How the Religious Right Censor Morally Objectionable Content to Target Queer and Adult Media

In 2009, the Japanese adult game industry came under deep scrutiny when the Belfast Telegraph, a Northern Irish newspaper, reported that citizens of Ireland and the UK could purchase Rapelay, an Illusion Soft game in which the player character stalks and rapes a family. Even though the game could only be sold in Japan, this caused major upheaval in the UK, the US, and later, Australia, where a group called the Women's Forum Australia led the charge to censor the game.

In page 27 of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls edited by Melissa Tankard Reist for the group, she writes:

Some of us worked to ban a Japanese rape-simulator game that was based on players raping a mother and her two young daughters, one of whom was ten and carrying a teddy bear. The website described the game as 'a new type [of] molesting game with more beautiful 3D images ... Players can get the new excitement like never before.' We succeeded in outlawing its download in Australia.

Illusion Soft was bewildered by the world's response. To them, they were clearly following the rules established by Japanese regulators and that they had no intention to sell their game overseas. Although they felt unfairly singled out by international campaigns, they ultimately removed references to their game from their store page in order to prevent the situation from worsening.

In 2025, No Mercy, an adult video game developed by Zerat Games, was at the center of a successful Change.org petition that called for its censorship. An Australian radical feminist group, Collective Shout, organized the petition and was able to garner almost 70,000 supporters because they claimed that "there appears to be no obstacles in the way of any child accessing the game" and it "features deeply disturbing pornographic depictions of rape and incest as entertainment." The Change.org UK Facebook page later announced the removal of the game with glee.

Before the developers voluntarily withdrew the game, it was already inaccessible in Australia, Canada, and the UK. In a post announcing their withdrawal from the store, the developers criticized the media for covering the game in the first place since the developers saw the game as simply a fetish game for people with these fetishes:

Please consider—would anyone who wasn't looking for such content hear about this game if it weren't for hundreds of articles, petitions, and statements from content creators? After all, if someone believed that this game shouldn't be available in their country, they could have handled it quietly; they could have reported the matter to the authorities. Meanwhile, websites used the trending topic for clicks, organizations placed links to fundraisers under petitions, and content creators made videos that garnered more views. The result of all this was that the game suddenly went from around 1,000 visits to 100 times more in those days. There are certainly events that need to be publicized quickly, when someone is actually being harmed and we can save someone. Was it really necessary in this case, for those few views and extra money for fundraisers?

Similar to Illusion Soft, the developers said that they did not want to cause any further problems and decided to leave Steam.

But Collective Shout thought this wasn't enough. In an open letter addressed to executives of credit card and companies payment processors with relationships to Steam and itch.io,

However we have since discovered hundreds of other games featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse on both Steam and Itch.io. Our research has shown many of these games would breach Australian classification laws. Most of the content found within the games, including the graphics and the developers descriptions, are too distressing for us to make public.

Scrolling down, one will find a familiar name on the top of the list of people who wrote this open letter: "Melinda Tankard Reist, Movement Director, Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation".

The main concern of both groups led by Tankard-Reist was the exploitation of young women in mainstream Western culture. This is, I think, a legitimate feminist cause. However, upon further examination, it becomes evident that this noble objective is, in reality, an attempt to censor sexuality rooted in deeply conservative, puritanical beliefs.

In a March 2010 interview with the Australian Prebysterian, Tankard-Reist rehashed her victories censoring Rapelay in Australia ("That was as a result of one complaint") and claimed, among many questionable things, that

Freedom has been distorted. Freedom for girls now has come to mean being publically sexual, to be what I call “service stations” or “pleasure delivery centres” for boys. There is very little concern here about real intimacy and connection. It is all about their ability to please boys. We see it during schoolies week, where this is the role that girls are expected to play. Girls have got the message that if they want to be seen as mature, free and liberated, they should wrap their legs around a pole and expose their bodies in public to please boys. What a tragedy and a distortion of the original message of women’s dignity and freedom!

Tankard-Reist has also written Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief After Abortion. The book description reads:

I wish someone had said, 'There would be losses having a baby, but don't underestimate the loss of having an abortion.'

Abortion has been presented as a simple procedure that allows women to put the crisis of an unintended pregnancy behind them. The women in this book were told they'd be able to get on with their lives after abortion. But their lives would never be the same.

Giving Sorrow Words includes the personal accounts of 18 women who had abortions and draws on the experiences of more than 200 others. These women share their stories of personal suffering and loss -- stories that have often gone unheard in a society eager to dismiss abortion-related trauma.

