arcady

Immigrant communities tend to be radically different from the people back in the mother country, and yet believe they are the same.

 

Culture within them tends to get frozen in time, with people keeping the values they had when they left their point of origin, and not changing to match how that society has since changed. Their children then end up with a mix of local values and out of date source-point values - while themselves still believing they represent the culture of their ancestry rather than a new, third culture.

 

 

So, that said - in forming a Russian quarter I would look at Russian communties outside of Russia more than Russia itself. There is a big immigrant community in San Francisco, existing in the same space as one of the three largest concentrations of Chinese, but I don't know them well myself. I believe there is also one somewhere in the New York area, but I don't know for sure.

 

I don't allow for 'on-camera' depictions of rape, nor for it to be a 'pressing topic' of 'during-focus time' in a character's life (as in, no raping in game, and I don't want you giving me a report of your off time between adventures involving a 'rape tour' or whatever...

 

That said, it is present in backgrounds a lot, and the horrors of the sex industry are also often there in both modern and historic genres when I cover them - because I've lived around them for so many years and one of the prospetive paths I will take after law school might be in helping the victims of this out...

 

Its just too much of reality for me to ignore.

 

Especially when I do 'realistic genres' that look at darker aspects of humanity.

 

 

That said, even in a lighter touch there is room for the topic, thought not on the negative side. Sexual expression -would- expand in a world with less boundaries over what a sentient and self-responsible individual is.

 

 

I'm reading Greg Bears 'Slant' novel right now. After saying I was let down by it in the literature thread, I decided to try and pick it up again and see if I could plow past the parts that were dull to me and find anything good. Fortunately, that's exactly how its worked out.

 

The novel delves quite a bit into the idea of nano-tech and sexuality. Mr. Bear is on that end of things that holds that nano-tech will allow us to reshape even living bodies, and as a result he has as one story a criminal investigation of some deaths of people involved in the sex industry were modded in the exreme. Case in point, a woman given three vaginas and a 'row' of clitorises on each cheek. The notion being that these people modded themselves in an extreme after being unable to find work in other avenues and in order to meet the ever growing extreme desires viewers of 'sensie flicks' have.

 

The deaths came about when the above mentioned nano-surgery went wrong as the result of being done in an unlicensed clinic where the 'doc' used not human-designed nanos, but nanos meant for gardening that he had tried to reprogram -on the cheap-.

 

The woman above died from being cooked from the inside out after having her torso rebuilt in the form of a bee...

 

 

He's also got an earlier chapter with two more successful porn actors - talking to each other casually before, during, and after filming. As a reader you 'know what is going on' but he doesn't go into that. Rather he goes into how they mix the recordings of many different couplings and couples to 'get the right emotion' for the sensie recording, and these two are commenting on personal philosophy, their mutual chemistry despite the man being gay, and how they know they're on the far end of the peak of their careers -this- close to being replaced by younger fresher talent...

 

 

 

The ability to 'feel and sense' what another person feels and senses will be the biggest boon to porn ever. It will probably also result in some of the most horrible examples of exploitation imaginable. Much of this was explored even as far back as 'Aldeus Huxley's Brave New World' written in the 1940s if I recall right. I consider that the book that really started Cyberpunk.

 

Read it. You will see everything that is Cyberpunk in it - but sometimes with a few oddities such as the notion of helicopters as a wonderous marvel.

 

The Cyberpunk age will have a boon to sex and sexuality - either positive or negative or both, it will be there even if law and social trends try to stop it.

 

 

 

Oh, just because someone else might mention it - there's an urban legend going around of cannibal dining in China, but it has already been debunked. Doesn't mean it won't come to pass someday, but it's not 'the new big thing' like the urban legend tries to claim.

 

 

A note on sex-SINs (Sensies) in my current game: It just fell into place that one of the suspects under investigation had a SIN-recorded porn collection (the players grabbed his SIN deck and played it back when they had him in a holding cell, and on a whim I said 'and he's got the latest porn hit too, from the POV of the woman'). Way I see it, number one thing men are going to want when this tech comes out it to 'feel what she feels' and to know 'what lesbian sex is -really- like'.

 

So there it was, and that was about the point that I learned that one of my players has strong issues over men playing female characters. Of course, in the game we have on hold right now (he joined after it went on hold) all the PCs are female just because as it started happening it got pushed as a bit of 'odd theming'. - you know, when all the players who turn in early PCs make a solo, you retool and call the game 'solo's night out' and then ask the others to see if they can make solos as well.

