But what’s the issue here? Is it “I don’t want to be exposed to this stuff” or is it “I don’t want YOU to have access to it”. The former position I have a lot of sympathy for. The later: not so much. Solutions like ‘report abuse’ tend to control what everyone has access too, instead of protecting those who do not want to be exposed to certain material. I see the problem with a lot of this stuff being that it’s projected into the public sphere. If it was kept behind some kind of walled garden, so that people who didn’t want to have to see it didn’t have to, then that would solve the major issue for me.

Of course, there’s people who want to control what the rest of us read/write, listen to or look at, and there always will be. We need to distinguish between what they’re doing, and the valid objection that people should not have to be constantly assaulted by stuff that offends them. The two things are not equivalent.

The issue of what’s appropriate is a complex one. The subject here: rape, is something that more people than you’d think have had to live through, and I can see that they don’t want to be reminded of that.

But once we apply that standard, won’t we have to apply it to everything? Most crime drama is about murder. Why are we okay with murder? There’s people out there who’ve had loved ones murdered, why do they have to put up with being ‘triggered’?

And the argument that such publications normalize such behavior, that they’re part of ‘rape culture’, seems disproved to me. We can all play any number of video-games where we get to kill out fellow human beings (and other species) en masse. Do we live in a ‘murder culture’? No. The reason is that the law and moral norms prohibit murder regardless of what appears in fiction and entertainment. Similarly ‘rape culture’ is an issue of a country’s legal/moral system, not its entertainment. A country could outright ban all forms of entertainment, and still have a rape culture, if the legal/moral structures allow this behavior (as in many cultures and subcultures, they do).

Still, I can see that many people don’t want this kind of thing in their fiction feed. But then what does one say about religious types who don’t want gay material in their fiction? And how do we deal with stuff like requires_hate’s “strident critique”? (which was worse in my opinion, because it targeted actual individuals (obviously, I’m a dog in this race and make no claim to objectivity)). I do think the RH issue is slightly different, because it had consequences for individuals, but it still comes under the ‘I don’t want to have to see this stuff’ rubric. Interestingly, most of the “everything is problematic” crowd had no problem with this until they realized she was targetting women and PoC as well as white men, which tells you all you need to know about them and their moral consistency. It also raises the issue that, when people put in place systems to handle ‘inappropriate content’, they tend to wind up biased and hypocritical. The people driving this will want to control all manner of things in media, down to chain-mail bikinis, while preserving the right of people like requires_hate to call for actual individuals to be raped and murdered. I wonder how many of the people in the outrage mob over this RPG game were laughing when RH was saying people should be raped to death by dogs?

Clearly, someone’s going to have to do something. ‘Free speech’ has always been a myth, and it’s going to become more of a myth in the future, whether we like that or not. The answer, I think, is a better system of rating and isolating types of media, so as only the people who want to be exposed to it are. This is ‘balkanization’ again, and it will have some ugly results, but I think it’s the only solution that will keep everyone happy. The alternative will likely be blanket censorship, as the ‘censor this filth!’ crowd will not stop once they’ve gotten going, look at how much strife there is in SF&F over minor infractions of their law. The solution will be to create walled gardens where they are not welcome, and are forcefully shown the door if they try to break in. Some of these walled gardens are going to be festering cesspits, but that’s most of the internet anyways: twitter is a cesspit of man-hating lefties, reddit seems to be more a cesspit of misogyny. This is the way things are going, and we’d do better to guide the flow of events to the best result we can get, instead of trying to hold back the tide. We simply can’t continue to have communities where the likes of Vox Day, Requires Hate, John Wright, Kameron Hurley, KT Bradford, etc, etc, all rub shoulders. We can’t continue to have communities were people making rape jokes bump up against those making castration jokes, or where one lot of tweeting #KillAllFeminists, and another bunch are tweeting #KillAllMen. All these people behave like children, and need to be treated as such, segregated for their own safety.

# The “everything is problematic” crowd have very broad definitions of racism
# and sexism, and there is a very loud faction of them with the RPG community.
# Give them the power to disappear publications they don’t like, and it will have
# a chilling effect on the hobby as a whole.

They’re having a chilling effect on society right now. This is Mary Whitehouse back, looking younger and hipper, with a degree in gender studies. The thing that interests me most is the utter refusal of most people to admit it’s happening. People get hounded out of jobs, publications get pulled or shut down, people walk away from their artistic endevours, but everyone you speak to claims “Oh, they’re just a tiny fraction with no real power”.

Seems simple to me.

I think it’s a bit of what I’ll call “Safe space scope creep”. It’s perfectly valid to make a particular convention, the community around a specific game, or all the works of a specific publisher into a safe space. Trying to make part of the public square into a safe space is a different matter, since a safe space is defined by what it excludes.

I’m not trying to be extremist by calling oppressive regimes and parallels to 1984, but that was my initial thought, because once precident is set it can be used as a means for future actions.