Saturday, September 1, 2007

Falling Stars

The world is always wrong. We are always wrong. Since there is no rock that is fixed in time and space, there is no absolute standard of when someone is right and when someone is wrong.

It is easy to come up with generalizations, for example, looking back on my time in Second Life, a disproportionate number of the people who have caused me grief are men from Australia. The mind grabbing for the easy generalization can take this and draw conclusions from it. But that's foolish. Because there is a real, not coincidental, connection.

Or rather two.

The first one is one I know. There are some men in Second Life who are not happy unless they have reached through the screen and hurt a real person in the real world. This is the exact pleasure that they want. This is what motivates, for example, an ordinary griefer. To them, forcing emotion on people is "winning." They in turn, since they don't listen to people, since they don't feel, believe they "win" every discussion, because they don't feel hurt. This is what joined my two unpleaant experiences.

But that is the world. It was true yesterday, it will be true today, and it will be true tomorrow.

The other part is me. Not Lillie me, but me me. And me me feels very uncomfortable dealing with these people. They are like talking to a garbage disposal. It just spins and whirs. I can't accomodate them, because what they want, specifically, is the one thing that I don't provide: emotional rape.

It isn't that there aren't people who are willing to fill this role in a relationship, public or private. In fact, that is what keeps the emotional rapist going. An enormous ego and self-centeredness that is so thick, that it crushes under others. But just as there are people who don't feel alive unless they are abusing their position, so too are there people who don't feel alive unless their psyches are receiving blows.

I'm not going to speculate on causes. I wouldn't even know when and where to start. There are dozens of easy explanations for this, I don't doubt that all of them are partially true. I think that, to take a visual analogy, this reality is a vast looming prison, and it looks and feels like one, whether from a distance, or inside one of its cells. All these things are true.

But the other part is that there are some people much better able to deal with these people than I am. People who either have the ability to conform, or the people who are more comfortable than I am... and here is where I stop. Because here is where my imagiantion fails me. I cant't even imagine the words that would have to come out of my lips.

I know the reason this is true, it is that they only call you a whore when you aren't. And I know that while I am a pixel prostitute, I am not a whore. Mostly, no one gets by in this world without whoring from time to time, even the very fortunate must, from time to time, present their emotioanl hindquarters in submission.

So as I watch the planet of ego streak by me in space, I have to think on how it is watching me. And it is watching all the other little shooting stars that burn up in its atomosphere.

And it is hard for me to even imagine what it is they see.

3 comments:

  1. I just got this message:

    "Hey i just wanted to say, i broke into your skybox house!"

    Now, there is a special kind of silliness that thrives on annoying people. To them any kind of answer, even a parcel ban, is a success.

    You can deny their pleasure simply ignoring, or even muting them; don't even say "I am going to mute you", that gives them a thrill.

    I understand that in your line of work you need some patience to discover if a creep is a possible client, but you give them too many opportunities; that's what makes you thing the world is wrong... it isn't perfect, but you pay too much attention and time to the bad on it, and that shadows the good for you.

    There are more things I want to say, but this is already too long, so I'll take that words and use them on my own blog .-p

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  2. "To them any kind of answer, even a parcel ban, is a success. "

    Yes.

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  3. Lillie,

    It doesn't surprised me in the slightest.

    Australia is sexually retarded compared to the rest of the modern world. There could be a few reasons for it, It might be that we don't have any interaction with any other cultures, it's just us, on our own continent.
    Maybe we don't travel enough.
    We definitely still have a post-Victorian attitude to sex. I grew up in Queensland, it was government by pensioners for pensioners , it was like being in a time warp, the thought of a naked breast in public would cause a major "Think about the children" outcry.

    It's a "Blokey" culture where the guys all stick together, and they have never really got over the "you've got girls germs" insults in the school yard.
    When I was in school there was no sex-education at all, if there was, it was the "Don't do it"

    It's not a place where men can share emotions with anyone, and denying that you have any is quite normal. I can't say if this is a generational thing, that we might grow out of, or lots of Aussie men are stuck with being assholes for ever.

    Woman's magazines are quite helpful with the articles on good sex, but there is no equal for men, but it looks like that's the same in most countries anyway.

    I currently live in the UK, and attitudes are much the same here, but when I visit the Continent, it appears woman have it much better. I could be wrong, I might just be idealizing it. I also guess it depends who you talk to , and what your experiences are.

    I have seen at least one article at news.com.au that rated Australian men the last is a survey of lovers.
    I also remember a story on http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/waiwai/ about two years a go, when some Japanese girl decided that she would test out the men in as many counties as she could. Again Australian men were last on her list...well, actually she said they came first, and that was the main problem.



    BTW I'm Australian if you haven't guessed.

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