Apryl On: Making Second Life Relationships Work

Tonight Zennaka and I are celebrating our five-year anniversary. I’m sure our Second Life marriage is not an SL record, but many of our friends tell us that it’s by far the longest SL relationship they’ve ever known.

A lot of that has to do with the love and affection we still have one another. We’re often called the most cuddly couple people have seen, and that hasn’t diminished over time. We share a number of fetishes (obviously) and a number of real-life interests, but it’s our chemistry together that has made our marriage so strong. I wish I could give advice on chemistry, but honestly I’ve never had a real-life relationship that’s lasted even a year, let alone five. There are lots of books and sites about relationship chemistry anyway, and I don’t think I have anything to add that hasn’t been said before.

What I’ve noticed with Second Life relationships is that sometimes people grow out of Second Life. For many of us, especially those of us who run businesses on Second Life, the online world is a very important part of our real lives. For others, though, Second Life is an occasional distraction, or a smaller part of their lives. When someone for whom Second Life is important gets involved in a relationship with someone who doesn’t care that much about Second Life, it can lead to heartbreak, and that’s where I’ve seen a lot of Second Life relationships fail.

As with real-life relationships, communication is vital to a Second Life relationship. If you want something lasting and meaningful on Second Life, then make sure you tell that to the person you’re thinking of marrying or otherwise committing yourself to. More importantly, if you’re one of those people who only wants Second Life as an occasional thing, and someone wants you on Second Life more often that you’re comfortable with, say so. Don’t lie to someone just so you can get a short-term relationship fix if you know you don’t want to make it last like the other person does.

I love you, Zennaka. Here’s to many more years of our marriage.

 

Apryl On: Gags and Domestic Discipline

[Picture: “Princess Tapeface” blushing and squirming as she stands on display in front of her class.]

Even if we’ve never met in Second Life, you can probably figure out from my store, and the pictures I’ve posted here on my blog, just how much I love gags. I knew I was into getting tied up since I was little, and gags are probably my biggest fetish.

Although I do a lot of roleplay on Second Life, I’m rarely sexual with anyone outside of Zennaka and Silka. This has posed a problem for me in the five years I’ve been on Second Life, because there seems to be an assumption among many on Second Life that if you walk around in bondage of some kind that you want sex (or worse, you want to roleplay a rape scene), and overzealous avatars will often come up to me when I’m gagged and stick a hand between my legs when that’s pretty much the last thing I want in my role.

Over the past couple of years I’ve tried to get involved in sims devoted to discipline roleplay, as a fair number of them specify that they don’t want any kind of sexual activity going on, just discipline. The problem I’ve run into there is that at these places “discipline” seems to be a synonym for spanking, and they either can’t or won’t understand the use of restraint by itself as discipline. Some people refuse to see restraint as anything but sexual, even while they explain that for them spanking is “clearly” not sexual.

I understand where this comes from, at least in part. When I’ve run into friendly avatars and spoken with them OOC, we’ve discussed where our predilections come from. One possibility we’ve discussed is the effect that punishment has on us in our formative years, that people who were spanked as children have an easier time considering spanking roleplay as non-sexual because they have that previous association of having experienced spanking in real life as a clearly non-sexual activity. I was spanked when I was very young, although I was one of those kids whom spanking really didn’t work on. (I tend to use the word “restraint” in these discussions because even the word “bondage” seems to be sexualized in a way that “spanking” isn’t, at least for some of the people I’ve spoken with.)

Although it’s fallen out of favor even faster than spanking, using restraint as a disciplinary tool, even for children, wasn’t so uncommon in past decades. These days when a teacher tapes a student’s mouth shut in class there’s always a big news story and possibly a lawsuit, but if you look at online discussions about these incidents there always seems to be someone who posts that s/he had his/her mouth taped shut in school a long time ago and it didn’t harm them any. I saw one boy in my elementary school get his mouth taped shut, and heard of another, although I never experienced it myself.

From my real-life dealings with people who practice domestic discipline (and its variants), it seems like they don’t really consider restraint as one of their disciplinary tools, except to hold down someone receiving a spanking or paddling or whipping or birching or what have you. That strikes me as odd, because restraint can often be a much more practical punishment than something painful like a spanking. In the roleplay pictured above, in addition to the shaming and humiliation of being seen by my “class” in that silly princess outfit and gag, my teacher also knows I won’t be talking too much for the foreseeable future simply because I won’t be able to talk until she takes that tape off of my mouth.

In the end this could just be a simple matter of affinity. People who like spankings are drawn to spankings, while people who like bondage are drawn to bondage. This still leaves the whole issue of trying to do non-sexual bondage and finding a community of like-minded people to do that kind of roleplay with. I’m having some measure of luck with that, but for the most part it seems like domestic discipline and other forms of non-sexualized discipline are mostly the domain of spankophiles.