 

Of course, we've since gone on to have almost every encounter with that NPC involve somehow finding a new collection of SIN-porn on him. Latest one was to find he went into a 'booth' at the subway to get a short three-way porn SIN recording of himself, his girlfriend, and the 'lady working the booth'.

 

Ever see those booths you go into to get a picture of you and your buddy on little stickers for about $3 for a dozen of them? I decided to mix that with prostitution. Go into the booth and get a recodring of you staring in your own sex-SIN...

 

When I lived in Asia, all the major train stations had 'redlight houses' near them, sometimes off in an alley, sometime right there on the main street. Some subways had it too...

 

Seemed a natural mixing.

 

Got a good laugh and an 'ew gross' out of that player, because naturally, he was the one who slotted in that chip...

 

You're sidetracking by trying to make it sound as if I am referring to gay rape of boys when I am referring to the entire sexual slavery industry - which is as old as the human species and is ever growing.

 

There is a world full of documentation on this, throughout history. Go look it up.

 

Here's some places to start:

http://www.humantrafficking.org/

http://womensissues.about.com/od/sextrafficking/

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/trafficking_human_beings.html

http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/global_issues/h...rafficking.html

www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/international/ programs/sex_traff_us.pdf

http://www.interpol.int/Public/THB/default.asp

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking/

http://www.stophumantraffic.org/

http://www.state.gov/g/tip/

http://www3.undp.org/ww/women-health1/msg00123.html

http://www.bellaonline.com/subjects/7303.asp

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/38790.htm

http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v7n2/struensee72.html

http://www3.baylor.edu/~Charles_Kemp/sex_trafficking.htm

http://www.captivedaughters.org/

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for "getting it from a local source"... here's how it works:

 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...r&sn=003&sc=507

 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...g&sn=004&sc=462

 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/90d?term=...o.y=0&Go=Search

 

It is cheaper to kidnap women and children from other countries and carry them across borders than to take locals. Nobody knows them wherever you drop them, and they have no resources or knowledge of how to escape and seek help. Many of them are very fearful of what will happen if they try.

 

Note this headline from that search:

 

12.3 million forced into labor, study finds - Yearly profit from sexual exploitation put at $27.8 billion

 

 

I've known women trafficked into slavery. It's no fiction.

 

 

Even with 'local - non-trafficked prostitution' the method is one of enslavement.

 

As an example of the involuntary and exploitative nature of even the 'traditional street walker'; one prostitute told a story that when her pimp learned a girl wanted a higher cut of the money, he tied her to a chair, made all the other girls sit around her, doused her with gasoline and lit her on fire.

 

The only out for that is legalization with a government oversight system for health care and the prevention of exploitation - as seen in the Netherlands and parts of Nevada - both of which still have women and children getting trafficked in for 'below board' work.

 

 

And sexual bondage isn't limited to women. Read the book Chicken sometime. The author spoke in one of my poli-sci classes in my last semester. He was a hetero male raped on his first day of college and then 'funneled' into the 'industry'.

 

 

 

 

 

In a Cyberpunk future where everything else has gotten worse, I find it highly suspect that this bleak aspect of our world will somehow get all nice and shiny happy roses when it has been a part of us for thousands of years - only getting worse with globalization and the growth of disparity between both first and third world populations as well as elites and underclass.

There is a lot of truth to it, but it is also not that absolute. Primary concern of life is to survive and procreate, not just to procreate.

I believe our real motive is to find meaning.

We learn things as children, and then want to take actions that have significance to the whole system we have learnt about...else we question the need for our existence.

 

An intelligent animal learns to seek meaning to occupy its mind and increase overall survival, but the question has little importance to substistance level survival.

 

'Finding meaning' is just a tool of the larger purpose - not vital by any stretch through most of our history.

 

However, if you consider that in the last 35k years humanity has shifted into a mental status - evolution now happens through culture. 'Memetic' if you will - and finding meaning is now nothing more than one of many tools for advancing survival on that new platform. It makes us more viable than other social species - such as bees and bonobo chimps.

 

If we were really, truly built to want to survive, it would be as hard for us to commit suicide as bend our elbow 90degrees backwards...and that obviously ain't the case.

Suicide is the result of an overwelmed system that in essense, crashes. Often the real goal is a distorted desire to gain attention and 'importance' and thus 'survive'.

