From: Cilis Nephilim
Its all well and good to say you need to be a part of a group to understand it... I don't feel the need to hiel Hitler to know that Nazi's had some sickening practices, or that they were in part based on an opera... its just common knowledge this day and age that it was screwed up.
You don't need to be part of group X to dislike X. Or to understand what it is they actually do (though, seeing it firsthand certainly helps). Understanding *why* a group does what they do, however, is very difficult without being a part of that group, and almost impossible unless you actually have a lot of direct contact with people in that group who you can ask questions.
From: someone
I don't need to join the KKK to understand they're ignorant racists.
No, but you would need to talk to KKK members to understand why they chose to be ignorant racists.
From: someone
So I can safely form an opinion on ageplay without trying it, and I don't ever wish to try it.
You can safely form a moral judgement about it without trying it - but personally, I don't give much weight to moral judgements made by people who don't understand the thing they are judging.
For example, if I said that the current political situation in some random world country is morally wrong.... and then admitted I don't really understand why people behave that way or even the details of what they're doing.... I would not expect people to accord my moral feelings much weight.
From: someone
Just going by science we know that people have primary and secondary sexual characteristics... Why on earth would anyone consider having sex with a person who lacks anything to say "I'm ready for sex" physically, when in fact it could harm them, emotionally and mentally?
1) Most ageplayers don't have sex when they're regressed to a younger age, mentally.
2) Ageplayers who do regress to a younger age, mentally, do just that - they MENTALLY regress. They do not physically regress. Thus, they keep their 'adult' sexual characteristics.
3) Mental regression is only PARTIAL... not complete. People who do sexual ageplay always keep part of their minds as 'adult'.... so, for example, you can regress your hobbies (preferring computer games to reading, or legos to cooking).... whilst still retaining the sexual part of your mind.
So, in summary, don't assume that the characters ageplayers play are just like real young/old people - they often have important differences.
From: someone
Members of my family have been abused as children, past girlfriends have been... I see on a person to person bases how much and how long past sexual abuse can effect a person.
Quite a few people who do ageplay as adults have been abused in various ways as children. They use the ageplay to re-enact what happened to them as a child, but changing the outcome. For example someone who was molested as an 8 year old can choose to replay the relationship they have WITHOUT the molestation, or they can choose to change the outcome in roleplay to make it less nasty. There is a psychological debate over whether going over past traumas is healthy, but my personal opinion, one shared by many others, is that it can be provided when you go over past traumas you change the outcome of them to render them harmless. In short, you go back over them and erase the bad bits.
This is a constructive, theraputic use of ageplay - going back and changing not your memories, but your associations and thought patterns.
From: someone
The people who have been abused write books on it, talk about it, every one of them that escaped their hell go on to say how horrible it has been on them, the few instances where they have reported good? they're usually docile, dull and married to their abuser, or still living with them...
It depends what you call abuse. How do you tell the difference between an abused wife and a Gorean female slave, given that both get hurt/harmed sometimes and yet both "choose" in some sense to stay with their man?
Personally, I think ageplay is like BDSM, or sex - is a VERY powerful way of pushing someone's mental buttons. It takes a lot of maturity to be able to handle it well. Lots of people try to do it and screw up, sometimes with terrible results. But, when done well, it can be good, harmless fun, and doesn't require you to be really abnormal or wierd to like it.
I know lots of people that regress slightly when under stress - they might start acting different, use less complex language.... want to be hugged or to lie down and curl up in a warm, soft bed, or whatever. The tendancy to regress mentally under stress is a perfectly normal one that I think a lot of people have. Ageplayers harness this and use it in a controlled way to achieve goals like relaxing and sometimes enhanced sexual pleasure.
From: someone
Its that detrimental. It hurts... It isn't right.
Abuse is just that, abuse. Ageplay isn't abusive - I actually classify ageplay as a form of BDSM (as it involves dominance/submission, though is often much more gentle then normal forms of dom/sub). BDSM is a game played by adults for fun. If it gets abusive, then it's not BDSM anymore - it's just abuse. If it becomes abusive, it moves out of the realm of BDSM and into the realm of the courts.
From: someone
Now this is all real life, this is why ageplay in the extreme disturbs many people... I'd say most people consider below 15 to be extreme, just so we're all using the same dictionary.
Of course. I remember one point when I was doing sexual roleplay online, and I got approached by a submissive who wanted me to play with them. I asked them how old they were - it turned out they were 14. I asked them what the hell they were doing asking me to do those things to them at 14... they said they wanted it.
I basically said "you're not mature enough to handle this yet, I'll cuddle you and let you relax in my lap so you can experience what it's like to have a dominant guy looking after you a little... but I'm not going to do sexual stuff with you, so please stop asking me to. I don't want to play with people who are RL minors - even if you CAN play and ARE mature enough to do it, I still dont' feel comfortable doing it."
