Australian Censors Threaten All of Us With Moral Tyranny
Last week saw one of the most devastating losses for anti-censorship advocacy online with the censorship of games off of Steam’s game platform. An Australian group called “Collective Shout” managed to leverage the puritanical tyranny of payment processors to force Steam to take down “hundreds” of games they considered to be “sexploitation.” Already we have known that large payment processors are notoriously anti-sex, calling into question why they get any say in what adults spend their own hard-earned dollars on, but with the foot in the door it’s only a matter of time until the rot spreads. From controlling what we can do with our bodies to what we can look at online, censors and conservatives will stop at nothing until they have complete and total control over every single facet of our existence. And they’re coming for us.
Under the guise of “protecting women,” Collective Shout collected tens of thousands of signatures in petitions and rallied against one game in particular before they discovered a trove of games much like it which featured what they considered to be a promotion of abuse against women. Though some media may, in all actuality, be a part of a single man’s journey toward crimes against women, the Magic Bullet Theory was discounted in the 1940s and still remains debunked to this day. No game about raping your female family members is going to make a normal man into a monster, much like reading erotic novels doesn’t make women into drooling idiot female main characters who flirt with mafia bosses and then go get shitfaced at a club only to find themselves kidnapped…
I digress.
It’s not really any shock that Collective Shout is an Australian organization considering Australia has weird obscenity laws which include those that allow women to be arrested for writing books and those that make it illegal to be in possession of certain types of Simpsons porn. As a normal, well-adjusted Leftist American who happens to be passionate about Nazisploitation (a sexploitation genre featuring storylines and aesthetics revolving around Nazis) you can imagine that my options for platforms are already blessedly small and I’m really not too happy about Collective Shout’s alleged new target: Itch.io.
Itch happens to be one of the only places left online that doesn’t make a stink about the types of stuff that I make, happily leaving me to my own devices when it comes to violently murdering chub-sporting Nazis. It wasn’t enough that certain games or content was geo-locked for Australia, no these censors will not stop until they’ve censored the entire globe, telling us exactly what we’re allowed to look at, what we’re allowed to see, or what we’re allowed to think about. They couch all of this in a guise of protecting women, but I’m not feeling very protected and I didn’t ask for this kind of performative activism. Caitlin Roper, seemingly the only person who does anything on Collective Shout’s website, claims that “misogynistic” male gamers have argued endlessly against the censorship of Steam games, but when I tell you that this is more about control than it is about protection, I say that as a woman.
It’s time to recognize the new boss is the same as the old boss. This isn’t about saving anyone, it’s about moral tyranny and the self-righteous control over others. To Caitlin Roper and the rest of the morality freaks at Collective Shout: leave us alone. We didn’t ask for your help, we don’t need it, and you’re making things actively worse for women who value their freedom over your disgust.
UPDATE 7/24/2025: Itch has now shadowbanned the greater majority of all NSFW titles listed across the platform.