I can remember when I was a lad in Second Life that I had a PG parcel. One day, I noticed that next door a Gentleman’s club had opened and I wasn’t happy about this. The outside of the building and even the wording on the parcel was more risque then explicit but hey, this isn’t PG I thought. Stepping onto the parcel I realised the parcel was in a neighbouring sim and on further examination I realised that the neighbouring sim was mature. This was back in the days of only having maturity ratings of PG and Mature.
Now this made the PG rating of my parcel, meaningless, however the neighbouring parcel was not breaking any rules. I decide to pack up shop there and sell the PG parcel. I mentioned the silliness of this situation to a Linden, who agreed that said situation was silly and had been discussed.
Quite a few moons later Linden Lab unleashed the adult category, as with many Linden Lab ideas it had good intentions but was delivered in a very poor fashion. However now we have three maturity ratings, the issue of General sims neighbouring Moderate sims still exists, but adult sims are in their own category and we can filter adult results in our preferences, we can exclude them totally, this is a better situation than we had before because Mature or as it’s known now, Moderate, has quite a wide scope, so excluding adult helps to avoid the more extreme content.
I’m reminded of this because I’ve just read an article, which I’m not going to link to, that complains about extreme adult content in Second Life and in this article, to demonstrate that extreme adult content exists, the author set their preferences to adult and listed events, which included adult content. They also searched for a particular type of extreme adult content and then published the results, with outrage. I’m sorry but if you go out of your way to search for extreme adult content, you’re hardly in a position to complain about finding it. The author could try unticking safe search on Google and searching for similar results, the results will be shocking too.