Anchoring-Annual Day

n a popular Internet role-playing game called Second Life, people can create a virtual identity for themselves, choosing such things as their age, sex, and appearance. These virtual characters then do things that people in the real world do, such as having sex. Depending on your preferences, you can have sex with someone who is older or younger than you – perhaps much older or younger. In fact, if your virtual character is an adult, you can have sex with a virtual character who is a child.If you did that in the real world, most of us would agree that you did something seriously wrong. But is it seriously wrong to have virtual sex with a virtual child?Some Second Life players say that it is, and have vowed to expose those who do it. Meanwhile, the manufacturers, Linden Labs, have said they will modify the game to prevent virtual children from having sex. German prosecutors have also become involved, although their concern appears to be the use of the game to spread child pornography, rather than whether people have virtual sex with virtual children.Laws against child pornography in other countries may also have the effect of prohibiting games that permit virtual sex with virtual children. In Australia, Connor O’Brien, chair of the criminal law section of the Law Institute of Victoria, recently told the Melbourne newspaper The Age that he thought the manufacturer of Second Life could be prosecuted for publishing images of children in a sexual context.The law is on solid ground when it protects children from being exploited for sexual purposes. It becomes much more dubious when it interferes with sexual acts between consenting adults. What adults choose to do in the bedroom, many thoughtful people believe, is their own business, and the state ought not to pry into it.If you get aroused by having your adult partner dress up as a schoolchild before you have sex, and he or she is happy to enter into that fantasy, your behavior may be abhorrent to most people, but as long