There is a big difference... between your reactions to someone in RL based on their age and your reaction in roleplay, just as with most things. People are happy to accept the existance of slaves and torturers etc in roleplay, but would react violently against these things in real life. Similarly, people who do ageplay react very differently to sexual play with children in ROLEPLAY to how they react in real life. I actually find that given the significant percentage of ageplayers who had troubled childhoods, ageplayers can often be even more anti-pedophille then normal people..... because as they may have experienced the glow of childhood again, they know how valuable it is and thus how it ought to be protected from corruption.
I'm happy to talk about ageplay because it has very little to do with real life. It's like roleplaying a furry or an alien - we don't think they exist in Real Life.... so it's clearly a fantasy, it's clearly made up, it's not even *meant* to be realistic.
From: someone
Since such strong feelings exist about it in real life, you can't expect people to throw away those feelings when they play SL, almost every avatar I know outside of a specialized roleplay group carries all the same concepts and prejudice that their controller has.
I don't expect anyone to just 'get over' their prejudices, though I applaud those who do.
Neither, however, do I care much about the prejudices of others. Ageplay is quite entrenched in SL, and it's not going anywhere. It shouldn't have to, either. No matter what people think of it, it's a form of roleplay done consentually between adults. Ageplay done well is a caring, nuturing experience. I'd personally suggest that people who want to be 'looked after' in a BDSM relationship consider ageplay, it's one of the styles, like 'pet' play, which is very good at promoting that kind of play.
From: someone
Ageplay in game thats light, like a 17 year old.... okay yeah whatever... but banging a 9 year old? thats just sick... I don't need to "Be one with the Fishies" to understand the "Fishies"
If there was a person who enjoyed going around banging 9-year-old characters in SL, I would worry about that person. I'd suspect that they were using SL to hide their RL pedophillic tendancies. I'd be glad they were doing it as roleplay in SL rather then harming a real child in RL... but I'd still be very
about such a person's existence.
Thankfully though, I've never met such a person. The dominants I know who do ageplay get into it slowly, often via jokes at first. They also have limits - many of them flat-out refuse to have sex *at all* with an underage character. In fact I think a lot more submissives squick out their dominant by asking their dominant to fuck them while they're roleplaying a younger char, then It hink dominants squick out their submissives by proposing the same thing.
Hell, in my experience of ageplay, it's usually the submissive partner who initiates sexual ageplay and the dominant goes along with it - often needing reassurance that doing this in roleplay doens't make them a bad person... because the person you're doing it to is NOT a child, they are a mature adult who is partly shifted mentally into a role and can shift back to being their normal adult self if you're not comfortable.
From: someone
Lets get another thing straight, just acting like a kid but retaining an adult body isn't called ageplay, at least in this book I have next to me that lists over 3,000 plus sexual kinks (guess what, psychology is my past time and what I plan to go to college for)
Thats called adult babies... so don't defend the practice of ageplay (sex with minors in the extreme) with the adult babies.
'Age-play' for me is where two or more people roleplay characters of different age to their RL age.
Adult babies (who roleplay babies or very young children) are one example. You also get 'kidults' who typically roleplay young teens.
From: someone
The adult babies might take offense and throw things at you... not all of it smelling like baby powder.
I know several adult babies who agree that ABism is a form of ageplay, just like any other form of roleplay where you RP an age difference. Some ageplay is sexual, most isn't... ABism tends to be on the non-sexual side. But it's still ageplay.
From: someone
Another concern of some SL residents is how much of this roleplay is roleplay, and how much of it is swapping ideas and secrets, as done on IRC rooms and email groups, how much of it is new pedophiles gearing up for the real thing?
I know people who've been into ageplay for MANY years, both OL and RL. They've seen a few pedophiles try to 'infiltrate' the ageplay community and use it as a cover... but thankfully they're a small minority.
In all the years that some of my friends of mine have been doing ageplay IRL and Ol.... they have NEVER been approached by someone wanting to 'swap tips' on sex with RL children. It just hasn't happened. The reason for this is simple - ageplayers are just that, age-based ROLEPLAYERS and they reject, often violently, people who want to have sex with real children. Just because *some* of a group do something in an online roleplaying game, does NOT mean that any of them would consider doing similar things in real life... especially when the situations aren't actually that similar. For one, a regressed adult doing ageplay reacts, I think, VERY differently to sexual stuff then a real child would, because the regressed adult still has awareness of their sexuality, whereas a child does not. (I assume the fact that children aren't sexually aware is true, I don't really know much about how sexuality works in real life children because I've never asked... you'd be better off talking to a psychologist if you wanted to know this).
