I received an email today from well-known Australian Second Life resident Wolfie Rankin, with some fascinating thoughts on sexuality, furries and the issue of griefing. His views in full below – the only alterations are changes to spelling and capitalisation:
“Some interesting things have come to light during a discussion with a friend who’s an Officer at a large Furry Sim.
It turns out that a lot of griefers, including those in well known griefing groups, are Furries themselves.
This will sound strange, but here’s how it works.
Furry #1 has a bad fallout with his Gay lover on Secondlife, So rather than taking it on the chin, decides to seek revenge… returns to SL as an Alt, loads up with weapons, and griefs. He may target his former lover or grief the entire sim where they hung out.
Or another scenario is that he asks someone in a griefing group to do it for him.
How do we know for certain?
Well it turned out that quite a few from that certain SL griefing group also had accounts on a well known furry art page and had used similar names to the ones on that art page.
Once this information came to light, quite a few from this well known griefing group suddenly left it.
I’m not putting Furries down, as you know, I’m one myself… However, it’s well known that some Furries are also huge “Drama Queens” who whine a lot and cause the rest of us to grind our teeth. They’d be the best candidates for this kind of thing.
Also, I’m not saying that griefing groups are entirely made up of furries, that’s not true.
It’s very clear now, that many who go griefing and target potential gay areas of SL, have personal sexual issues… For instance, a young lad who’s having feelings, but can’t cope with the idea that he might be gay, might takes it out on others who he either thinks are gay, or are openly gay.
In other words, he’s trying to assert his heterosexuality by targeting anything even loosely considered to be “gay”
Saying that it’s done for “Lulz” is simply a thin veil hiding larger problems, when you spend hours in the day griefing SL and then making a video of it for YouTube, there’s definately something not quite right.
People who are secure in their sexuality would never worry if the bloke up the road is gay or bi or whatever”.
It’s an interesting take and there’s no doubt those sexually conflicted may adopt aggressive measures to assert one viewpoint. One of the key opportunities and challenges that virtual worlds offer is exploration of social issues like sexual identity. What are your thoughts on the issue – is the viewpoint above a valid one?
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