Collective Shout

I’ve been hearing more than I care to about this Australian organization. From what I’ve read so far, Collective Shout are a bunch of wowsers. If you’re not from Australia, Occasional Reader, you might not be familiar with the term. If you are an Aussie, then you have probably met your share of wowsers: meddlesome, Puritanical sorts determined to impose their morality on others by any means available. They are congenitally incapable of minding their own business. And they always have a high-minded excuse for sticking their noses in everybody else’s business.

They bring to mind something C. S. Lewis wrote about the tyranny of the well-intentioned:

Omnipotent moral busybodies? Well, while Collective Shout are not yet omnipotent, the rest is a better characterization of them than their own. According to their about page: We are a grassroots campaigns movement - a Collective Shout against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.

Bullshit. Who elected them to speak for anybody but themselves? I regard them as moral vigilantes. I do not consent to be policed by them, let alone governed according to their dictates. I have no patience for censorship, regardless of who’s doing it or why, and no sympathy for authoritarians. Even if they say it’s for the children, I would just as soon say, to Hell with the children! (because Hell is for children...)

Is it fair to call Collective Shout an authoritarian organization? Decide for yourself, while your mind remains your own. I think that their methods prove their true nature, regardless of any claims they might make for themselves. By their own admission, they could not persuade storefronts like Steam or itch.io to remove games they found objectionable. Their attempts to pressure payment processors like Visa and MasterCard to refuse to handle transactions in which people buy content that may be objectionable but is still legal to purchase in their jurisdiction are nothing but financial censorship. They have no respect for democracy, individual rights, or the rule of law. They are nothing but right-wing authoritarians. Their claims of concern for the rights of women and children to not be objectified or sexualized are nothing but emotional blackmail.

I’m not going to defend No Mercy, because defending the indefensible is something conservatives do. I haven’t played the game. I have no interest in doing so. Having read about it and watched a preview trailer, it looks to be as amateurish a title as it is vile. However, I am not convinced that this is worse than the rape scenes in Ayn Rand’s novels, the depictions of incest in the Old Testament, or the film adaptations of E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Gray novels. I, and most likely the vast majority of people who play video games, might never have learned of No Mercy if not for pressure groups like Collective Shout searching for something to campaign against and stirring a tempest in their toilet.

Why couldn’t Collective Shout leave well enough alone? If I didn’t know better, and were in fact prone to paranoia, I would suspect that Collective Shout founder Melinda Tankard Reist was involved in the creation of No Mercy. I am also tempted to suspect that Collective Shout themselves are behind the harassment campaign allegedly directed against them, because social media activity isn’t that hard to fake and screenshots don’t prove anything. A dozen people armed with a few thousand sockpuppet accounts, ChatGPT subscriptions, and the belief that the end justifies the means could easily create the appearance of a misogynistic harassment campaign in response to Collective Shout’s recent successes.

After all, we’re supposed to believe women. But to me that means only that if a woman trusts me enough to tell me that she doesn’t feel safe around another man, then I should not dismiss her concerns out of hand no matter how well I think I know the man in question. It does not mean that I should accept an activist’s claims at face value. Besides, the women I do believe don’t seem to think much of Collective Shout, their methods, or their agenda.

From what I’ve read so far, Melinda Tankard Reist never got past second-wave feminism, particularly the sort espoused by the likes of Andrea Dworkin or Catherine A. MacKinnon. She seems to think that pornography is always and inherently harmful to women and exploitative of women. She thinks that pornography is addictive, even though all current evidence suggests that porn addiction is a culture-bound syndrome that only affects the devoutly religious, who pray for forgiveness every time they have an unplanned erection. She likewise and categorically condemns sex work, which is legal in several Australian states, even if women freely choose to do it.

She claims to be a “pro-life feminist”, but I don’t buy it. What kind of feminist wants to force other women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term? Does feminism mean something different down under? I don’t think so, but Reist is not the only feminist whose interpretation permits no room for sex workers or transgender folk. Nor does she consider the possibility that many of the games depicting themes she considers harmful were created by women who have survived abuse as a way for them to deal with their experiences.

Why should she? She has already decided, with the help of her friends and supporters, that she is right and anybody who disagrees with her is “porn sick” and “brain rotted.” I know people like Reist and her fellow right-wing authoritarians of old. They’re pushing the same moral panic that former Senator Joe Lieberman and disbarred attorney Jack Thompson did.

