A friend of mine calls such places "The warrens of the undercity," those vast dark gathering places of people who gather in the blackness of the soul, and cry out in the emptiness. One such cluster of places are where streetwalkers congregate, looking for quick tricks to turn. The mirror of them is the orgy room. The streetwalkers cluster alone and wait for the few men willing to pay to drop out of the sky. An orgy room is where clusters of newbie men sit, with cheap cocks errect and attached, waiting for the few women willing to just fuck anonymously to drop out of the sky.
(Click on pictures for full size versions.)
If the open scandal of SL escorting is how, without males playing females and women cheating on their husbands, it would be very difficult to pay for a blow job in sl, the open scandal of orgy rooms is how few people are actually having sex. I went to 6 the other night, and in most of them only one couple was having sex at one time. The most I saw was three. The reason this is over on Raise the Red Lantern, is that I took pictures.
The first picture is from the Neva orgy room. The largest actually active one, the only ones higher on the list that night were camping farms with no, or few, actual people. Three couples were having sex at the peak. One person shouted for 45 minutes "any woman want to spend the night with an angel." He wasn't getting any. Many males tried the approach of hopping on half a pose ball and waiting. They didn't get high rates of success either.
This next picture comes from "Nymphos paradise." I am not sure that is true, but be that as it may, the score here is one couple, and they probably were a couple before they came, since they were using their own pose balls. This has been my experience: that if you see a good looking couple having sex in an orgy room, it is because they are a couple who has a penchant for public sex.
Score here? One raw newbie chick. Yummy if you are still into biting the erasers off of pencils. When getting good looking is 0L, you can do it just by visiting the Yedo Freebie room, and being a reasonably good looking barbie requires on a a short side trip to Bare Rose Tokyo for the 1L basic AOs, and 10L for prim shoes. That's right for 11L you too can out of that newbie gear and into a gown, a shape, a skin, a walk and spiked heels. Then send in your newbie hair coupons at Gurl 6 and Diversity... and well, you won't look like the girl in this picture... or the next one either.
Again, one raw newbie chick, and a man getting in my face after not having taken the first "no." This gets me to my thoughts on the matter. Clearly, there are women who want to have sex, and have sex at rates that would not cover my weekly take out expenses... (full sink, no time, forget to eat, you know the routine I think. If I didn't forget to eat, SL would be really bad for my wasteline...) Clearly there are men who want sex. But the terms are incomensurable, the men want to hop on a pose ball, or at most make a few noises about how cute the girl is. The girls want to look good, and have some spending money for that pleasure of sl... shopping.
The costs for keeping a girl happy aren't high. In fact, if you think about it, the cost you can get an sl pixel prostitute for are less than what it would take to buy a girl a cup of coffee and feed her a chocolate croissant as an extravagance. The time it takes to find a girl willing to have sex by going dancing, that is couple's dancing, is a hit or miss affair. We like romantic moments, and that's the cost of having sex without paying for it, give the girl a couple of magic moments.
One way to look at it is money, if there were other work for women, they wouldn't need to make virtual sex their entry level occupation. If there were enough work for men, they might be willing to, gasp take girls out on excursions and dates, buy them trinkets and act like... ummm... you know, men. As opposed to prickbots. But that isn't the way I look at it, because while buying Linden from Linden Labs can be a pain in the neck, there are enough other sources. And since the Linden exchange rate is around 260L:1USD, it doesn't take much to be able to be generous on sl.
No, the problem is social. There are men who not only can't pay, but do not want to pay. Not just not want to pay money, which I can understand, but who don't want to pay anything. Not time, not emotional investment, not presents, not caring, not conversation even. And since the sex they want, the other part of this is not just the pictures, but the complete absence of text in any of the sex acts other than one, that I saw on this excursion, is of such dismal quality, they feel it is more worth their time to stand around, dick upright, saying "any girl want to have fun?" and IMing every female who goes through about "where are you from?"
Think about that last. A man who isn't even willing to spend 1L on his own cock, wants to, immediately, know a personal piece of information about a girl, one that narrows down where she is and makes her vulnerable to being stalked. And stalking is a problem on sl. Even the Pepsi-Cola company is willing to give me some free iTunes downloads to get my email address out of me.
So it isn't about money, though money would put many more women into circulation as being willing to have unpaid sex, and, I think, take many of the men playing women out of circulation as being willing to have sex with men. It is about a social system which is fundamentally broken. And I don't mean SL's social system, but instead the one that is pouring both streams of people into SL. Not to knock my profession, but what exactly does it say about us pixel prostitutes that we are willing to engage in some fairly complex hard core pornography to format for rates that wouldn't hire a data entry person on a work study job for some biology professor?
One last picture, one last thought. SL is about bringing people together, between streetwalking and orgies, there is a picture of a world of people apart. A problem, a real proble, to be solved. Because if you peruse the top sites on sl, they consist, almost entirely, of camping farms and orgy rooms.
If streetwalking is selling the hopelessness, boredom and despair of women on sl, then orgy rooms are selling the hopelessness, boredom and despaire of men on sl. By loudly proclaiming "FREE SEX!" and "NO ESCORTS!" they are avoiding a larger truth, and that is the costs of orgy sex are time, both simulator and real, and the soul crushing emptiness of the results.
The warrens of the undercity are a reflection of that which is above the water. It isn't SL which is broken, it is us.
It is only us.