I was in world last night when I ran into another avatar who got into conversation and whom I subsequently told about SLN. He hadn’t heard about us before (do such people exist???? 😉 ) and while we were conversing dipped out to view the blog.

‘How come you don’t have a blogger warning for your blog?’, he asked. I knew what he meant. Many sites, some properly ‘adult’, some naturist, some SL bloggers and, I presume, some of a news nature, have a warning site prior to be being able to access that site. Some SL bloggers will contain such a ‘warning’ on their sites because it features boobs, covered with pasties. What????

How can you seriously blog skins, for example, without showing what nipples look like, are coloured, are shaped? Seriously, I couldn’t contemplate buying a skin through a site which is representing something common to all of us, a nipple, illustrated via two strips of electrical tape in an ‘x’ shape. I don’t know what I’m buying! Is it truly representative of the real me? Is it going to accurately represent the real me? Forget it! Note that this generally is a rule only applied to the female nipple, never a male one. Odd, given that the remainder of the breast area, an enlarged area of sub-cutaneous fat, is the real difference between the sexes, not the nipple itself, and is generally represented as being considered to be acceptable as visible.

This sorry state of affairs has gone on for generations. In photos of the female breast, from the 50s until now, it’s the nipple itself which is ‘censored’, the remainder of the breast visible. Yet nipples are common to every human being on earth.

Weird? Don’t start me!

How ridiculous are the following photos?

My answer was that, to me, the sight of real, much less pixellated boobs and genitals don’t really count as being ‘adult’ in theme. 50% of the world has a penis and testicles. 50% of the world has breasts and a vagina. It’s natural. It’s how we are. I don’t think such basic realities about life,about our bodies, need or deserve ‘warning’ notices. A photo of a gun, aimed at another life (human or other animal) needs a ‘warning’ sign. A blog on which someone champions gun ownership needs a ‘warning’ notice.

Unless and until wordpress enforce a ‘warning’ notice on SLN, we won’t be adding a warning sign on SLN quite simply because we acknowledge the presence of female breasts (in real or pixelated form) to be wholly natural. And we regard the depiction of human (or pixelated) male and female genitalia in the same way. They do not require a ‘warning’. They represent who we already are.

So, no, there won’t be a warning notice on the blog (and wordpress have never asked for one, give them their dues) now or ever. Indeed, were wordpress to insist on one, I imagine we’d abandon the blog and move to our own website where basic humanity may be accurately represented.

Ella