A Japanese video game is getting a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons. It’s called RapeLay. Can you guess what it’s about?
Yup. You stalk and rape, repeatedly if you like, a young female and her sister and her mother. Fun, right? Women’s groups didn’t think so of course, but their outcry over the obvious problems with putting this plaything into the hands of North American kids only prompted several websites to offer it, in some cases for free, to keep up with demand.
In Japan it’s always been okay to be graphic and, well, deviant in entertainment. But what was made in Japan used to stay in Japan. Now it’s just a mouse click away. Unsupervised kids can just rape the day away and even cyber-impregnate a woman and force her to have a cyber-abortion.
I’d like to think that kids are being watched closely enough that they wouldn’t get five minutes with this garbage before suffering parental disapproval and having it deleted from the hard drive. But we know that’s not always the case. A spokesman for the gaming industry in Japan says disallowing such a game would limit freedom of expression and the government has no place making such a decision. There are scads of Japanese games about rape and revenge rape. The object of one is to find the woman who fired you from your job and rape her. It’s like something from an amoral alien world.
Last time I checked, if nothing else, rape is illegal. Yeah, yeah, so are shooting up a city street and stealing a car, also popular themes in video games. But they’re not targeting one identifiable group and committing a violent, destructive act on that group simply because that group is female! Cry me a river about wanting to change someone else’s culture or limit their freedom of expression in a so-called art form. I’d just like to drag them into something akin to a civilized outlook on women.