And I can't see us making virtual rape a matter for the real-life police. Like sex, rape has mental and emotional elements that go beyond the body and the damage to the mind and spirit generally takes much longer to heal than the body.īut that doesn't make the psychological upheaval of virtual rape anywhere near the trauma of real rape. Rape is the ultimate perversion of sexual intimacy. It's a tacit acknowledgement that while the time-space continuum may change, people don't. That's why we still enjoy pondering whether cybersex is real sex and whether an online affair is more or less damaging to a relationship than a physical affair. The truth is, anywhere people gather, we bring all of our potential with us - for love, for sex, for community and creation, and for violence and destruction, too. The developer is well aware of how seriously fans take their virtual love interests, with writer Patrick Weekes joking in a interview with Game Informer that their games are dating sims with a. We don't expect to have our control wrenched away or our minds assaulted or even the intensity of our anguish during and after. We feel safe because of the peculiar blend of disclosure and anonymity provided in online communities, and we journey along paths we might not even glance at in the physical world. Your friends will gather around to give you emotional support - but your customers will wander off and shop elsewhere.Īdult communities facilitate our need to go deeper into our sexual selves, even into secret places around gender and taboos that we cannot acknowledge anywhere else. If an online environment becomes too hostile or scary, or causes you such great anxiety you cannot work or interact with friends, more has been taken from you than your playtime. Some suggest that the best way to deal with a virtual rape is to ignore it, or simply log off and come back as another user. In that context, a sexual assault can indeed have a deep impact on a person's life, especially if they are actual rape survivors. The psychological aspects of relating are magnified because the physical aspects are (mostly) removed.Įven regular users might not realize how wide open they are until something drastic happens - they fall in love, get dumped, have a huge fight or get attacked in the online parallel of rape. If you've never immersed yourself in online life, you might not realize the emotional availability it takes to be a regular member of an internet community. (And if you are inclined to pooh-pooh this, first read author Julian Dibble's chapter about a rape that occurred in a text-only MOO in the early '90s.)Ī virtual rape is by definition sudden, explicit and often devastating. Virtual rape is not just a prank, one the target needs to get over or expect as part of a role-playing world. That's not to say I dismiss the trauma a person suffers after being raped online. No matter how disturbed you are by a brutal sexual attack online, you cannot equate it to shivering in a hospital with an assailant's sweat or other excretions still damp on your body. But I have a hard time calling it "rape," or believing it's a matter for the police.
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