More Pseudo-Defenses
Back in the before-times when I was a university student, being a liberal-lefty in the US generally went hand in hand with being a free speech maximalist, or at least pretty far out on the “free” end of the scale.
Nobody was posting memes about the paradox of tolerance. The ACLU was still proud of having defended Nazis’ right to march in public. If anyone talked about “safe spaces,” it wasn’t in the context of limiting speech. My freshman year, the movie every college film nerd was rooting for to win Best Picture was famously thick with racial and gendered slurs.
Back then, ideas like these, recently expressed in the context of the Aura Clash fracas:
would have resonated way more with the right than the mainstream left. It was the religious guys who were quick to talk about “responsible” limits on free speech. It was the left that argued that offensiveness or subjective feelings of threat couldn’t be enough to justify silencing someone.
So I get the arguments against censorship. I came of age immersed in them. In a lot of ways, I’m still more of a '90s liberal than a '20s one. That much-beloved xkcd comic makes me queasy, because yes, “free speech” is founded on government laws and policies, but most of our speech happens in private spaces (in the internet age, more than ever). When those spaces stop valuing free speech, the fact that you can’t get arrested for saying the wrong thing – just fired, deplatformed, demonetized, banned, ostracized – is pretty thin comfort.
And at the same time, I also think that the free speech maximalism of the late 20th century died for a reason. There’s more harm in normalizing rape and racism than the old liberal consensus recognized, pre #MeToo, pre BLM. (And, for comic fans, pre Neil Gaiman’s spectacular fall from grace. I’m sorry to keep bringing him up, but he defended obscenity so eloquently for so many years that he almost demands to be a poster boy for this question.) Our ability to function as a democratic society has been damaged at least as much by unchecked incivility and misinformation as it has by anyone’s attempts to control speech. The pedagogical role of porn is real and calls for more than uncritical positivity.
The answer to our echo chambers and fascist movements isn’t just to go back to the presumption that speech – including the fictions, tropes, and social scripts that we meet in stories and games – can’t hurt anyone.
I’m still pretty maximalist when it comes to the government; no one should get arrested for writing rape stories or making animated rape games. But in the social and market sphere, some of the “bad stuff” is bad enough that it’s worth condemning and pushing to the margins. I don’t agree that a disgust response for pro-rape stories is unjustified or “unexamined,” and I’ll support company policies that exclude rape-glorifying media from their markets. (And Nazi-glorifying, incidentally, since “nazi slop” was mentioned.) There’ll still always be somewhere online where people can find their noncon media, or their nazi media… and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that place being hard to find and hard to make money from.
Whether we’re talking noncon or nazi, that requires us to make judgments about ethical boundaries – and absolutely, bigots are going to rush in and try to impose their judgments through the same process. But I’d rather fight them over setting those boundaries than try to make the case for zero boundaries, anywhere.
The hate lobby goes to Visa and says, “You have to stop facilitating the sale of rape simulators and depictions of child abuse. Oh, and LGBT content, because it’s all child abuse anyway.” Do we implicitly accept them rolling those things together, or concentrate our fire on the latter point? For all the recent legal setbacks around trans rights, plenty of Western countries still have laws against LGBT discrimination which companies like Visa have to take into consideration, as well as a (hopefully vocal) LGBT-and-allies consumer base.
The more we can narrow the scope of the fight to be about the (factually ridiculous) claim that “LGBT = noncon” – the more we force the hate groups to fight over bigotry alone! – the more we’ll be aligned with both nondiscrimination law and the moral sentiments of most Westerners. If on the other hand we go to bat for the “rape your whole family” game and seduce-the-schoolgirl genres…seems to me that’s where we walk into the fundies’ trap. That’s exactly the ground they’d love to fight us on.
Any xkcd-style policy of “showing the door to assholes” or otherwise limiting free speech will inevtably hit people who don’t deserve it sometimes. Rules are applied by people making judgment calls, and sometimes they’ll get it wrong. Make a rule against racist speech, and it’ll inevitably sometimes be enforced against people who weren’t really being racist. Make a rule against games that glorify rape, and it’ll inevitably sometimes catch up a game that’s actually dealing with horrors with sensitivity and insight.
Make any kind of rule, and a platform that’s not built in an effective capacity for moderating its content is going to struggle. Itch have screwed up above and beyond the inevitable messiness of getting called on their crap, and I hope they’ll figure themselves out and get to a better place than we are now. If they ultimately can’t figure out a way to distinguish rape-glorifying content from other porn games (let alone all the games tagged NSFW for other reasons), then some other platform will, and the delisted games can migrate there.
tl;dr - I disagree that anything other than free-speech maximalism on this point is the death of freedom or creativity; and defending stories that glorify rape or child abuse is counterproductive in a world where bigots are working to paint LGBT people and their allies as rapists and child abusers.