Do you have any thoughts on why spanking seems to be easier to de-sexualize than restraint/bondage? Why do you think there isn’t as large a community for non-sexual restraint as there is for non-sexual spanking?

Apryl On: Five Years

That is the first screen capture I ever took on Second Life, five years ago today. I was just about to finish college and, without a boyfriend or girlfriend to do real-life bondage with, I began to wonder about the “virtual worlds” I’d been hearing so much about and whether or not there were people on there I could be kinky with. Of course there were, and so that afternoon I got on my computer, which really had no business trying to run Second Life — I was getting maybe one frame every two seconds when I got to Bondage Ranch — bought some stuff off of SL Boutique (which later became onrez before getting bought up by Linden Labs), and tried to do a fantasy I’d been mulling over in my head for years.

You can probably guess that’s me in the stocks there. (The default SL avatars back then really sucked.) I only really attracted one person’s attention, though, the woman in the hat who’s doing the typing animation in the picture above, using another default SL avatar because she’d just joined SL the previous day. Rather than follow along with my fantasy, she just asked why I was doing what I was doing, being too polite to give me the kind of roleplay I was looking for.

I wasn’t sure if I’d get back on Second Life after that — I was about a month away from graduation and of course I had all kinds of papers to write — but I got on the next day and played some more with that woman, who called me her “lovely.” As you’ve probably guessed, that woman was Zennaka Yoshikawa, and we’ve been together ever since, getting married in July of that year, but not before starting SL Pillory and bringing our own spin on kink to Second Life.

Life is too strange for me to even dare to predict what the next five years will bring for me, on Second Life and in the real world. I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who’s made my first five years on Second Life such a joy, especially my wifeypoo. I’ll be having a private party with my Second Life family tonight, but next month we’ll be holding a special party at Club Pillory to celebrate the five-year anniversary of our store’s opening. I hope you all can make it to that.

Apryl On: Customer Service

[Picture: Me with Zennaka and Silka at our store. You should really come visit our store if you haven’t already, to see all we have to offer and check out Club Pillory while you’re at it.]

When SL Pillory first opened nearly five years ago, Zennaka and I figured that we’d be spending a lot of time down in the store, trying to sell customers on our goods and just being friendly with them. What we quickly found, though, was that when we were in the store customers would tend to teleport away before even taking a step inside. When we went back up to our skybox we could see customers in our radar, and then they’d walk around and check things out and buy stuff.

Even today I’m not so certain I understand why this is. Someone pointed out to me that maybe, like places that sell adult goods in the real world, people might be embarrassed to be seen in a place like ours. I’ve always thought this wouldn’t happen so much on Second Life just because of its relative anonymity, especially since our store in particular kind of specializes in items for humiliation roleplay. One of the reasons I opened Club Pillory was so my customer base would have a place to go for that kind of play.

Similarly, I have nearly five years of traffic data to look at now, like how many customers the store gets every day and our SL traffic ranking and things like that, and there seems to be very little correlation between our traffic and our sales. If people were embarrassed to be seen in our store then I’d think that it would help to keep our traffic rating low, and I’ve even thought about buying a second parcel of land just for the skybox for the extended Beaumont-Yoshikawa clan, but it doesn’t seem like it would help our sales any.

My previous experience working in real-life retail positions tells me that I should be spending as much time with our customers as possible, hanging out in the store more, holding more events at Club Pillory, and doing other things like that, but the data suggest that it wouldn’t really help and might even scare customers off. I’m not sure what to do, because basically “turning my back” and making myself unavailable to customers and potential customers just doesn’t seem like a wise idea.

What do you think? How can I make myself more available to assist customers while still giving them the seclusion and privacy they seem to want while shopping at our store?

Apryl On: Safewords and Second Life

[Picture: Me engaging in some humiliation roleplay on one of the sub-stages at Club Pillory. On-stage humiliation roleplay is one of the staples of our monthly Club Pillory events; we’d love to have you out to come play with us, or watch the Club Pillory dancers, or dance on our spacious dance floor, or even play a nice game of chess. Yes, that’s a chess set in the background to my right. We cater to the intelligent kinky.]

A few days ago a customer asked if I could produce versions of some of our items without a safeword feature. I can, and did (and if you’d like a safeword-free version of one of our items you’ve already bought, IM me in-world), but this got me to thinking about safewords and Second Life again.

