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There has been a recent crackdown on naughty games on steam and itch.io. The game platforms say the crackdown has come from payment processors. Payment processors have said they don't want their business associated with unsavory practices, and that adult products have higher charge back rates. Some people have blamed activist religious groups on aggressively lobbying the payment processors for this crackdown.
I mostly feel a sense of annoyance. My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.
Fetishes are spiritual (shoutouts to Skimmerlit, he's a real one):
Those who already perceive the resonance of duty within themselves, those who already walk a "path" -- be they adherents of traditional religious tendencies, or woke activists, or TRP/manosphere/MGTOW types, or even certain garden variety authoritarians -- correctly identify pornography as a portent of an alternative spirituality, an intrusive force from "somewhere else" that encroaches on their market share and threatens to de-sediment what they have worked so hard to bring together under a certain conceptual regime.
True, as far as it goes. Fetishism can be a tool and a religion, and as such other tool/religions recognize it as mutually exclusive. But take it a step further, and ask what separates this entity from other entities in the tool/religion class, and you'll see there's a reason "free love" isn't the rallying cry it once was.
One of the themes I keep coming back to in my participation here is the crucial importance of cultural memory. In attempting to understand our current culture, it's very useful to see where we came from, and what people were aiming for as they pushed society along. Old sci-fi is handy for this purpose, and having read a good amount of it in my youth, one meme that stands out is the common idea of the therapy-sex appointment. That meme came as an extrapolation of where people thought they were and where they thought they were going. There's a reason we didn't get there, and ended up here, instead. Not all tools/religions are equal under a given set of values.
(Just as a quick note for anyone reading this: my views on sexuality will be inevitably misunderstood at first glance, although if prompted to clarify these misunderstandings, I could perhaps only speak in metaphorical language. It's easier to clarify what I don't believe in. I don't advocate for Bataille's permanent revolution, I don't advocate for the ecstasy of transgression-as-such, etc.)
I am cautious regarding this concept.
Something that, due to my own dimwittedness, I didn't appreciate until recently, is the difference between concrete rootedness as such on the one hand, and rootedness-to-come on the other.
I yearn for rootedness. There's nothing I want more. But it's a rootedness-to-come. It's an abstract rootedness that can only be intimated at with whispers and signs. It's a familiar image, but it's been passed through a filter that makes it look like a dream. Perhaps it will forever be on the horizon.
It's easy for me to forget sometimes that there are people who live in reality, and not in dreams. Rootedness for them is already here; it's inconceivable for things to be otherwise. Rootedness for them is Aunt Sally and Uncle Joe, it's the corner convenience store that's been in the family going five generations back, it's the guys down at the Elks Lodge or the local church, it's all the family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas and in general it's all these things that define the coordinates of their world. These are their "roots", this is their "memory".
Given the vast differences in constitution and temperament you find among different individuals, it's unsurprising that we develop different conceptions of "memory".
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