Nor are they doing anything particularly new. Carrie Nation would have praised them. They would have gotten along nicely with Phyllis Schafly. They would have agreed entirely with the PMRC, though I doubt they would have been content to see the albums teenagers should use to annoy their parents conveniently marked with Parental Advisory — Explicit Fucking Lyrics decals.

They aren’t content to refuse to buy art they find objectionable, or to refuse to associate with men who purchase such art. It is not enough for them to live by their own moral code; they would impose it on others. Back in the day this would have meant legislation like the (long overdue for repeal) Comstock Act of 1873. But in the boring cyberpunk dystopia we inhabit today, where sufficiently large corporations rival nation-states in power, that means pressuring CEOs and major stockholders who acknowledge no principle but profit über alles. It’s much easier to threaten a corporation’s revenues and reputation than to make one’s case in open and democratic debate, after all. Nevertheless, corporations should never be permitted to create public policy; that way lies tyranny.

Therefore, I refuse to believe any rhetoric on the part of Collective Shout claiming that they want to protect women and children. They care no more for women and children than book banners like Moms for Liberty do for liberty or children. People like them and allied organizations like Exodus Cry and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly called “Morality in Media” and “Operation Yorkville”) always claim concern for the welfare of women and children as justification for their actions, but they are after one thing: control. They want to set themselves above others as arbiters of “acceptable” art, and no doubt consider any sort of art that offends them “degenerate”. If they cannot persuade elected officials to accede to their demands, they go after publishers and distributors. If publishers and distributors refuse to entertain their demands, they go after payment processors.

By their fruits shall you know them, it is written in Scripture, and the fruit of Collective Shout is censorship. It is authoritarianism. It is misogyny, because they would exclude any woman who does not conform to their definition of womanhood. It is also misandrist, because they are convinced that men cannot control themselves or find healthy, ethical ways to indulge their sexuality and thus believe they are qualified and entitled to control men. Above all, Collective Shout’s ideology is one that enables mass murder or outright genocide via erasure: they want to erase queer and transgender people — whose existence and identity they find objectionable — from art because doing so is a fundamental first step toward what these people really want. We have seen where the moral crusades of activists like Collective Shout lead; they lead to Auschwitz.

If the members of Collective Shout were content to play the wowser in their own country, and work to get material they dislike banned in Australia, I would be happy to ignore them — just as I was content to ignore the existence of No Mercy. I am not an Australian citizen, so what Canberra does usually isn’t my problem. But they weren’t content to tend their own garden (as if the morals of their fellow Aussies was their garden to tend). No, they took it upon themselves to reach beyond Australia. Who elected them, anyway? Could any of them get elected to any public office without backing from a conservative billionaire who regards them as useful idiots?

Likewise, who elected the likes of Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal to act as moral arbiters? They should have no legal authority to refuse purchases to adults. If we accept the premise that money is speech, then refusing to process certain transactions is indeed an abridgement of freedom of expression. If people like Collective Shout are going after adult materials or even materials that merely depict LGBT people, it is because they want to set a precedent. They have already done so. They should not be permitted to set any further precedents.

However, I do not want to rape or kill these women. I am not in the business of making martyrs out of morons. Nor do I feel obligated to provide emotional validation to right-wing authoritarians. Just as one cannot be a conservative without believing that double standards are necessary and proper, it is never enough for a conservative or a monotheist to know that others share their opinions and beliefs; they have a pathological need to be hated by those they disagree with, and thus interpret even the most clear-headed and principled opposition as persecution.

Therefore, I would prefer instead to see them exposed as the religiously-motivated right-wing authoritarians they appear to be. I want to know who’s funding them, so that they can be publicly shamed for financing authoritarianism. I would then like to see Collective Shout shut down by the Australian government for not being what they claim to be — an independent registered charity with no affiliation to religious or political institutions — after being sued into the ground. Incidentally, if you are an Australian citizen and have evidence of misconduct on the part of Collective Shout, you should file a complaint with the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission.

What I want most is to see organizations like Collective Shout and Moms for Liberty made irrelevant. Let them speak freely, without reprisal, as long as their opinions are ignored and their demands summarily dismissed by those they would command because they fail utterly at persuasion. It is greater tolerance than they would offer others.

Speaking of censorship, why did Vice censor journalist and Tumblr Porn author Ana Valens by taking down her articles about Collective Shout? Do they not realize that the internet rarely forgets, and never forgives?

• This Group Takes Responsibility for Steam’s Payment Processor Censorship Policies — They Just Implied ‘Pervert Nerds’ Cause Society’s Problems
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