When SL Pillory opened nearly five years ago, Restrained Love (or Restrained Life as it was first called) hadn’t been invented yet, so there was no effective way to make it impossible to detach items or sit up from a poseball. Back then the best “security” you could put on an item was to IM whoever locked an item on if the item was detached without permission (or before a timelock expired). Safewords were generally used as a way to say “Hey, this item got detached but the person you locked it on had an emergency” as opposed to forgetting it was supposed to be “locked” on (or other reasons).

With the advent of RLv, the issue of safewords became more complicated. Yes, you can make items undetachable (or prevent people from standing up from poseballs) in RLv, but you can always detach an RLv-locked item by exiting out of RLv, loading up Linden Labs’ default SL viewer, and detaching the items (or teleporting away from a poseball that may try to “grab” you the next time you get on RLv). Barring that, you can always just exit out of SL, or shut off your computer (or walk away from it).

Are safewords necessary on Second Life and Restrained Love, then? There’s an argument to be made that the ability to log into a different viewer and detach/get away from RLv items constitutes a safeword in itself, and that if someone really needs to safeword then these steps are sufficient. The feeling I get from people with this viewpoint is that by adding a safeword feature to my items I’m making it too easy for people to just get out of their restraints for whatever reason and that the safeword feature might be abused.

I still think the safeword feature is a good feature to have, though, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it keeps the same protocols we use in real-life kink in Second Life. A lot of people go from doing kink on Second Life to doing it in real life, or do both at once, and I think it’s important to keep safewords in Second Life since they’re so important in real-life kink. Secondly, there are times when you need that “panic button” if someone tries to mess your scene/roleplay/you up, and at times like that you want to be able to click a few buttons and teleport away, and not have to go through the rigmarole of opening a different viewer, detaching things, then teleporting. (This is why, if you don’t have a private home on SL, you should always set your home location to a non-kinky place, so you can hit Ctrl+Shift+H after safewording and get to a safe place right away.)

To reiterate, if you’d like one of our items without a safeword feature, buy the “regular” item and then IM me, and I’ll send you a copy of the item with the safeword feature removed.

What are your feelings about safewords and Second Life? Do you think safeword features are necessary, or do you think they make it too easy to escape attachments and poseballs?

Apryl On: Enthusiasm and Marketing

(Apryl here. In order to keep the blog updated while I’m busy working on long-term projects, I’m planning on a series of semi-regular columns here addressing various things having to do with Second Life and kink on SL. I’ll be writing many of them, with occasional contributions from my wifey and other members of the extended Beaumont-Yoshikawa family. I hope you enjoy them.)

[Picture: Me high above the air at Annerose, among the branches of Yggdrasil.]

SL Pillory’s been getting a huge makeover since the start of last year, with the addition of this blog, new product lines and long-awaited product upgrades, and a new look to our store and vendors. As I’ve been working on these changes, I’ve wondered about the best ways to market on Second Life, particularly to the kinky community that makes up most of our customer base.

Looking back at the vendors and posters I made when SL Pillory opened nearly five years ago (the store’s anniversary is the first of June), I was very liberal with my exclamation marks. On the surface it seems like a good way to get people excited about your stuff, if you can be excited about it too. Look at all these features! No other toy on Second Life does this! You can’t beat this price!

I’m not using exclamation marks much at all now as I revamp the store, and I’m even consciously avoiding using them. Why the change? Honestly, I’m not all that sure.

Part of it is because I did overuse exclamation marks back then. Just like any other rhetorical device, when you use something too often then it just becomes blasé. I had other tics like that as well (such as working the word “features” into every product description, often in very awkward ways), and I’m trying to move away from those and onto just straight product descriptions. There’s kind of an underlying idea here that quality doesn’t need to boast, so why bother shouting about how great a product is when you can read about all its features and see for yourself?

Since I first opened the store I’ve also joined a real-life kink group and attended a handful of kinky parties. I experimented with bondage and spanking in high school and college, but with much different people than I’ve been associating with in the group, and I’ve noticed that real-life kinky people tend to be very subdued and serious. The only time they shout is when a dominant is scolding a submissive, it seems like, and I hardly ever see most of them smile. On the one hand it seems like taking a more subdued approach may help me reach these kind of people better, but at the same time I wonder if the more “fun” approach we take to kink at SL Pillory is part of why we’ve been so successful for so long, because we bring that sense of fun to kink on Second Life that most other stores don’t bring.

There’s also the fact that, well, I’m nearly five years older than I was when I started SL Pillory (and so are all of you), and maybe the more subdued approach comes more naturally to me as I grow older. Toiling in pretty dead-end real-life jobs since I graduated from college may also be sapping some of my enthusiasm as well.

As with many of the columns I’m planning to do here, I’d really like to hear from you and get your perspectives. Does being overly enthusiastic about something someone’s trying to sell on Second Life turn you off? Does a more enthusiastic, “funner” approach make you feel more or less comfortable?