 

Many things at the species level operate to ensure survival even while limiting the benifit to individuals - menopause is an excellent example of this, and liberal sex-psychologists argue homosexuality may serve the same function.

 

 

Drugs never seem to give the desired results, cloning will be slow and 'dolly like' - no vat grown replacement parts, and there will likely never be an actually self aware AI. So we're probably going to be doing the normal human thing for many generations to come.

 

All simple lack of understanding. As understanding of the various systems increases, so will our ability to reach goals of manipulating those systems - there is no magical barrier preventing us, just a lack of understanding, which is decaying with time and effort. I 'bet' on ours being the second last generation of homo sapiens to actually have future significance.

Problem there is that we do face hard limits:

 

Relativity limits FTL.

Turning Machine principle prevents AI.

Biology prevents the 'adult ready clone' - learning and life experience are absent, and it will not be you, just a twin with a vastly shorter lifespan.

 

 

Personally I'm not all that saddened by the second two of these - I find the human species a beautiful thing. We're the only predator species on the planet that can learn -not- to kill.

Anti-drug laws have only increased durg use, and sex is a more primal urge.

 

Human Trafficking begins in the Bible with the wive's of Adam's sons, and it's been on the rise ever since.

 

Sometimes its legal, sometimes it isn't, but it never goes down.

 

As long as the world has economic disparity there will be abusers and abused. Traffickers and the trafficked.

 

It is a fact of sweatshop labor, sex industry, globalization, and general human socio-political dynamics that there are those who seek to gain off the backs of others.

 

Even if sex laws become draconian over the issue, that just serves to push the market elsewhere. Likewise when they get more lax. Consider the recent shift in Europe over EU status with several central European nations. A few scant years ago the Chech republic, Poland, and other nations were -the- places in Europe for enslaved women to be taken to or taken from. Now as the women there have EU citizenship the trafficking has just moved a 'few miles' east.

 

"Civil rights-liberal" nations like the USA, EU, Japan, and Isreal all have slavery within them on massive scales. Draconian nations like China, Iran, the former Iraq, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Vietnam, and others all have slavery as well.

 

Women, children, and workers are and always have been bought and sold for predatory purposes around the world - both with the legitimate and illegitimate markets.

 

 

'2020' of Cyberpunk wopuld look cartoonish if this was suddenly missing - regardless of how other laws and social norms over sex adopted to the times. Given also that it is supposed to be a darker future - faced on the idea of a collapsing society - this norm should be made even more severe than reality would suggest it would be - and reality is today painting a very dark probable future on this one. Globalization is serving to exacerbate the problem in the real world.

Seriously.......... you guys do realize that every single accomplishment, every single technological advancement, every single feat of human ingenuity, that men have ever achieved, from the invention of the wheel to putting men into space, has all been just an attempt by men to get laid?

Then there are the humans with the urge to destroy. The stupid and untrained rape and murder. The others run big business or global mafia. Or play violent games to live out their self-destructive wishes.

Rape, murder, and so on are not urges to destroy - they are issues of power, confusion, passion, and many other assorted motivations - sometimes even to create.

 

The only difference between the Mob an Enron is one of them admitted what it did and the other admitted... hmmm... scratch that. The only difference is one destroyed lives and... scratch that... the... well, this is pointless.

 

Mobs, gangs, and so on tend to form when a class of people is denied economic opportunity within the legitimate system, or is denied protection by the legitimate powers. For example, the Crips was formed by Tookie Williams originally as a form of 'Neighborhood watch' after seeing police ignore attacks on project blacks one too many times. It lost that focus in the struggle over economics, but that was the origin.

 

Point being - just because it is illegal, imorral, or deviant according to the state does not mean it is an agent of destruction any more than many of the legal, sanctioned, non-deviant systems.

 

To the first person quoted: that is an awefully Freudian outlook.

 

There is a lot of truth to it, but it is also not that absolute. Primary concern of life is to survive and procreate, not just to procreate. As social animals we have learned the best way for us to do both is through advancing culture - increasing our supply of resources, tools, and information.

 

Oh, on the little note I cut: the most dangerous people in all of human history were rocket scientists... Think about it - think what horror they have created for us in the last century. Just one of those many creations alone if the greatest destructive technology known to the human species. So they don't make a good example of the better side of things.

 

Transhumanism. We're realising we're the last generation that has to put up with this crap. The next will either have the technology to mod' themselves into sanity

Drugs never seem to give the desired results, cloning will be slow and 'dolly like' - no vat grown replacement parts, and there will likely never be an actually self aware AI. So we're probably going to be doing the normal human thing for many generations to come.

