January 2014 – Antisocial Darwinism

Funny, You’re the broken One
But I’m the only one who needed saving…
Cause when You never see the light
It’s hard to know which one of us is caving…

I’ve been wearing the same outfit for four days, so I may as well blog it. Lol.
Consider this your warning, there will be some personal stuff, like RL personal stuff, in this post. It may trigger negative memories for some of you, if you’ve been through similar situations. I apologize in advance, but this has to be said…

Some of you know, because you’re close enough to me that we’ve talked about it or you’ve read earlier posts on this blog, but I’ve been raped not once, not twice, but three separate times. I take the issues of violence against women very seriously. Some people kink for consensual non consent and rape fantasies and other similar things inside of role play situations, and that’s fine if that’s what they like. It just isn’t for me. And I find images and other such things depicting rape as OK really disturbing. Some of you probably know now the direction that this is going.

In a judgmental community like the fashion industry in SL, you’re told you need to be squeaky clean. Designers don’t want models who offend their customers. Whether or not it’s OK, people are offended by the things they don’t understand. So if you engage and an alternative sexual lifestyle, that is not understood or misunderstood by the general public, such as D/s or M/s, you are told to not be open about that. If you choose to be open, like myself, you risk never being afforded certain opportunities than if you did not engage or had hidden it. Anyway, this brings me to last year’s Miss Metaverse pageant.

We were told to be squeaky clean, which should be no surprise as, again, the SL fashion community is a naturally judgmental community. We were told to hide the associations with anything that could be remotely construed as being overly sexual. This includes relatively innocent things, such as the fact that I facilitate discussions on a education based D/s sim. The discussions are not sexual in nature, but because people don’t understand D/s and M/s, I was told to hide all the groups. This was understandable, because in theory a pageant winner should be ” wholesome “. I had friends who didn’t understand, and I did my best to explain, but the fact was we did what we were asked. We did this because we had to, in order to follow the rules laid out for the pageant.

So after this pageant, and I use the term loosely, when it was outed that there was a not only nude photograph of the newly crowned Mr. Metaverse, but that it was a photograph of him overpowering and raping a female avatar, I expected something to be done. The pageant owner claims to care about the integrity of his pageant and the integrity of the contestants. The pageant owner also claimed to be a victim of sexual assault himself, so I expected that he would understand how disturbing of an image that would be. Now keep in mind, I did not see everything that happened in group chat when this all came about. I had already been stripped of my title, but I will get to that later. However, I will link Isodel’s blog entry to the bottom of this one, that includes a lot of the things that the pageant owner said and did via the group and Facebook. Not only did he not stick up for the women who were offended, he did not even hold to the rules that he originally established in the very beginning of the pageant.

Even though I started with it, the pageant owner being OK with the picture of rape and even calling it art, was actually the last straw for me. My own personal experiences with this pageant owner are probably just as bad.

When I first entered Miss Metaverse, I was not exactly as open about personal stuff as I am now. It took a lot for me to tell the pageant owner about some stuff that I’ve been through that made me choose my particular organization for my platform. It also took a lot for me to even survive the personal questions about my real life they were asked in the interview portion. I was shaking, I couldn’t control my stutter, and in efforts to do so I was saying ” um ” and ” uh ” a lot. This isn’t just a nervous habit for me like it is for some people. It has to do with the fact that I stutter. Either way, I survived sharing deeply personal details about myself to these people that I barely knew. It was hard, but I grew from it.

I related to the pageant owner, or so I thought, because after I told him about the things that I’ve been through, he began to tell me that he’d been through some of the same things. Looking back on it now, I’m not sure how much of what he told me is true, and how much is a lie.

I honestly don’t know. To not be able to trust this man enough to at least know that these personal details were not just made up, is pretty disturbing. But that’s the kind of person he is.

That kind of person that claims he wants to run an ethical pageant, claims he will show the ultimate transparency… Yet now, 10 months after last year’s pageant, the scores that he promised STILL are not up in the public eye. No one knows how most of the models actually scored. And the scores that are up, one of the judges claimed she wasn’t even present for those particular models, so she wouldn’t have scored them. He also claims to own the name Metaverse Pageantry. Unfortunately, I know the person that does. And it’s not him. Which is interesting, given that he’s trying to run the pageant this year under that name that is owned by somebody else.

Was I disappointed when I didn’t make it past preliminary competition? Yes. But I was disappointed because the pageant owner claimed that there would be emphasis placed on those who were unique. He claims to value of those who were not ” typical ” models or pageant girls. He even told us, outright, ” Everything you see in other pageants? I don’t want to see ANY of that. ” In the end though, he didn’t really care about any of us as models, or as people. He only cared about us as pawns to move around as he saw fit for his own personal gain. He constantly changed rules and structure of the pageant throughout. He went back on his word several times. And it seemed that some rules applied to some models and others to other models but not the same rules for all.

I was hoping that I could reflect back on my experiences in a positive way, this long after it happening. However, after seeing that this pageant owner is attempting to run the pageant again, I knew I had to say something. I will attach a link to Isodel’s blog entry, as well as the two that I wrote about my experiences last year.

If you are considering competing, I heavily encourage you to think hard and reconsider several times before you actually enter. For me, it was too much drama, too many lies, too much deceit, too many broken promises, and too much bullshit from a man who really only cares about himself.

(I also apologize for any typos that occur in this post. I broke my keyboard a couple of days ago, and so I dictated this entire post via speech recognition on my computer.)

The promised links:
Isodel’s post: http://isoldel.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/the-truth-hurts-the-metaverse-pageantry/
My first post: http://tivispiritor.com/2013/03/17/lies-disguises-and-hoops-they-make-you-jump-through/
My second post: http://tivispiritor.com/2013/03/22/lies-disguises-and-hoops-part-2/

*~* Funny, You’re the Broken One *~*

(Will insert style credits hopefully tomorrow on laptop or with new keyboard.)

Blogging Tune: “Stay” – Rhianna