Saturday, April 21, 2007

Virtual Infidelity

The MSNBC survey on infidelity that I wrote about yesterday has a companion piece on people who have affairs in virtual worlds, especially Second Life. The opening story is about a torrid lesbian romance between two avatars of people who in real life are married to someone else. More interesting, one of the "lesbians" is the avatar of a man, and perhaps the other one is, too. The man behind one of the characters thinks it isn't really cheating because, while he is in love with the other character, the sex is not real. This brings us back to yesterday's pie chart -- men don't mind the straying love as much as the straying sex. The odds are good, though, that the Second Life player's real wife would resent the love (if she knew about it) even is the sex isn't physically consumated in the material plane.

Very dangerous stuff, affairs. Even the virtual ones are real.

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