"Sporting woman, is she...?"







Quoting form an article in the Metro (2/24/09)

“Rapelay,” a Japanese video game, was recently pulled from Web sites such as Amazon and eBay, but anti-violence advocates are shocked it’s still available for download elsewhere.

As described on mobygames.com, “Rapelay” players take the role of a pervert who, after an arrest for molestation, sexually assaults the young woman he first attacked, along with her mother and younger sister.

“This is not what you want in the world if you want to end sexual violence,” said Harriet Lessel, executive director of New York Alliance Against Sexual Assault. “Does it talk about the seriousness of rape and how it destroys people’s lives?”

Yesterday, she and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn urged video game distributors to pull the game.

Illusion, the Yokohama-based software company that released “Rapelay” in 2006, states on its Web site that the product isn’t available for sale outside Japan.






It was hard to know where to start. It seems the company feels that a game available to (presumably) adolescent Japanese boys is less offensive than a game available internationally, as though that's an excuse (I wonder if there's an argument being prepared that it's culturally acceptable to portray rape as fun in Japan...). Anyway, two simple questions seems to me to clarify why this game isn't harmless fun-or even a good bad-taste joke to be sniggered at when the girls have gone to bed.

1> Why don't they make the game so that the protagonist is raping / sodomizing men?
2> Why wouldn't that game be marketable to its target demographic? What thrill would that game lack that rapelay contains?

Even the title "rapeplay". FFS.

I am ever amazed and appalled in equal measure.