Australian journalist and women's rights advocate Melinda Tankard Reist examines the experiences of women, including the lack of resources and support, the misinformation and lack of informed consent, and the intension pressure and coercion often applied by partners, parents and society in general to force women into unwanted abortions.

This may come as a surprise to people who know basic feminist history until one learns that Tankard-Reist refers to herself as a "pro-life feminist", the very same label Sarah Palin used a long time ago. In an insightful profile by Rachel Hills for the Australian periodical, The Age, Leslie Cannold, a pro-reproductive control activist and "regular sparring partner", suggests that Tankard-Reist's wide reach is only possible if we don't know everything she does. Hills continued:

Tankard Reist worked as a media and bioethics adviser for former Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine for 12 years, during which time he successfully blocked and continued to campaign against the abortion drug RU486. She also personally opposed changes to legislation that would have required pro-life pregnancy-counselling services to disclose their affiliations in their advertising.

For context, the late Brian Harradine was a socially conservative, Catholic politician who opposed both homosexuality and abortion. Bernard Keane in Crikey has an excellent short article about his "lethal legacy"":

As an ardent anti-choice campaigner, Harradine did everything he could in his 30 years in the Senate to undermine women’s right to safe abortion. In particular, he used his role as a balance-of-power senator to negotiate deals to undermine access to abortion with both the Keating and Howard governments. Tony Abbott’s ministerial ban on medical abortion pill RU486 had its genesis in a deal between the Howard government and Harradine for his support on the sale of Telstra. But far more damaging was another aspect of the Telstra deal: his successful attempt to stop Australian aid being directed toward family planning of any kind.

These guidelines prohibited Australian foreign aid for abortion, causing unnecessary suffering for many people in recipient countries. They were rescinded in 2009 because they were "ridiculous and repugnant."

And in 2019, Caroline de Costa, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, claimed that it was time to lift the medical restrictions on RU486 (mifepristone) because acquiring the drug remained difficult even after Harradine's legislation was overturned in 2006. It wasn't until 2023 that doctors and nurses could finally prescribe RU486 without specialist certification.

While it is certainly depressing to read about how many people had suffered at the hands of this politician, it must be stressed that his thinking was deeply religious and dogmatic. Brian Greig, a former Australian politician who sat across him, wrote about him for WA Today:

As with most religious crusaders in Australia, Harradine would never make reference to God, Jesus, the Bible, Christianity or the Church. All of his arguments, discussions, view points and values were expressed as secular, civil concerns. It didn’t matter whether he was railing against pornography, abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or stem cell research, Harradine would camouflage his catholic zeal with the language of every day concern. He saw it as his duty to launder dogmatic Church positions into every day thinking and to normalize religious positions into common, unchallenged acceptability.

As if foreshadowing what would later happen in itch.io, Greig continued his reflection:

A couple of punky-looking lesbian authors, one with pink hair, talked enthusiastically about their erotic writings and the valid place of adult literature in the over 18 community.

Harradine looked on in bewilderment as they explained their craft and its benefit to women’s sex lives before responding with some derisory condemnation of “porn” and its “harmful effects.”

The young women were not going to accept Harradine’s assertion without some push-back, so one of them leaned into her microphone and stated to say, “Senator Harradine, I completely respect your right to hold your religious views, however….” but there was no way she could finish her sentence.

Harradine exploded. Thundering into his microphone in a way that reverberated around the small meeting room he angrily discharged that, “My personal religious views have absolutely NOTHING to do with my views on this legislation!!!”

The two women sat back in their chairs stunned by the volume and fury, perhaps wondering what on earth had triggered such an aggressive reaction. The whole tableau was so absurd I had to bite my bottom lip so as not to burst out laughing, but Harradine had won the point. The women backed off. No-one, ever, would get away with questioning Harradine's underlying religious motivations.

Now that we have this context, let's return to Tankard-Reist. Like Harradine, she disguises her religious views in the language of feminism. Her views that girls were becoming too sexually promiscuous make much more sense when couched in religious dogma rather than feminist politics.

She and the group clearly want to create a world where girls cannot express themselves sexually. But as Valens writes in a now-deleted Waypoint article, previous attempts by Collective Shout to ban big titles like Detroit: Become Human for child abuse made little sense. They used misleading language to suggest that something bad was happening, but they didn't find much success until they targeted No Mercy.

It's hard to say whether Tankard-Reist remembers Rapelay and how successful the global campaign against it was. But the playbook is practically the same: choose a game that is deeply morally objectionable and that very few people will defend in public, and stir up controversy over it. Soon, businesses that fear they might not comply with the rules will follow suit. Many well-intentioned people would then create petitions and organize movements against the game, which would create a chilling effect for future companies.

