look up to,” she wrote. Allowing her character to do things she can’t in real life, “gives me a sense of freedom.”
Furries aren’t the only sex-based subculture in Second Life. There are also the Goreans, a male-dominant group demanding female submission. “Every single sexual subculture has come into Second Life,” said Wagner James Au, a journalist from San Francisco who writes New World Notes, a blog chronicling avatar dramas in the virtual world. Linden Lab employed Au from early 2003 for three years as an "embedded journalist" to blog about the personalities in Second Life. He continues reporting as Hamlet Au, his dapperly dressed avatar who sports a crisp white suit inspired by Tom Wolfe. 
He believes Second Life will continue exploding. “I think it will be the next generation of the Internet,” he said. Going beyond the personalized Web pages of MySpace, Second Life’s “fully immersive, fully interactive three-dimensional environment” has the ability to push the boundaries of how people meet, form and experience relationships. 
Au said he has seen all the drama and jealousy of the real world repackaged and expressed online – with a lot more action. “You’re role playing in a sex soap opera,” he said. Au recalled a blog entry he wrote last year titled: “Online gumshoes for hire in Second Life.” He discovered virtual private detective agencies to check up on virtual spouses, using sexy decoys in the classic “honey trap.” If spouse A takes the bait, the detective teleports the wronged partner to the scene.
If every aspect of sexuality is expressed in Second Life, it’s not surprising to find an avatar dominatrix, Cheri Horton, earning 1,300 Linden dollars per customer in her fetish business called the Dashwood Dungeon. Noche Kandora, Cheri’s real world controller, spends three to four hours a week in the dungeon. “I do what I want and they enjoy it,” she said. In her 30-minute routine she uses props, including a paddle and whipping post, to physically dominate her virtual client while typing erotic text.
Kandora first logged on to Second Life in September 2005. In real life Kandora is a journalist in Nevada with a blog, Apogeevr, which discusses “desire in the digital age.”
Kandora discusses real world jealousy from Second Life relationships on her blog and ponders the allure of bondage and other fetishes in Second Life that don’t involve real world touch and pain.
“This is a dawning of an age where humans are going to be interacting more and more in these environments,” she said. “Second Life is just living out your life in a different setting.”
This could not have been more true for Britain’s Farrant and Roden. After they had virtual sex, a steamy phone conversation and a Web cam chat, they decided their avatars, Ruby and Ravan, should become engaged. They planned “the ultimate Second Life wedding” with the help of wedding planner Pentium McKenzie and her company, Wedding Bells, Farrant said. The wedding
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