07 in 10

This is me. Lillie. I will be part of a panel on saftey and risk in relationships on line for Blogher. But the advise I have will apply to men as much as women.

Mochamomma wanted us to give 10 second introductions, I don't think I can fit in 10 second media girl's exciting life story. But then, my rl isn't exciting.

On second life, I run a ballroom and art complex 22nd Century Yedo.

I blog here.

I escort.

Now to go beyond 10 seconds...

My thing is being visual, and SL is not just visual, but polydimensional thinking, understanding that time, space, people, movement, ideas, energy all fit together in ways very different form what we have understood up until this point. The other thing about me is transhumanity. Not in the "we will re-engineer ourselves," sort of way, though of course we will, but in the sense that the boundary between our physical identity and our spiritual identity is, and always has been, more fluid than materialism would lead us to believe. We have always wanted to merge with the universe, with whatever tools we had to hand. SL is just the next cave wall to paint on. But paint on it we must, and can.

In SL I advocate the idea that avatars are, or should be, persons, in the same way that corporations are persons: beings with a legal life of their own, and with an identity that is not tied to a single physical person. If I sell Lillie Yifu, she is still Lillie Yifu, even if she is going to be run by a different person. If a different physical player else logs into Lillie, and spends money, then that money is just as spent.

Between these to rather abstract ideas, I say that beauty is my profession. There is a new kind of beauty here, because there is a new kind of world to go with it. We need to learn this new beauty. Interactive art, is art, just as media art, is art, and the arts that came because of previous waves of technology were art. Remember there was a time when painting was not considered "art" in the west.

People ask me why I escort. First, because it is the entry level profession for women in sl. Second, because it is the view into the heart of humanity that shows more about what we are and are thinking than any other occupation on sl. And third, because I respect need and desire, and fulfilling those needs and desires is my own desire. For people to do what they must do, they must have someone to do it with: sl is a game of people, not a game of things. It is a game, in the same way that language is a game, or Wall Street is.

Finally it is the world's oldest profession, and intimately linked with the visual arts. An art museum is a large building filled with pictures of naked women, many of them prostitutes, and with decorative ideas, many of them funded by women of pleasure who wanted to surround themselves with beauty. Without prostitues, there is no visual arts as we know them. Subjects, patrons, salon taste makers.

So that's what there is, a strange girl trying to make her way in a strange world.

This is me. Lillie.