From: someone
At least goreans are consenting adults in real life... I don't think ageplayers are too interested in adults in real life (not speaking of adult babies in the same group mind you!)
Bluntly, doing ageplay is such a different experience from interacting with a real minor, that I don't think people who enjoyed doing sexual ageplay online would WANT to do the same with a real life minor. The experience of doing sexual ageplay online is very different because :
1) you usually do it with a partner you know well and who you trust
2) the person who changes age retains the use of the adult part of their minds while playing, which means that they CAN roleplay sexual things without it seeming awkward.
3) if anything goes wrong... then you just stop roleplay. Further, both of you know what you're doing as you have knowledge of both mindsets, so you can detect and correct/prevent mistakes... and if it stops being fun you just stop playing.
I don't really know anything about how pedophillia works... I've done some study of psychology but I've never studied that topic. The closest I've come to studying the mix of children and sexuality was looking at Freud's theories of psychosexual development in a psychology class.
I'm absolutely convinced, however, that ageplay, even sexual ageplay, is NOTHING like RL abuse of children. It just can't be.... given that these are consenting adults doing this, and given that the regressed person has to consent too.... it has to be enjoyable and not scary for the people that do it. Otherwise they wouldn't do it!
Seriously, what sort of person do you think would want to roleplay being raped as a child? I doubt you'll find people that would enjoy that. I DO think you'll find lots of ageplayers that enjoy sitting on daddy's lap, being held, fed or such. There are also people who roleplay teenagers who want a trustworthy older person to help them explore their sexuality *WITHOUT* forcing them and *WITHOUT* harming them or doing anything they don't *enjoy*.
I know I don't really know anything about pedophillia etc work IRL as I've not studied disorders like that in psychology.... however, from my experience with friends who do ageplay, I *know* that both people doing ageplay *can* enjoy it a great deal - and if the relationship was at all exploitative, or bad for them, or generally dangerous - then they wouldn't do it or they'd at least have serious issues doing it which would be reflected in their play style.
But... many of them find it safe, comfortable, easy and natural. They don't even get involved in debates about ageplay because they simply think "these people who are so opposed to ageplay have NO CLUE what they're talking about, they're just scared of it because they don't understand it.... and I don't need to waste my time talking to them when I could be enjoying myself".
From: someone
Even in cases where goreans have actually gotten together and formed colonys like in England, they're legal, they don't hold anyone who actually wants to leave, and they co-operate with the police... I've never heard of them burning their harddrive with thermite like some ageplayers do... you know, covering stuff up from the police? not harmless if you ask me.
I've never heard of any ageplayer I know (and I know a LOT).... ever tell me of any other ageplayer who burned their hard drive with thermite. If you know of any, I'd like to hear about it - becuase I've never heard of such a case, and I've known a lot of RL and Ol ageplayers for many years now.
Oh, and as for police searches of your data... have you ever considered that many people have so much pirated music on their hard disks, that they could face millions in fines if police found *that*?
You need to be seriously paranoid to wire thermite to your hard drive, true. But, imagine, say, if you were a multi-millionaire with hundreds of thousands of pirate mp3 tracks on your hard drive. In that situation it'd make sense to wire your hard drive to blow - simply to stop police from finding the mp3s and sending you a bill for millions for copyright infringement.
From: someone
I don't really care who starts it, the fact is child avatar or adult predator, both are age playing, both prefer having a child in their sexual fantasy to two adults... that speaks for itself.
Actually, a lot of them just borrow some childish traits (dependence, high trust, curiousity, etc) - they don't become children - they become sort of hybrid - an adult who borrows traits they want to have.
From: someone
to the quote just below this one, I've already addressed it I think, but the point is there are so many flavors of this that you really need to consider them separate groups, age play = cub furs, but those both don't equal adult babies.
I really don't think you can draw a line saying babyfurs are ageplayers but abies, who play characters of very similar ages, are not ageplayers.
From: someone
The hiding part...
A lot of ageplayers turn furry and beleave it or not I've asked them why... I usually hear back "Your all pretending to, you should understand us" as a very, very defensive response...
So yes, I do feel like they're hiding behind our form of "pretend" and claiming their own is just as harmless, in regards to cubfurs.
The sad thing is not all cub furs are sexual but there is no other group to put them in, they haven't formed one up and named it yet... there are a lot of cub furs that just, as you said, act young, reject sex, and sometimes even acts as an adoptive child to an in game family.
I genuinely feel bad for the clean cubfurs caught in the crossfire.
IMHO ageplayers turn to babyfur as babyfurs are cute, cuddly and friendly - just as they want to be.
Also, cut the ageplayers some slack - they don't expect you to understand, and it'd take a long time to explain - can you blame them for giving a defensive response?
