Nothing creates stronger reactions than the word ageplay – Which is too often confused with pedophilia. Ageplay was banned in Second Life about 1 and a half year ago when Linden Labs were dragged into german court.
A german journalist decided during the hype days of Second Life to write something about the things going on in Second Life. Nothing draws more attention than to write about sex in virtual worlds. He found two avatars, one of them a female child avatar and the other a grown up male avatar, indulging themselves in sexual acts. Pedophilia is, according to german law, illegal to depict in any form which includes illustrations and computer generated imagery.
The twist to this story is that Linden Labs decided to pursue the persons behind the avatars, which turned out to be a male in his 50’s and a female in her late 20’s – in other words adults. The journalist wrote about his sensational discovery and took it to german court, while Linden Labs kicked the people behind the avatars off the grid and banned ageplay in Second Life to avoid a continuation of the german court case. All this happened back in 2007.
This caused a lot of debate in Second Life and to me it became quite obvious that the term ageplay is also misinterpreted. Imagine a BDSM scene where the old professor in his 60’s is using his cane on his young female student in her mid 20’s just because she didn’t hand in her assignment on time. Some of you might think that it is a quite arousing situation – School uniform, a red bottom and the sound of a cane.
But hold your horses, it is age play! There is no evident sign of pedophilia in the described scene, as it doesn’t involve minors at all and it doesn’t even come close.
The definition of ageplay is and should always be “Erotic play with a significant age difference between the participants”.
There are some genres with in BDSM that involves ageplay and it is really important to stress the fact that it isn’t pedophilia. I wouldn’t even try to go so far in my judgement and say that adult babies are potential pedophiles – They just want to hand over the control in a different way compared to someone that could be labeled as an ordinary submissive. Some regressive age play is actually done with a therapeutic intent and doesn’t involve any sexual acts at all.
Ageplay is not my cup of tea, but I am not bothered when the role play carried out by two consenting adults. And it is time to take the stigma out of ageplay with some good facts that a good discussion be based upon.
One person that has done some really impressive research on this, being a bit of a sceptic herself is Forceme Silverspar – Pop over to her blog and read her post “Is all ageplay bad?“. More people should do what she is doing, investigate and research before you express an opinion. Pedophilia is a hideous crime and abuse, ageplay is carried out between consenting adults – There is a huge difference between the two.
If you want a more information about ageplay then pop over to this wikipedia article.