 

We've got invetro now, but its the 'option of desperation' not of choice.

 

However we may alter that somewhat when we begin to modify the DNA of future generations.

 

Sooooo...back OT. I have a feeling, that with all the hyper-stimulation of Corporate advertising, high technology and computer-mediated socialisation the 'punkers of the future will live in - their sex drive is going to vanish.

 

We see it now in the west - as obsessed as we are with sex, that's a sign we aren't getting much - consumption of sex related material is statistically inversely proportional to frequency. Whereas the 'morally repressive' and ecologically desperate parts of the planet are breeding like wildfire.

Might want to take a second look at where much of the world's human-trafficked sexual slavery takes place. Much of it is in the morally repressed regions, but many such people are also trafficked -into- the west. First worlders make up a large percentage of the 'client base'.

 

Sex hasn't gone down at all in the west or anywhere else - it is just that the west has better resources towards preventing conception.

 

 

Providing a solution to the more lethal STDs, we'll likely hit a new round of sexual revolutions and become even more open about what we accept.

 

Much of modern sexual 'frustration' comes from having a strongly open society that forces itself to refrain out of fear. That then drives an undercurrent of backlash against that fear and we see people frinding creative solutions to express around that fear. I don't have to walk far to find all sorts of sex clubs, strip joints, prostitutes, and so on. I have only to flip only my newspaper to see singles trying to hook up, or couples trying to find other couples or a single, and so on. I get it in my email, I even see it on TV.

 

We've got more sex than ever before if anything, but with more shame attached to it.

 

 

At the same time, we have all sorts of crazy superstititions that fuel the rise of STDs, such as the notion popular in the 90s that AIDS was low in Asia, fueling a boom is sex tourism into the region (which is one of the -major- hotbeds of AIDS today). Every Expat of business traveller I ever met living in Asia assumed I 'knew all the hookups' and always asked where to go to get laid...

 

Even married men and women travellers, I'd get the handshake, the obligatory comment about the taxi ride, and then the 'so where's the poontang around here?'

 

They could care less that most of the girls were not there by choice. They weren't human after all, they were gooks.

 

We rationalize exploitation. We always have, and we're getting better and better at it.

 

Human trafficking into sexual slavery is on the rise at shocking levels. While Columbus and his gang raped and pillages Hispanolia, that is nothing compared to today.

 

Just in the last month or two San Francisco police busted up 17 slave brothels of Asian women. A few years back 'ultra-left wing women's rights' Berkeley uncovered a sexual slavery ring of Indian women that had been running for years on a grand scale...

 

That in the city were baby girls get their combat boots before they've even had their umbilical cords cuts.

 

They've got slave rings in all the liberal and not so liberal countries.

 

Read the chapter on sex in China Inc. Did you know the number one source of income into rural China is from prostitutes working in the cities that cater to foreign men and then send the money back to their families? Conviently, if your first child in rural China is a girl, you're allowed to have a second one...

 

The same chapter notes a police bust of 'week long orgy' in I think, Shanghai (or maybe another city), in which they arrested over 400 (!) Japanese business men in one raid...

 

Now just stop and think about scale for a second.

 

Then note that after that raid tourims in the city dried up for nearly six months.

 

Who do you think learned what lesson in that one?

 

Tourism is back there btw... and they didn't come for the cheap handbags...

 

When I lived in Asia they called it a 'golfing trip'. If a man went on a golfing trip but forgot his golfing clubs, well lets just say he didn't forget the club that counts...

 

If you're in any city in the world and you want to find someone who can speak English, as where you can find the prostitutes. There's a reason they all learn English faster than anybody else...

 

 

Sex in the future is going to be a nasty brutal business of using and disposing of the poor and disenfrachised for the benifit of the wealthy elites.

 

Our first true cloned people might very well be over the issue of trying to produce the perfect sexual servant. You can outlaw it here, they'll just do it there, and then sell you a plane ticket to come and sample the product.

 

Sex has been a boon to the internet, and it will probably be a boon to many other technologies as well.

 

Unless you can engineer out the sex drive, and engineer -IN- some other stronger pleasure trigger and drive, sex will be here to stay. It will always be -THE- major factor in economics. As long as you have unequal economic realities it will be exploitive.

That link to the rules doesn't seem to be working at present.

 

Mac OS X.3.9 running Safari 1.3 v 312 - which is w3c compliant.