It's interesting that ageplayers get accused of hiding behind furry, but furries don't get accused of hiding behind ageplay (e.g. a lion who, whilst normally scary, plays a baby lion to make people less scared of her). Why is that?
There are a lot of non-sexual cubs. That's true. But personally I don't feel bad for them... if I was one of them, and there were people out there that just *assumed* all babyfurs were sexual, I'd just shrug my shoulders and ignore such people. If they can't be bothered to get the facts right, why should I talk to them?
From: someone
As for the church and homosexuality?
My point about the church and homosexuality was not whether they were right or wrong to condem it.
My point was simple : if you say "I speak the truth - I'm not attacking, I'm just stating the truth which has bad consequences for you".... then you are still attacking someone, no matter what you claim you are doing.
It's like if I was the Vice President of the USA, and I stood up on National TV and I said "The President has been replaced by an Alien double!" - and then said "this wasn't an attack or an attempt to get the President locked up, or impeached... it was simply stating the truth"....
then NOBODY would argue that it was just 'stating the truth'. They'd realise it was so damaging that it WAS an attack.
From: someone
Slavery... again, not valid, it has nothing to do with sex in any sort of direct way.
Are you sure? For a lot of people the two are VERY tightly linked.
From: someone
You might think I'm taking the moral highground and playing like I'm better than them... the simple truth is my dick doesn't get limp in normal sex involving other people my age, online or off... for some of the age players? they're not even interested unless there is a binky to shove up someone's anus...
1) Most ageplayers do sexual play WITHOUT ageplay as well as with. They *do* want to have sex with people their own age too.
2) Even if they diddn't, so long as it's consensual adult roleplay... we're not entitled to take the moral high ground above them.
From: someone
I can definitely take the high ground without being a part of the group.
Sure, but ask yourself - if you don't really understand a group at all, and this is obvious from what you write about them.... do you think other people will agree with your opinions when they see that they're based on misconceptions?
From: someone
Anyway, Angel I respect you but on this issue I have to disagree completely, this isn't going to be something that becomes MORE accepted over time, unlike slavery and predjudice against homosexual sex, the hate and anger against pedophiles and ageplay have only GROWN over the span of history.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's popularly accepted or not. Ageplay does not harm anyone and over time, with the internet, privacy, etc, it will happen and there's not much society can do to stop it, so better get used to it being here. Oh, and I *do* think that it is becoming more accepted.
Just this year, I had a friend from university who, as far as I have known, has NEVER done ageplay - come clean to me that actually, several people she knows do it actively and she even does it herself sometimes. She doesn't think it's a main kink of hers, she just does it sometimes for fun or the healing properties which come with the state of mind "I can just relax and be looked after".
Obviously, it depends who you ask - I avoid talking to anyone who wears any kind of religious clothing or items on their clothing because I doubt I'll find anyone who does who is really interested in learning new things or expanding their mind, especially new perspectives on what is moral/immoral. I don't have a problem with religious belief, but I do find that most people who make a thing of their religion do so because they lack the ability to think critically and make up their own minds.
On the other hand, if you talk to open minded, progressive people like university students, then you may well find a much greater degree of open mindedness about ageplay - I did!
And, the students are the future leaders of our society who set our laws...
From: someone
*Sigh* damnit
This was not suppost to be another ageplay thread... I was hoping people would post where they've been and what features they like to see, and what they think about the issues... I'd rather hear about what people think on many issues (and get a feel for who they are) than just hear about their thoughts on one
I think the reason that the ageplay stuff drew more comments was because it was the one topic you covered where most of your points were wrong. The rest of it was really good, and very hard to disagree with. That's why it's turning into an ageplay topic - because nobody really disagrees with the "lets have less drama on the forum" idea, and it's hard to argue that people should be entitled to free stipends for playing SL, or that accounts LL have no way to really track should be entitled to the same level of access to the system as accounts who are confirmed, paying customers.
When people zero in on a small part of what you write to criticise, bear in mind that this is usually a form of admission they can't find fault with the rest of it. This principle has helped me greatly as I write a lot and I've learnt that if people can't find anything to object to about your work, this is a sign you are doing well. I've also noticed that they tend to pour scorn on the few flaws in a work as some form of compensation for the fact that they can't find a good reason to disagree with you, and thus, resist changing their beliefs, about the other things you've written about. For example, on this topic people may criticise your stance on ageplay as they're annoyed that you've already managed to convince them to backtrack on their other important beliefs with your superior argument on those points.
Don't worry
Life is too short for unprodutive worry.
I liked your post, and thought that the bits about LL economic policy were great even if I thought the ageplay stuff wasn't justified as you don't really understand ageplay.
)
