Last month, I posted a video about how online age verification laws are not protecting children from dangerous material, but instead are just a way for the Religious Right to censor content they don’t like. I mostly focused on the “not protecting children at all” part, but at the end I pointed out that these laws are part of the grand picture painted by Russel Vought and Project 2025, and how if passed they are designed to lead to the censorship of more than just pornography: “Trans care. Women’s health services. Resources for kids in abusive homes.” On and on.
But a lot of people didn’t pick up on that ending message, because of attention spans I guess:
“If you have to worry about people knowing it was YOU visiting that particular website, maybe don’t visit that website! (cry emoji)”
“Just don’t use these platforms. Maintain both your privacy and your mental health (celebration emoji)”
“I really don’t care about the whole porn thing. Some of us don’t need porn to have a good time, lol!”
So I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to make a follow-up video where I emphasize the “slippery slope censorship” of it all. But how to make sure that I fully capture the attention of these attention-span-starved commenters? Well, inspiration came from another commenter who DID watch to the end and had a remarkably blunt reaction: “I don’t care about the LGBT+ movement, but I’m still concerned. As a gamer, I remember Jack Thompson’s rampage against violent video games. Imagine if he was in charge of what happens next. Fallout, Doom, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dead By Daylight, Mortal Kombat, Dead Rising, Grand Theft Auto, and any other violent video game franchise would be gone.”
Well then. That’s certainly a Gamer™ opinion! First they came for actual queer people, and I only spoke up because I was pretty sure that next they were coming for my favorite video game’s gay mutant hybrid clone crafted in the flesh pits by a soul-stealing sorcerer.
As luck should have it, the Conservative Christian War on Gamers actually launched in force on the very day I posted my previous video. In June, the online game platforms Steam and Itch.io removed hundreds of games deemed to be “adult” – not because the platforms themselves objected to the content but because their payment processors did.
This all seems to trace back to an Australian organization called Collective Shout, run by a woman named Melinda Tankard Reist. The organization cosplays as “feminist” and uses that label to lobby corporations to delist and demonetize pornography, but in reality Tankard Reist is a rightwing theocrat who is not just anti-porn but, and please hold on to your monocles, also anti-abortion, anti-trans, and anti-free speech. Wow, it’s almost like those things go together no matter which country you’re in.
To learn more about Tankard Reist, I picked up this well-written and very thorough paper from Dr. Kate Gleeson of Macquarie University that discusses both Tankard Reist and her place in the decades-long history of conservative Christians who take on the mantle of being “pro-woman” and “pro-children’s safety” to achieve their goals of outlawing abortion, stifling free speech, and banning anything they consider too “raunchy.”
Tankard Reist started her public life as the “bioethics advisor” for an anti-abortion politician, spending a decade with him before starting her own anti-abortion lobbying group, Women’s Forum Australia. When Australians rejected the anti-abortion agenda of that government, she pivoted to publicly wringing her hands over the sexualization of children, something much more likely to gain positive press in a more liberal world. That focus led to her creating Collective Shout in 2008, to lobby against the “objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.”
Gleeson compares and contrasts Tankard Reist with contemporaries like Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, writing “Levy’s analysis is similar to Tankard Reist’s in identifying the sexual revolution as having hijacked women’s liberation: her irritation that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner touts himself as a feminist hero of the‘post feminist world’ is palpable. However Levy does not concern herself with agendas of censorship or children, as does Tankard Reist, who tends to portray women less as active participants and more as passive victims in their relentless personal and cultural sexualisation.”
I think that’s a great point. Feminists have differing and nuanced opinions on pornography and the sexualization of women, so when I discuss Collective Shout and their ilk it’s important to not assume that I LIKE the brands, games, films, and whatnot that they criticize. My issue is with their philosophy and their tactics, which assume that women are essentially powerless children, that anything “adult” is necessarily damaging to society, that any portrayal of sexuality or violence against women or children is necessarily bad, and that the answer to all of this is top down censorship.
