Happy Raping...

There are many lessons to be learned from RapeLay, about not wearing a skirt on a train in Japan or the need to equip your daughters with suicide pills, but the lesson foremost in this game is that rape is easy. You can wantonly grope women on a train without consequence and repeatedly rape their entire families without much fear. The only thing you can't do is not force them to get an abortion, because that's a sin in the eye's of god and leads to murder. He is the same god that answers the prayers of rapists standing on subway platforms.

A few days ago, Andrew Lamprecht sent me a link on SomethingAwful to a game called RapeLay. It is a Hentai game in which you simulate rape. There are all sorts of options is in this game. You start by raping a woman, then move on to her two daughters - both of whom are virgins (something made apparent by the first person player's bloody cock). The game continues through all sorts of objectives, including getting them pregnant and then forcing them to have an abortion. Something Awful says it best:

Defining Moment: I wish I could say that the first instance of bloody cock or the rape that takes place on top of the child's enormous bed were the defining moments of the game. That would have been enough - more than enough - but, these are both things I have seen in Hentai games before. Pregnancy and abortion are new twists on this filthy genre, and they were disturbing, but they still don't quite win out. No, the winner on this one are the tears that glisten and move in the little girl's eyes. That sort of attention to detail wins this game a huge pile of disturbing points.

Some time ago, Andrea Dworkin, who by the way, is undeniably wrong about a lot of things but is also much maligned in my opinion, wrote about a woman who was victim of another computer game, Cluster's Revenge :

The pornographic video game "Custer's Revenge" generated many gang rapes of Native American women. In the game, men try to capture a "squaw," tie her to a tree, and rape her. In the sexually explicit game, the penis goes in and out, in and out. One victim of the "game" said: "When I was first asked to testify I resisted some because the memories are so painful and so recent. I am here because of my four-year-old daughter and other Indian children. . . . I was attacked by two white men and from the beginning they let me know they hated my people . . . And they let me know that the rape of a 'squaw' by white men was practically honored by white society. In fact, it had been made into a video game called 'Custer's Last Stand' [sic]. They held me down and as one was running the tip of his knife across my face and throat he said, 'Do you want to play Custer's Last Stand ? It's great, you lose but you don't care, do you? You like a little pain, don't you, squaw?' They both laughed and then he said, 'There is a lot of cock in Custer's Last Stand. You should be grateful, squaw, that All-American boys like us want you. Maybe we will tie you to a tree and start a fire around you."'(Letter from a War Zone, 1986)

It's interesting to note that Something Awful refer, in the article about RapeLay, to Custer's Revenge, saying: "the joy of raping that Indian woman tied to the pole was simple and pure." Like with a lot of these kinds of sites, I really can't quite judge the tone of this statement. I'd be glad for advice though. Although I am the last person to advocate censorship, or to make simple equations between virtual and real life violence, should a game like this be allowed? And why is it that advancements in technology, in networking, in communication, lead to making a really advanced rape simulator?