watch the Devil on a news real before a movie in the theater; it's a far different thing to have the Devil march through one's back yard.

I think violence against women is perpetuated in large part by patriarchal ideas passed down generations, so it's going to take many generations to elimate that. For some reason, though, I don't think a lot of those patriarchal attitudes in real life receive a perfect translation in Second Life.

All-in-all, I think it's more effective overall to give people a way to control their space, rather than denying someone the right to say whatever on their space. I wouldn't be in favor of controlling someone else's speech more unless I had less of an ability to not hear it. And at least in my experience, I can easily not hear it.

And honestly, to me, that would include people excluding, for example, black-skinned avatars on their own parcels or whatever. The dynamics of excluding someone based on racial appearace in Second Life is just far different from the dynamics in SL. Being denied entry to one's parcel does not deny basic needs (like denying a job- needed to feed the family- would). And while some people do carry real life prejudices with them into SL, it just doesn't feel to me that SL is as burdened as much with a history of racial or gender-based prejudice as real life.

This.

Actually, most anti-discrimination laws allow one to be discriminatory if it's only a little bit.

For example, anti-discriminatory housing laws usually don't apply if the landlord actually lives in a small apartment complex for example (like maybe four apartments, the landlord lives in one). When it comes close enought to one's personal space, the law tends to allow one to make racially motivated decisions.

Most federal employment discrimination laws only apply to companies of a certain size (like 50+ employees, I think?) States often have fill-the-gap laws that apply to smaller companies (say, 15-50 employess, as an example). If there is a justification there, maybe its that for a small company, personal and business spheres become way too interconnected- your employees are often family and friends, not just the people with whom you work with. And the law won't force you to choose your friends or deny a job to family.

Edit: In Second Life, one can't even have a gathering of 40 people, can they? The technology provides some limit on what can truly be considered public.

There is the same thing on TV and in the theaters. They are actors. Roleplay is acting, it is not "real". It is fantasy role play, done be consenting adults. What can be wrong with that? Soon there will be a rating system installed so those encounters should not happen in the public areas of SL anymore.

/me yawns.........

I noticed Voltaire brought up earlier. Is it true that he died face down in his own sh*t or is that just an old euro urban legend. I read it while at college in a bunch of critical essays about critics from the era of enlightenment. This author was a critic of Voltaire's, and iirc he said he found it quite ironic that the great godless, rashionalist thinker - the great satyrist Voltaire!! - should die in his own dung. Just curious.

Yes, and vented in the specific direction of Ursula:
I'm not clear if the whole thread is just an attempt to establish valid motivations behind the Adult Content policy, retroactively animating those missing millions of would-be customers--or if there's actual delicate sensibilities being offended.

It could be the latter if it were a real problem. But are the Welcome Areas suddenly full of violence against women now? God knows they host every other ill that can befall an avatar, yet I've never seen this.

(Even if this were happening, the obvious solution would be to enforce the rules, not make up new rules that won't be enforced, so there's just no reason to think that the Adult Content policy will--or is even intended to--address such issues at all.)

There's nothing wrong with posing a discussion thread to engage and amuse forum posters. But trying to shore-up a bankrupt policy with trumped-up offenses, if not wrong, is at least pathetic.

We'll see more threads on this topic because the group you're associated with is hellbent on pushing their agenda. That first thread was just the opening salvo, it failed to get the proper response and its OP couldn't handle the backlash so they sent you in to continue on a slightly different tack. When yours fails, they'll try a 3rd. And a 4th. Until they run out of members to throw to the lions or manage to get their agenda enacted.