Posted on August 02, 2025.
Recently, an organization aiming to fight women's sexualization, Collective Shout, has targeted gaming platforms, Steam and itch.io specifically, by urging them to remove certain content through payment processors. Many gamers and developers have had defiant reactions against this censorship.
After about a month of not publishing new blog posts, I decided I would pick this one current event and comment on the censorship policies in this text. How well does this organization actually fight for the cause they claim to do so?
Let's direct the attention to the founder of Collective Shout, Melinda Tankard Reist. She describes herself as a feminist [1], and one could assume such an ideological alignment because of her campaign that supposedly opposes women's objectification. She describes herself as a "pro-life" feminist, as she holds tightly onto her conservative, Christian values with sprinkles of transphobia on top. In this context, does she really care about women's exploitation or their sexualization?
While it's true that the pornography industry is coercive towards women because of sex work being perfomed to make ends meet, within the context of internalized patriarchy, and a reflection of women's bodies being treated as a commodity throughout history, Melinda doesn't hold this perspective for all women, or actually, any women if we consider that she's okay with women being forced to give birth - speaking of which, childbirth has been used to oppress women by degrading them into their reproductive capabilities and limiting their mobility.
Transgender people are still being viewed as fetish objects and are targeted by sexualization, as much as, or maybe even more than, cisgender heterosexual women are. Melinda, with her flustering transphobia and anti-abortion stances, is apparently blind to how it's the patriarchy, capitalism, and the law that exploits and sexualizes both transgender and cisgender women. Her right-wing stances are in discord with the intentions of the organization she directs.
A closer inspection would be that Melinda is a conservative who adores the status quo. No, it's not the NSFW content in gaming platforms that causes the objectification of women she desires to eliminate - it's the conditions that push women into sex work and the pornography industry.
Women who live under poverty, women who are stereotyped as sex objects due to gender roles, women who cannot attain education due to misogyny, sex workers who are criminalized by legal systems to prevent them from coming forward with abuse... Censorship won't solve any of these conditions or end the abuse women face to continue sex work, as pornography is a symptom of the patriarchy intertwined with the state and capitalism. No systems were designed for women in mind, and neither are these content restrictions.
Now, pornography is what Collective Shout has mainly opposed and declared found in gaming platforms. It's reasonable that the patriarchy manifests itself in pornography - men leave women's consent and sexual gratification behind and portray an unrealistic, abusive show.
Gender norms are perpetuated with the interests of men, so men are encouraged to be more violent. However, if men simply become more violent because of pornography, it must be because they've been raised as such to comply with the dominance model they had been exposed earlier, like gender socialization and stereotypes - in broader words, the patriarchy.
The production of pornography won't simply diminish after censorship - it will take another form. It will be found elsewhere and shared privately. Women will have a harder time with getting the content they want taken down. Maintaining the laws and corporate intervention will only get you so far. Collective Shout's conservative stances don't leave a good impression either. In addition, censorship is an exertion of power - it's unlikely to be fair and stop in the right place with its blurry scope.
Collective Shout has already targeted games with LGBTQ+ themes [2], which aren't even pornographic when we keep in touch with reality. If we tie censorship policies with the observation that conservatives deem LGBTQ+ themed video games inherently pornographic, censorship extends to silence and marginalize queer representation and developers, who by their existence threaten the patriarchy and are disproportionately disadvantaged in terms of income.
In fact, anything they dislike or is critical of them could be censored, and that has already been the case. Some video games raised awareness of violence and sexual offence, and some helped rape survivors feel validated. In these video games that had been previously indexed, no real people were harmed and no abuse was glamorized, unlike what happens in other platforms. Collective Shout targeted the gaming site for a reason.
Women's sexualization and objectification are serious issues that need addressing, yes. However, if Collective Shout really cares about women's objectification, they may as well criticize oppressive systems, help LGBTQ+ groups, focus on challenging gender norms, and not perform good-faith activism on the conservative stage and advocate for censorship through PayPal and Stripe, whose net worths exceed 60 billion. Corporations and conservatives - they both don't care about our liberation.
Finally, Collective Shout's policies are driven solely by their conservative purity and chastity moralism. They shame women's sexuality and cannot accord with its representation when it's harmlessly portrayed. They attack developers and not those who control the industry on a broader scale. They want to erase the LGBTQ+ community. itch.io, a much smaller company than Steam with much fewer limitations on user content, and its developer community didn't deserve this.
Collective Shout only insists on the privacy of sexuality and its stigmatization, which is harmful for many women and marginalized communities to open up about the sexual abuse they endure and a counteraction to sexual education. They aren't feminists, they uphold the patriarchy, and they aren't "protecting women and girls" - they want power.