Group That Tried To Ban Anime Games From Steam Has Dark History

As AVN.com reported on Wednesday, the video game “app store” Steam and its parent company Valve last week threatened to delete four anime-style games due to their allegedly pornographic content—only to back down after the weekend, allowing the games to remain available on the Steam platform. Now, more information is becoming known about the organization that claimed credit for pressuring Valve to pull the games. On its web site last week, a group calling itself The National Center on Sexual Exploitation posted a statement claiming “victory” in response the news that Valve planned to delete the anime games. “This sudden action by Valve, parent company of Steam, comes after a two-year aggressive campaign by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, including the listing of Steam on the 2018 Dirty Dozen List,” the group wrote on its site. “We thank Steam for their leadership in working to change our #MeToo culture in which sexual violence in rampant and normalized.” In fact, the group promoted its campaign against Steam on its web site as well, calling for the company to “institute a more robust policy enforcement against selling games that normalize or glamorize sexual exploitation in the future, no matter the age of the user,” among other measures  But according to an exposé by Katherine Cross on the gamer news site Gamasutra,the group’s reference to “#MeToo culture” is little more than a ruse by a group that is actually a conservative Christian advocacy organization formerly known as “Morality in Media.” In 2015, Morality in Media underwent an extensive “rebranding” program in which the group’s “overtly conservative Christianity was submerged beneath inoffensive rhetoric,” Cross wrote. The NCOSE now describes its mission as “to defend human dignity and to oppose sexual exploitation.” As part of this “rebranding,” the group also began a “co-optation of feminist rhetoric,” pretending to support the anti-sexual harassment movement as a way to mask what Cross decsribes as their "right-wing agenda." “NCOSE has deftly—and sickeningly—appropriated the #MeToo moment to push a right wing agenda that harms women, trying to cloak themselves in the mainstream credibility gained by the blood, sweat, and tears of actual survivors,” Cross wrote. “The organization appears to realize that its brand of religious conservatism lacks a broad base of support, thus they have to filch someone else’s. In the process, they ironically undermine the credibility of MeToo itself by tying its name to trivial matters.” Steam is only one target of the former Morality in Media group now known by the initials NCOSE, In 2015, the group waged a crusade against the popular women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, with the group’s executive director Dawn Hawkins describing the magazine widely sold at supermarket checkout stands as, “actually just another porn magazine glamorizing and legitimizing a dangerous lifestyle—pushing readers to try violent, group or anal sex.” In addition to the video game platform Steam, the group’s “2018 Dirty Dozen” list of supposed “leading facilitators of sexual exploitation” includes the cable network HBO, the online retailing giant Amazon.com, the set-top streaming device manufacturer Roku and Apple’s iBooks store—each of whom the group labels as “a major contributor to sexual exploitation.” Photo by Chase N. / Wikimedia Commons