Gawker Media site Kotaku just published a long article called The Ugly New Front In The Neverending Video Game Culture War. At first that may not seem relevant to readers of this blog, but the article addresses one of the more notable victims of the raging vehemence of these disgruntled gamers, Alison Rapp. Apparently many of them have decided that Rapp, an employee of Nintendo, is responsible for censoring some of the Japanese games retooled for American audiences, and because of that they have dug up every bit of dirt they possibly could on Rapp, including a college essay she wrote called Speech We Hate: An Argument for the Cessation of International Pressure on Japan to Strengthen Its Anti-Child Pornography Laws, in which Rapp argues that Japan’s culture of being more open to child pornography, specifically the type of cartoon pornography known as lolicon, is too poorly understood by Westerners, and that our tendency to pressure Japan into conforming with our laws and taboos is disturbingly imperialistic. Make no mistake: Rapp is no fan of child sexual abuse and certainly thinks there should be strong laws in place to punish such offenders. But she also recognizes that Japan’s extremely low rate of hands-on sex crimes owes a lot to the fact that the Japanese have plenty of outlets for their more taboo sexual desires like pedophilia. I absolutely agree with Rapp on this. The proof is in the pudding.
Not A Monster 