Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.

This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.

Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.

And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.

This really isn't unique to America.

Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.

In the "western" world it is.