Jezebel 
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New York, 3:50 PM
Tue Dec 1
73 posts in the last 24 hours
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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
03/10/09
This is not remotely true. There may not be a Federal law that effectively bans import of this material, but I'm certain that sale, possession, transfer, or exhibition of this title is definitely illegal under many local obscenity statutes.
The 1st Amendment does have restrictions, for example based on safety (one cannot yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre), or prurient interest (bestiality and rape-porn are considered obscene in most communities), but it is up to the municipalities to decide how it treats these materials.
How materials such as these are handled both on a Federal, and local level, may change drastically very soon.
03/10/09
I think the government should ban games like this on a case-by-case basis (which it would appear it already does) to avoid the whole slippery slope of a catch-all ban that would infringe on free speech.
The aspect of this that disturbs me the most is that I think if this game depicted men raping other men, there would be a much more visceral, public outrage over it (particularly from the religious right, since they hate all things gay). And I don't even know what people would think if it were women raping men, but I think there would be less shrugging off and more examining how and why this is wrong and how to put a stop to it.
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I don't think either should be banned.
03/10/09
I don't like rape porn because it romanticizes a violent act. Would it be ok to watch murder porn? (though I guess that already kinda exists in the form of Friday the 13th and other horror films).
03/10/09
03/10/09
Kind of nothing we can but be outraged. Outrage is fun, though. Not knocking outrage.
For the record, I know a guy who downloaded and played this game. I was like, "Isn't it totally disgusting and wrong?" He was like, "Uh... it's good porn... that's really all I thought about it."
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03/10/09
Wow, that's some great guy you know, there! Hope you excised him from your life soon after!
03/10/09
Even if games like RapeLay do not "cause" players to go out and rape, would you want someone who enjoys the game serving on the jury of your rape trial? Serving on the bench? Depictions of eroticized violence normalize sexual violence even more than it already is.
03/10/09
Where is the line?
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03/10/09
I won't say that depictions of rape and murder are the same, but I tend to put them in the same box in terms of shit I don't want people "pretending" to do for kicks.
If we look at movies, I think murder can be shown highly stylized (i.e. Kill Bill) but can rape? I don't think it can. This is why I feel they must be handled differently.
But, at the same time, I think games like GTA are just as shitty as this game.
03/10/09
Rape is also a much bigger problem. A woman has a 1 in chance of being raped in her lifetime, a man has a 1 in 10 chance of being raped in his life time. Compare that to the odds that someone will be murdered, which is less than 1 in 100 (the stats vary by race and ethnic group).
03/10/09
What do you jessies think?
03/10/09
In games, killing usually takes place in the context of killing "bad guys", like in war, mobs, spies, space aliens, zombies, whatever. And, almost always, you have a pretty damn good chance of being killed yourself in the process, cuz the bad guys have some sort of weapon to fight back with. It's not really comparable to rape... at all.
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03/10/09
this whole story makes me want to crawl into a hole.
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03/10/09
Period.
Yeah, I'm a dirty hippie. Fuck it.
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But, yes, it's very complicated.
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03/10/09
joking aside, i'm very torn on this. i'm vehemently anti-censorship, but the fact that this game exists (mostly that there is apparently a market for it) is deeply disturbing to me. i don't know how to reconcile those feelings.
03/10/09