Eroticism Forever!

Wouldn’t it have been interesting if instead of delisting anything tagged “adult,” “NSFW,” or “erotic,” regardless of whether it was commercial, PWYW, or free, itch.io had decided to avoid payment processor scrutiny by pausing payments for everything that has a set price? Of course, by now it’s too commercialized as a site for this to work, but it’s not like there’s no precedent for this.

I joked that what we really needed as a contingency plan against this was a Philome.la for Videotomes… but given how many noncommercialized sites and hobbyist communities have played a real role in keeping controversial work alive, it may not be a totally dumb idea…

My games that got got by the delisting are all through Domino Club (which you can no longer access the itch page of in the UK, a really hilarious compounding incident), none have been straight up removed yet, though I’m aware of it happening, and for pretty arbitrary/benign stuff. The thing that unites all my games that were delisted seems to be just using the “erotic” tag, which is interesting; for me it is more an indicator of the tone and sensibility of the work than whether it has real or simulated nudity or sex scenes.

I picked the “erotic” tag for games like Choir Medals to get at the feeling & context I’d like people to approach it with, how to consider how it deploys sensory detail, for example, and also to signal that it’s for a more adult audience. Vault 819, Underground and Horses are now Obsolete have more explicit references to particular fetishes, despite being mainly goofy or introspective. But again, sometimes desire takes these forms. Perverseoverride has the roughest and most explicit sexual content, but even then, it’s “just” a linear text game, you’re not enacting or seeing any of the sexual content.

Compared to other Domino Club games that got delisted, I sometimes feel like I’m jumping into the fray on this a bit selfishly; why had I even put an “erotic” tag on some of these in the first place? They’re not graphic and most only have like, a whisper of sexuality compared to other Domino Club games. But I also find the “Huh? My thing didn’t DESERVE this!” response kind of tedious. Because what is “actually deserving” honestly usually has more value to me.

I’m defensive of fetish art specifically because it often seems like the purest expression of someone pursuing something out of their own fascination (and fighting uphill to distribute it!) in a context where creativity is increasingly encouraged to conform to financial and algorithmic incentives. You wouldn’t want to be a loser putting stuff out no one will see or pay you for, right?

Payment processor regulations also make fairly arbitrary fetish content (which may not even involve, for example, penetration or nudity) much more regulated than the tasteful normie sexuality expressed in a glimpse of boob or sex scene of a mainstream film. And why? Well, because religious authoritarians (who may or may not couch their objection in terms of a “feminism” that seems to only extend as far as claiming a paltry feminine expertise on disgust) find it basically gross. There’s all sorts of social motives for this disgust, from invisibilizing queer people to cutting back on sex ed until more people end up pregnant younger and stuck in unhappy normative relationships and plenty others, I’m sure.

Fetishes and the erotic are very rarely about or encouraging the so-called “sacred” procreative “purpose” of sex; some themes, like incest, especially how it appears in gothic contexts, force our attention to how the family structures society and our lives, often by literalizing or perverting its ideals. To me, work that confounds the dreary view of life and pleasure handed to us by religion, the state, normative gender roles etc., is the art that allowed me to build a life worth living.

It’s work that’s compelling because it gets at unknown horizons of desire and pleasure that reiterate alternate possibilities. Of course this work often expresses pain that goes overlooked by mainstream culture (and this is what many have said in defense of games that are, for example, a serious take on the aftermath of sexual assault), but it is just as much imagining an alternative future where this pain becomes speakable.

But… just don’t tag it “erotic,” right? See what you can get away with. There’s been a lot of tactical discussions around tagging and content warnings in the wake of this stuff as well, especially since it seems like the tag system determined which games were delisted and additional scrutiny has been on the basis of keyword searches, ie, the most well-intentioned “CW: incest.”

In an ideal world we’d all tag and CW with shared understanding that this would mean it was easy for everyone to avoid things they didn’t want to see or find things they did. I’ve put CWs on some of my Domino Club games, and we’ve even gotten into the philosophy of CWs as “advertising” for the true sickos. Most of the time it does feel like a nice gesture, but it’s also being used to target work for this type of censorship and harassment. People who are the most careful are also the ones who leave themselves open to be the most punished.

