Comment on The recent Steam censorship debacle actually sort of opened me up to adult games.
vithigar@lemmy.ca 8 hours agoTycho, of Penny Arcade, actually had some words on this subject around the time the PC version of Stellar Blade came out and people were up in arms about it. I’ll quote it here because I think it’s a good passage.
I used to say that I grew up Christian, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say Evangelical, especially now that more people might know what I’m talking about. Sex was VERY naughty and we needed to be constantly on the lookout for incursions of this secular, demonic, but also somehow worryingly inherent force…? Breaking that pernicious notion down and enabling people to express themselves was the project I thought I’d more or less seen completed. Now it’s come around some weird bend, with precisely the same energy as before, except now it’s being done for the correct reasons. It can’t possibly be this dumb. And yet!
It’s incredibly fucking boring to have the tail end of the revolution you saw win shame the tools that gave them victory, dust off a bunch of regressive shit, and then have the pluck to feel righteous about it.
It sort of mirrors my own experience (minus the evangelical upbringing). I definitely recall a period of general sex-positivity that has now come around some strange turn whereby the very same voices are admonishing people for daring to enjoy sexy things.
It’s very strange.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It’s because both sides were always divided on sex. The “beer, titties, and jesus” crowd and the anti porn feminists had been the lesser voices of their side for a while. But in the fallout of the sexual revolution, in the 70s and 80s second wave feminism developed a really anti sex stance, especially towards deviant types of sex. This was the feminist sex wars, and its the era of a lot of the more batshit bits. But it did begin with reasonable criticism. There was fighting back however, from lesbian feminist sadomasochism groups like Samois to owned porn cooperatives where radical ideas wete tried like having the entire crew be naked so the performers weren’t the only ones exposed.
People like to blame third wave feminism for the swing back, and I disagree. The third wave was the movement born of the critiques of the second wave, and the renewed push for sexual liberation in the 90s ans 00s was quintessentially third wave. And it got far, it did a lot, and it also left us with a lot to criticize. Whether it’s media criticism like Sarkeesian was harassed for daring to do, or it’s the unfortunately common stories of women being pressured into sex acts they don’t want with feminist language critiques had been mounting in the early 10s.
The theoretical fourth wave is often called twitter feminism, and i think it’s best to consider that the first real thing it did that impacted anything was the metoo movement. I believe metoo was a good thing. It’s next to the Arab spring as among the few things Twitter ever did that are good. But it and the late third wave criticisms gave room for the sex negative side to return to prominence. That’s where we are now, but I dont think it will last.
Because I think we need to remember that while there is an internal back and forth, there’s also the realpolitik of the fact that you can pull horny people if nobody else does. A chunk of gamergate is straight up that. Shining feminist media critiques through the worst possible lens to horny boys and men. Anyways the right has dropped their horny-prude coalition recently and is all in on prude, which is coinciding with chunks of the left getting tired of the dominant position of our prudes.
Anyways free the nipple, and what 20 consenting adults do behind closed doors is their right to do.