I’ve never really played any porn games more hardcore than Baldur’s Gate 3 before, but you remember a couple weeks ago when GOG gave away those NSFW games, as a direct response to the whole thing?
Well I claimed the bundle just to boost their numbers (because censorship is bullshit), but recently I needed a low-difficulty gaming distraction, so I checked a few of them out, and… some of them are kind of good?
Like first off you have to be okay with visual novels (usually), but if you’re cool with that, some of them actually have some compelling characters, and occasionally even good gameplay in between all the fucking and whatnot.
Leap of Love is amusing, kind of adorable when it comes to the not-sex stuff, and charming. It is also a game where you (a former frog) can marry and simultaneously bed 3 princesses and their stepmother after deposing of the evil king. My brain is still trying to reconcile this.
Huniepop is one of the best match 3 puzzle games I’ve ever played, with a chill as hell soundtrack. Also a scantily-clad foul-mouthed love fairy wants you to fuck every woman in a 5 mile radius who can fog a mirror.
And Crom help me, when I finished… sigh… Fetish Locator Week 1, I actually cared enough about some of the characters to buy the next one.
The point is, some of these games have more depth and value than I’d been led to believe, and I wouldn’t have known that if the censorship thing hadn’t started that chain of events. So congrats censorship people, and honestly thanks, I guess? Completely the opposite of your intended effect. Task failed successfully.
Not directly to your point but your overall experience just reminds me: we really lost something when the sexual liberation movement was largely erased. People so often dismiss it because we’re conditioned to dismiss taking sex seriously (outside of a very narrow and specific context) but there’s a lot we lose from that.
Tycho, 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.
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.
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.
It has taken me nearly 30 years to undo that programming and it still affects me. The puriteens scare me.