It’s hard to express complicated feelings about CWs out of the idea that you’re amorphously harming or upsetting someone by excluding them. That said, I do think I am mentally moving away from them. I decided not to have a CW page for my novel, for example… there’s some potentially upsetting elements but, in the case of Martin’s father, who is implied to be an alcoholic who resents being stuck with his son while also having a pattern of making inappropriate passes at his girlfriends, this is layered in with memories and dialogue relating to things happening “off-screen,” rather than being directly depicted in a culminating moment. It contributes to the overall uneasy tone of the book but is hard to define. There’s also parts that are a bit gross, but a CW for “gore” I felt would misrepresent their surreal and monster-movie inspired qualities for something more Saw; the other thing about CWs is they kind of make you imagine the worst possible form of what could be a minor or passing element of a narrative.

Plus, I think it’s kind of impossible to predict what will get to you most about a work. Even though there’s only casual drinking in More Bugs, over the process of writing it I did end up having a serious moment with myself about how I used drinking as a form of masking or numbing in social situations, not at the levels of alcoholism but definitely in a way that was causing me emotional self-harm. I only realized this by examining what I had written in the book. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can CW for unless we’re going as overprotective as the ESRB.

Similarly, in my review of Beyond Black I wrote about how I found the constant belittling and bullying the main character faced for her weight to be really upsetting and bring back some of my own experiences vividly. In a way, because Al was so humanized and we stuck close to her perspective for the whole book, this repeated pattern hurt more than the dismissive way an incidental fat character is typically written about in litfic, and that I can usually dismiss as being skinny metropole woman nonsense. Two very different effects.

I feel uncomfortable coming up with a CW list for my current novel as well, because it feels like so many of the descriptors will just… validate? provoke? people’s existing discomfort with descriptions of explicit sex acts, rather than “dragon and dolphin” style scenes as romantic climax, especially in a field as crazily sex-negative as SFF publishing, where most submissions calls are several degrees more exclusionary and discouraging on “controversial” content than even the most uptight payment processors.

For Plaintext distro's zines, I basically have a sign when we table that says some zines have adult content, and to ask if you’d like to avoid them or have any additional topics you’d like to avoid. That’s pretty much how I feel, I think. I’m happy to have a good-faith conversation with anyone about what is in my work and how it’s depicted, but trying to fix that back-and-forth into a public, contextless list of “risky” or “upsetting” things in my “product” seems like an impossible challenge to fully succeed at, as well as a vulnerability.

With all the above thoughts swirling around in my mind, I felt super stressed out the entire back half of last week. On Saturday, I had a volunteer shift at the Glasgow Zine Library and made a display about the history of sex work, erotic art, and alternatives to commercialized online distribution. It was interesting to pull these threads out of the collection and feel like I was expressing something about the moment. It made me feel a bit better to realize this was part of a larger fight and that we do have resources and alternatives.

But most of all it reinforced how important zines are to me, that I should spend more time making them, distribute them more, and spend more time reading them! Square’s not looking over my shoulder the same way they are for a fully tagged game in an online storefront for a £2 “zine” transaction, for now anyways. And there’s always cash, or dropping them off at local consignment shops. It’s an immediate way of getting writing out there that doesn’t have to work around algorithmic or payment processor rules. And I find the feedback and conversations I have at zine fairs to be some of the most exciting and validating.

I have a big stack of recent zines in my “zine inbox,” a box next to my desk where I put zines I get in person or online before I have a chance to read and catalog them in my big spreadsheet. The FediZine 2025 envelope is sitting pretty on top! I’ve been reviewing books and gigs on this blog, but I think this is a good opportunity to start a zine review tag too. Stephen’s post about the itch.io situation brings up the importance of peer relationships, especially where little or no money is involved, and I want to help build that, wherever I can.

Anyways, I’m off to get another tattoo tomorrow! So it may be a while. But now that I’ve posted about it on my blog I have to do it at some point ;)