Dem’s de rules….or is dey?

Feathers continue to be ruffled over the removal of pictures from the SL7B because of its depiction of nudity.

Those that object – including British film director Peter Greenaway – seem to think that the removal of a single item of art is someone an attack on the bastions of all art in SL. Others see it as petty pedalling on LL’s part, while others point to the rules laid out prior to SL7B opening, and specifically the “no nudity” clause.

For my part, I find it hard to side with the “art for art’s sake” lobby, as lead by Scylla Rhiadya, who first stirred the pot on June 19th. I will admit that I’m driven in part by the fact that it has been my observation that Scylla rarely starts a forum discussion of her own without some underpinning agenda, which leaves me feeling that there is more to her cry of “art for art’s sake” than meets the eye. But the main reason I cannot subscribe to the cries of “let it be” is simply because – as the majority state: dem’s de rules.

It is not as if LL slipped the “no nudity” rule in after the fact, or blanketed it under other clauses. It was there right from the start. As such, the inclusion of such a piece – however “unsexual” or “mild” or whatever, was in breach of said rules and subject to removal.

All other arguments in favour of its inclusion are thus, simply put, null and void. Particularly those that attempt – as Scylla does – to claim that the removal of this piece (or indeed two pieces it now seems), is a stormy foreboding of possible censorship from the upcoming Linden Endowment for the Arts amounts to nothing less than mischief-making.

At this point in time, parallels between SL7B – which has traditionally been a “PG-only” event, and the LEA are purely speculative; we have no idea if LEA will be “PG-only” or a mix of all the major content ratings within SL, and pushing this particular panic button at this point in time is little more than a false flag exercise – and Scylla is intelligent enough to know this.

Nor is the removal of one or two pictures from SL7B an assault on art, again as Scylla implies in her plethora of posts on the subject. An “assault” would be more along the lines of all such art vanishing from across the grid.

No, the rule was clearly stated and fairly acted upon. One can argue all they like about the picture being “stylised” or “non-sexual”, etc., etc., all they want and demand it should be allowed under the banner of “art” – but I wonder if Syclla and her supporters are familiar with the term the “thin end of the wedge”?

Allow a “stylised” version of nudity into the proceedings, then why not allow a stylised picture of “BDSM”? Let’s say the same nude, this time with her arms bound and an image approximating to a whip hanging in the air alongside her.  Again, non-sexual. Again stylised. However, despite her claims otherwise, I suspect Scylla would not have gone out of her way to create a thread decrying the removal of such an image, or participate in other threads against its removal – simply because of her own slanted view of BDSM would dictate that to her the work is no longer art, but an image of violence against women. Thus it would have no place in SL7B and should rightfully be “censored”.

Even without the “BDSM” element above, the fact remains that once you start sliding the bar on “no nudity” around, you enter the murky waters of censorship in a very ugly way – as no matter where you set the bar, it is going to cause outrage and outcry elsewhere. Ergo, the simplest rule is often the best, if not necessarily the fairest.

The flipside of this is, of course, the fact that LL themselves have a track record of decidedly wonky thinking where “nudity”and “art” and what might be considered “offensive” are concerned, and what measures as “acceptable” displays in PG-rated environments. The Second Life birthday celebrations are themselves no stranger to such wonky thinking, as Tateru Nino amusingly pointed out a few years ago.

Double standards were similarly shown around this time last year, at the SL Land Expo. This was again PG-rated, and saw a ban on “adult material” and “nudity”, but a “stylised” model of a man hacked in two and trailing entrails was perfectly OK. Personally, I’ll take a couple of bare nipples over that latter any day in terms of “public acceptability”.

However, the subject of what constitutes a “good rule” or “sound policy” is somewhat different to simply fanning the flames of controversy – which, at the end of the day, is really what both the “banned” pictures and the subsequent hue and cry are all about. There are better platforms from which to try to engage with Linden Lab on matter of policy than to simply break rules and then attempt to browbeat or throw out speculative rumours.

The latter approach may well serve SL7B well in terms of stirring-up much need publicity (and even then, it doesn’t really encourage one to go visit). It certainly doesn’t really benefit anything else, though.