Dear World,

I believe the trouble began with anime porn.

Apparently, human beings were growing so increasingly dissatisfied with sex and so ever-more infatuated with Tiny Tunes that the next step had become obvious: combine the two to form one dysfunctional fetish. Pokémon enthusiasts were thrilled: if a 10 year-old androgynous ball collector could get laid, maybe there would be hope for them!

And for the most part they failed.

And here, World, is where you really began to go astray.

These socially-inept losers somehow managed to discover a way to engage in a wildly fulfilling sex life instead of just watching cartoons with poorly coordinated voice-overs.

Enter Second Life.

In Non— er, I mean Second — Life, these nerds found that they could wield power over their lives while the rest of your inhabitants, World, succumbed to impotence.

But like techies throughout history, Second Life rapidly lost control of the monster they created.

Take Amy Taylor, for example. According to a recent article on CNN.com, Amy and her husband David Pollard arranged and carried out a dream wedding for their Second Life avatars, perhaps because financial limitations in your reality precluded unicorns from being bridesmaids. They also got married in the real world.

Life was a fantasy — literally — until David decided to sleep with a prostitute. That is, David’s virtual alter-ego “decided” to sleep with a virtual prostitute. (Aside: This means that some real person decided that in a world in which she (or he!) could be any character imaginable, s/he decided to sell her/his fake body for fake money. How do avatars have sex, I wonder? A UP B LEFT RIGHT DOWN B Y X?)

“Amy” walked in on her husband and his fellow fornicator and sued for divorce. In the real world.

Despite the availability of virtual therapy, Amy could not tell the difference between cartoon sex and real sex.

So World, this is where my journey ends. Apparently, for some people, series of 0s and 1s have become indistinguishable from your complexity. Actual images are no comparison to marginal graphics. Relationships can be substituted.

And frankly World, if this is what you have come to, I opt out.

Eternally yours,

Jenna

P.S. Thank you for creating CNN.com which consistently publishes the most pressing and informative news stories, and thank you for Marin who often guides me to them.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.