Sex/Love/Money- SL Style II

As I was saying, she (let’s call her Kat) took me back to this quite dope apartment. I have yet to really understand how money works, or more importantly how to assess how much something costs, but this was a fairly swanky place. She hooked me up with some clothes and was explaining some of the dos and don’ts of Second Life. I told her I heard people have sex on SL. She giggled (Kat did that a lot). I asked her how that worked. Kat said she would call her “girlfriend” and then she’d show me. 30 seconds later an impressive looking avatar showed up and they went into a corner. I like to think of this mysterious avatar as a “digital pimp.” Kat returned and the other avatar disappeared. I asked Kat what were they doing. She said, “I needed to get some programs, sit still.” Next thing I know she has attached an anatomically impossiblly large penis to my avatar. Over my clothes. Hilarious. She strips and proceeds to engage me in time tested as well as gravity defying sexual acts. I don’t do anything as she moves me around the room, into a hot tub, and onto the wall. The initial shock and humor of this wears off almost immediately. Gets quite boring really. Kat is typing in a lot of dirty images though… funny. I think Kat starts to feel my malaise and says if I want to “cum” I have to pay. I turn her down. She gets dressed and takes my penis away. Suddenly, the walls of this apartment turn into advertisements for Asian porn sites. Everywhere. Kat, or the fat man in Texas, says they are all her and that I should go visit her site. I tell her thanks and leave.

Conclusions: This whole sex/money is a little bit boring. Given the medium, I’m going to have a hard time understanding the sex thing and the money can’t be that different from any material item except that in SL it is easier to convince oneself that money is not as present as it is. The one thing I found is that writing about this made me think about how I am going to come across to the people in class. I could have been a lot more explicit about what this “girl” said and did but it didn’t seem to matter to why I was there… though I also would have been concerned even more about how I’d be interpreted in class. Obviously, I didn’t worry enough not to write about it but it did make me think about how Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” might be applied here. With only a very abstract overseer- how are sexual understandings-of-self developed in virtual worlds? Vis a vis the RL. I’m going to try to gear my proposal around this concept. Not exactly sure how yet but we’ll see.