As far back as 2014, Collective Shout was lobbying against video games, as when they launched a successful petition to get Australian stores like Target and Kmart to agree to not carry Grand Theft Auto V because of its depictions of violence against women. They’ve achieved several similar “wins” over the years, and in April of this year they convinced online gaming platforms to delist a particularly violent rape game. But their goal was to get these platforms to censor all “adult” content, and clearly Steam and Itch.io were not willing to do that. There are hundreds of well-loved games on the platforms that are in some way raunchy or pornographic, with sexual gratification being the goal, and many more games that feature violence against women or children as an important part of the gameplay, like Detroit: Becoming Human, in which the player controls a housekeeper who witnesses a man abusing his wife and child and must take action to save them. That is obviously not a game you’d want a young child to play, but there’s absolutely nothing about it that glorifies violence against women and children. In fact, the point is the opposite: the violence is bad and the player’s job is to stop it.
Obviously there was just no way that these platforms were going to kowtow to the Religious Right and ban all these games, so Collective Shout adopted a tried and true tactic: they targeted the payment processors.
This is well-trod territory for Puritans, who used the same tactic previously to make life miserable for sex workers. As detailed in this 2023 paper published in City University of New York Law Review, financial discrimination against sex workers doesn’t just force those people to find difficult workarounds for opening accounts, getting insurance, or finding loans, but the algorithms financial institutions use to detect sex workers also ends up capturing “a wide variety of uses, including access to sex education, abortion services, and mutual aid funds,” all of which, I will point out, are also things the conservatives oppose. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
And so sure enough, it only took about a month of Collective Shout pressuring Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and others before those institutions leaned on Steam and Itch.io and boom, hundreds of “adult” games were delisted. Obviously Collective Shout celebrated this and claimed the win, but you don’t have to believe them. Itchio put out a statement that read in part:
“Recently, we came under scrutiny from our payment processors regarding the nature of some content hosted on itch.io. Due to a game titled No Mercy, which was temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April, the organization Collective Shout launched a campaign against Steam and itch.io, directing concerns to our payment processors about the nature of certain content found on both platforms.
“Our ability to process payments is critical for every creator on our platform. To ensure that we can continue to operate and provide a marketplace for all developers, we must prioritize our relationship with our payment partners and take immediate steps towards compliance.”
And because itch.io is run by a small group of people and hosts user-submitted games, they were forced to just delist ALL “not safe for work” games. All of them. Not just games that glorify rape, or sexualize children, or whatever it is Collective Shout pretends to care about. Much like with the financial discrimination of sex workers, it is a FEATURE and not a bug that the action resulted in widespread censorship. And like that example, this “win” will lead to an expansion on what is considered “NSFW,” what is “obscene,” what is dangerous for children: sex education, any depiction of gay, queer, and trans people, “blasphemy” against the Christian god, and on and on and on.
The Gamer pins the blame for all of this on Project 2025, which is right and also wrong. There’s no evidence that Project 2025’s architect, Russel Vought, had anything to do with this. There’s plenty of evidence that this anti-woman activist group from another country had everything to do with it. But yes, both Project 2025 and groups like Collective Shout are part of the Religious Right. Both are theocrats with the ultimate goal of controlling women, forcing them to give birth, and pushing them out of the workforce and public life. Both have identified pornography and the safety of children as the most convenient way to achieve their goals. Project 2025 lays it out very clearly:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology…It has no claim to First Amendment protection.”
Get it? You don’t care about the Religious Right censoring pornography? Well guess what? “Pornography means transgender ‘ideology.’” They said it. And once they manage to get that one over on you, they’ll know they can now outright say that “pornography means gay people.” Because “pornography” means whatever the Religious Right doesn’t like: empowered women, people of color, immigrants, and yes, video games. Video games are officially on the “First they came for” list. Okay? Do you care now? Reject MAGA, reject Trump, reject the Republican fascist takeover now or by next year your only gaming option is going to be Veggietales: The Mystery of Veggie Island, and you’ll fucking deserve it.