This is all a religious crusade from the very beginning, and I think many people played into it without realizing it.

Let's be honest: many people care about the censorship in Itch because it screwed over many queer creators. I don't know if forcing Itch to delist and suspend so many adult works was part of the plan (I believe they just wanted to remove a few titles), but this approach aligns with their strategy, and Itch has identified their efforts to convince payment processors as a motivating factor. Their actions, coupled with Itch's panicked response, made their intentions more obvious. One could say that they might have flown too close to the sun.

Meanwhile, there is rarely any sympathy for adult media, especially ones with problematic fetishes. I hesitate defending the likes of Rapelay as I too find it morally objectionable. This is why this tactic works: it's hard to sign your name to a statement saying that fictional rape is an artistic endeavor that may not appeal to you, but it's still art.

Instead, I want to show that so-called grassroots movements to ban morally objectionable content often have ties to reactionary movements. The object of controversy doesn't have to be Rapelay or No Mercy; it could be anything that most people might deem reprehensible and that just happens to be on the storefront. This makes it possible for groups like Collective Shout to sneak in their extremist religious views and create a chilling effect for everyone.

This explains how adult media censorship can intersect with queer media censorship, even when said queer media is safe for work. Queer people are already viewed as too sexual by conservatives, and when groups with ties to the far right view sexuality as a threat, the livelihoods of queer people become tied to pornographic media. The right will not distinguish games that explore sex work and queer identity, like He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, from pornography. While it may be possible to distinguish obscenity from art in some philosophical forum, this idea is fundamentally absurd in practice. The right is more than happy to take down queer art and pornography simultaneously.

In an age of fascist censorship, it doesn't matter if one can argue that some queer media has XYZ artistic value. It's just porn to these religious dogmatists; they're going after anything they deem to be degenerate art. This is a religious, moral crusade taking down any form of media that expresses sexuality and gender. That includes porn, and that includes queer art.

I would rather not write this article. Like, I'm just a subculture media blogger and indie game developer affected by the Itch crap. I want to go sob in my bedroom or something, not research some ridiculous Australian group (I haven't even brought up how the Women's Forum Australia had been more visibly anti-trans lately, were freaking about wi-fi in schools, and successfully pulled a sex ed book from circulation). However, I recognize that I'm one of the few people who remembers Rapelay. To this day, I still dislike that game, and you won't see me defending its artistic value.

That said, I still believe games like this one should be uploaded to storefronts like this one. Ideally, the end-user should be able to make informed choices in what titles should be visible to them or not. But in many sites that host adult content, creators can't properly tag media like Rapelay. The content warning tags we use to help people filter out unwanted games are being weaponized by right-wing organizations to target specific adult games. The current best practice for many adult media spaces is to remove content warning tags, even though the purpose is to help people avoid works that upset or offend them. This approach essentially paints a target on adult media. Queer media creators are also removing tags to avoid being banned. As a result, readers will increasingly be jumpscared by triggering content they should have been warned about earlier just so the work can survive the onslaught of payment processors.

And like, many of the problems surrounding sexual violence stem from conservatives controlling sexual education. For example, you can watch John Oliver discuss how poor sex education is in the US. We never received adequate education on contraceptives, consent, and sexuality. The same people who claim to care about children also oppose homosexuality and abortion.

Shouldn't we start talking about sex more openly? Fetishes, too? And like, how did these groups even find games like Rapelay and No Mercy? There's a lot of random porn games you have to dig through. They're meant for people with these fetishes, not for the general public. Indeed, it's disturbing that these so-called "feminist" groups are ones who keep bringing up these games to the public. They want to fearmonger about the decline of Western culture and the harms of pornography, so they can silently propagate their extremist views into the public.

So, I think we're all playing into their game, even though we acknowledge that they threaten queer expression. They know we have different opinions about sexuality and gender and how to address them. They're exploiting our fears and anxieties to help them achieve their reactionary goals. This became apparent when they started indirectly censoring queer media that is perfectly acceptable by societal standards.

I am deeply concerned that this strategy will continue being effective as long as they don't tackle obviously "good" projects. Whatever the outcome of this itch.io meltdown will be, I want people to recognize that this strategy can happen again and executed by not only this group but by other groups. We have to be resilient and also stand alongside pornography, even ones that we may consider morally objectionable. If they fall, we fall too.

There is no future for video games without porn games. This is what the right intuitively gets: if they are allowed to freely determine what is obscene or not, then we have no choice but to follow their repressive rules. Instead of taking their nonsense at face value, let's talk about sex, an activity we have mixed feelings about. It's a complicated topic, sure, but it's better than reducing it to nothing and letting the fascists dictate the terms of our sexuality.