The outrage bell is tolling this week over Ass Hunters, a game in which you play a safari hunter who shoots homosexuals with a shotgun, trying to avoid getting molested by them should you fail to shoot enough of the sexually insatiable naked gay jungle rapists. The game is as hilariously silly as it sounds.
Remaining lives are measured in unmolested bottoms. You ascend by dodging gay rape. The animations are preposterous. The ravenous queers are shown with rear ends to rival Kim Kardashian’s. But there’s no explicit content in the game; nothing to earn it a certificate. It’s just surreal, very European humour.
But the moral police on both sides of the political fence are up in arms. The Daily Mail hates it for obvious reasons–that it’s a video game, that it’s a million different kinds of degeneracy rolled into one… you can fill in the blanks here yourself.
And so does the left, of course, which is screaming blue bloody murder about the supposed homophobic incitements to violence and hatred. Indeed, the Lesbian & Gay Foundation said precisely that, calling the game: “A despicable form of homophobia which is nothing short of incitement of violence towards gay and bisexual men.”
That’s why Google was yesterday forced to remove a mobile version of the game, which has been floating around on the web for years, from its Play Store. All of which leaves me a bit mystified as to what possible harm this ridiculously daft, cartoonish nonsense could possibly to do society. How depressing that Google, which used to be proud about the integrity of its search results, is caving to pressure from scolds.
Two things strike me about this co-ordinated attack from the twin towers of the establishment. The first is how little the left-right distinction matters these days: whatever their reasoning, both camps want to ban the game because their natural instinct is toward prudishness and censorship.
This confirms my hunch that there’s a seismic shift happening in politics. In a few years, voters won’t be primarily marked out by whether they believe in low or high taxes, or liberal views about sex. The front opening up in the political and culture wars today is between libertarians and those who seek, whatever their reasoning, to oppress, control and proscribe.
The second is how, in their anxiety to express offence and to moralise, both camps have completely missed the joke. You see, Ass Hunters isn’t a homophobic game. Nor will it encourage people to be violent to gay people in real life. In fact, the research says that playing violent video games–and this hardly even qualifies as one–actually makes gamers more humane in real life.
It’s actually a very funny satire, in the tradition of the American road trip and teen movie, on the conceited anxieties of the sort of straight man who thinks that just because another man is into boys that he automatically wants to bang him. A clownish update of the old, “Bums against the wall, lads!”
The joke isn’t on gays, who are depicted, comically absurdly given how boring and sexless the modern gay establishment is becoming, as furious anal rapists. It’s on the sort of bloke who feels nervous around homosexuals for no good reason.
What makes the furore over Ass Hunters even funnier is that it was originally popularised by the b3ta messaging board, the founder of which now heads up the Mirror’s UsVsTh3m viral blog, which has morphed into a hectoring far-Left outlet for the most depressingly right-on opinions.
Ass Hunters is the sort of thing–like Julien Blanc’s dating seminars for men–that UsVsTh3m loathes. I’m sure they’ll be coming out with a furious denunciation of it soon. I don’t visit that site because I value my brain cells, so I can’t tell you if they’ve already rushed one out. But just a short time ago its own editor would have, and indeed did, recognise this game for what it was: a harmless bit of fun. .
I’m gay. I enjoy playing Ass Hunters. Why do people on both sides of the political spectrum want to stop me?
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