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.

 

Club Pillory French Maid Party June 24

We’ve been on a bit of a “summer vacation” this month while we build a new house for ourselves high above the store and club, but the Club Pillory Dancers are still hitting the stage this coming Sunday from 7 to 10 PM SLT for our French Maid Party. L$500 will go to the Best French Maid, and we’ll have all the usual goodies like humiliation roleplay on our substages, dancing, cuddling, chess, great conversation, and so much more.

Grab the poster for the event at our in-world store and pass it along to your friends. Remember, the more people you bring to vote for you, the bigger of a chance you have of winning that L$500. See you at the party.

SL Pillory 5th Anniversary Party May 27

That’s a pic of our first store, back when we were a tenant at Sunset Commerce. We liked it there, but when Linden Labs added an “Adult” land designation we were forced to relocate to Zindra. (You can see where we’d set up for a future expansion that never happened because of the forced relocation.) We bought the land for that first store on May 12th, 2007, and officially opened our doors on the first of June. What better excuse for a party do we need than our five-year anniversary of being in business?

Come to Club Pillory this Sunday from 7 to 10 PM SLT for the celebration. Instead of our usual contest, we’ll be offering the first ten avatars on the dance floor their choice of either one of our catsuits or an RLv Gag and Muffler Pack. As always the Club Pillory Dancers will be there, we’ll have on-stage humiliation roleplay, the cuddle and play corners, chess, great music, and everything else you’ve come to associate with Club Pillory parties.

Come to our in-world store and grab a poster for the event to give to your friends. See you there, and here’s to five more years of great kink equipment and kinky play on Second Life.

Giving SL Pillory Items as Gifts

Because most SL Pillory items are no-transfer, giving our items as gifts isn’t as simple as buying them and handing them over. In order to give our items as gifts, you will need to do one of two things:

1. Visit our Marketplace store and select the person you want to gift as the recipient. However, some of our older tattoos and humiliation signs aren’t on Marketplace yet, and we do charge a small markup on Marketplace because SL pockets 5% of all Marketplace purchases.

2. Send me (Apryl Beaumont) a notecard in-world (or IM me if you see me online) with your recipient’s name and what you’d like to give that person, then send me the money for the item or items. I can’t send the items until I receive your money.

All the items we sell at SL Pillory make great gifts. Hint, hint.

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?

Club Pillory Bondage Bunny Party Apr. 29

If you missed our Silent Spring Party last month, you missed possibly the silliest roleplay in Second Life history. We’re back at it again this Sunday, the 29th, from 7 to 10 PM SLT with the Bondage Bunny Party at Club Pillory. We’ll have L$500 for the Second Best Bunny (sorry, but Zennaka is Best Bunny always and forever), humiliation roleplay on our substages, the Club Pillory Dancers on the main stage, our spacious dancefloor, the play corner and cuddle corner, great music, and even better company. We’ll also be demonstrating the latest SL Pillory merchandise for your pain and/or pleasure.

Come to our in-world store and pick up a poster for the event to give to your friends (and remind yourself). See you at the party.

New RLv Clown Nose

If you can create a simple red sphere on Second Life, you can create a basic clown nose. Our new RLv Clown Nose is anything but basic. It features our 1,000-color tuning and shininess controls, and glow controls that include blinking for those special festive occasions. It comes with nine different honking sounds (including bizarre ones like burping and farting) that you can choose, as well as an option that chooses one of the sounds at random, and features adjustable volume including muting the nose if you have to. There are also optional facial expressions (including happier faces as well as the angry/sad ones Silka and Zennaka model above), and you can set a honks-per-minute limit to prevent people from spamming the honk. It comes with the same robust ownership controls of our gags, including an optional lock and timelock with RLv support.

This is one of our products that has good applications in PG sims as well as more adult applications; we’ve beta-tested it for a while now, and it is deliciously humiliating for kinky play. Buy it now on Marketplace or at our in-world store. Keep checking our blog for news on more new products and events at SL Pillory.

New Crayon T-Shirts

We’ve been busy recently with rez day celebrations and other things, but rest assured we have some big things in the works for SL Pillory in the coming months. For now we’re proud to announce a new line of t-shirts based on our popular crayon humiliation signs. Twelve shirts are already up for sale, and if you’d like to see more (or different colors or designs) please IM Apryl Beaumont in-world with your request.

The shirts are available on Marketplace and in our in-world store. See you there, and keep an eye on the blog for more new product launches in the coming weeks.

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.

Club Pillory Silent Spring Party Mar. 25

The Club Pillory Dancers take the stage once again for our Silent Spring party this Sunday the 25th from 7 to 10 PM SLT. We’re turning up the heat with an L$500 contest for Best in a Gag, in addition to our on-stage humiliation roleplay, dancing with the Club Pillory Dancers, and all the other cool stuff you’ve come to expect from Second Life’s Intelligent Kink Club.

Come to our in-world store and grab a poster for the party from our center-store displays and pass it along to your friends. See you at the party.