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

Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.

People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.

No, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, stop treating it as such, stop saying here in Europe or European here. You'd get annoyed if a yank generalised all of europe with a not take so don't do it yourself. State what country/countries you're talking about because social attitudes and norms vary massively across this continent!

Like for instance the outrage if you have a sign on your lawn stating that x president is a rapist to the economy, people will say that children should not be "exposed" to such words.

We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]

” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

And yet, you can take an averaged vector of all US states and all European countries and meaningfully compare those. Or extract some things that are common through all Europe as compared through all US.

I had a privilege of living for some time in Italy, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland (I still live in Switzerland). They are all really different, and yet there is something common compared to the US.

They aren't targeting all sex games on Steam, they were targeting rape, incest, and child abuse.

Using religious leaders as power brokers is a clever strategy, they'll never budge due to the better argument or scientific reason, hence making it almost impossible for non-violent progressive movements to having an effect at the macro level.

Here in the UK religion and sex are not part of the national conversation. A politician mentioning their love of god would seem weird to us. The only way it enters the national conversation are when right-wing religious zealots, from the US, try to affect our laws: I'm thinking of abortion laws and trans rights. These are entirely imported issues from US religious hangups. It's quite tedious, because mostly we were on a path of reasonable discourse with relation to sex, sexuality, relationships (marriage), etc. but with the advent of social media you see pockets of society being dragged into it.

I have friends in much of Europe (Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Greece) and have travelled to those destinations extensively. I still can't speak for all of Europe, but I think when it comes to sex and religion we're kinda similar. The only one that stands out to me was the Greek Orthodox church used to have an out-sized role, but even that doesn't seem to be the case any more (I just came back from visiting friends in Greece a few weeks back and we discussed this).

So whilst we can't say all of Europe is the same, we can say that it's not causing global problems due to its sexual and religious hangups.

> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.

It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.

Log in to your account and toggle the “I want porn” option? It’s annoying, but not onerous.

> And I know for a fact that the UK has much stricter limits on kink and BDSM in adult content as well.

I know what you’re referring to, but don’t know the full details. I believe it’s around violent porn (rape, etc). We certainly have a “think of the children” brigade. I still think the discourse is significantly more civilised than that of the US, which feels like it’s approaching virtual civil war levels. When these subjects are debated, it's usually in parliament and doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.

I think some of the policies you mention are more artefacts of the politicians not understanding the technological future we’re in, rather than ideology. Many of them think they can make the internet a safe space for kids through policy. It’s naive, for sure, but usually not dogmatic.

> What gives with people claiming it's just the US?

It’s not just the US, but when the people standing outside of UK abortion clinics harassing women are funded by US ‘pro life’ religious groups then you know there’s a problem. Puritanism is a US export.

The vitriolic political divisions in the US, which leads to all sorts of fringe issues becoming mainstream (trans rights, for example), is leaking out into the rest of the western democracies, poisoning the debate everywhere.

The Visa issue is just one more of these puritanical US exports.

Yes, Europe is not a monolithic bloc, but there is a large fraction that is less sex focused, it's a fair generalization and comment to express that.

No, in the UK it was left-wing feminists who led the opposition to gender identity policies long before any conservatives got involved, on the basis of this being harmful to women's rights.

Just look at the recent For Women Scotland win in the Supreme Court, it's nothing to do with US religious groups at all, and everything to do with protecting sex-based rights and sexual orientation in law.

In 2014, Time magazine declared trans rights as "America's next civil rights frontier" [1]. For Women Scotland was formed in 2018 [2].

(Just looked at your comment history. Just, wow... is the trans issue the only one you care about?)

[1] https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/

[2] https://forwomen.scot/about/

So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?

> doesn't turn into some societal ideological divide.

When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one. Instead of everyone just handwaving and ignoring it...

Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.

Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.

> Even 120-130 years after the point

There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.

Feminist women opposed to the Tory government's plans to introduce "gender self-id" law and similar policy had already started organising by this point. Groups like Woman's Place UK and Fair Play For Women. This had nothing whatsoever to do with religious arguments from the US.

There's also significant liberal opposition to all this in the US, again not linked to religion but, like the UK, on the basis of women's rights.

> So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above?

It isn't law. But even if it was, that doesn't contradict what I am talking about. I'm talking about the export of puritanism. If you think having to turn the porn button from 'off' to 'on' in your phone contract's options is the same, then I don't know what to say.

> When governments try to introduce mass surveillance of personal communications to "protect the children" liek ChatControl maybe it should turn into one.

Yeah maybe, but that's not the topic of conversation here. The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world (like the Visa issue).

Look, you have the right to believe whatever you want, but making every single discussion you have on here about how much you hate trans people is not really something I want to get involved with. Good day.

I believe English puritans were also in Holland and France for a while.

I recommend you go look up the feminist groups I mentioned and educate yourself on what's actually been happening in the UK on this.

Here's an article to get you started: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/hundreds-women-gat...

Anyway I don't think that the English Puritans/etc. were somehow particularly exceptional (besides the fact that they emigrated to North America) compared to other similar groups in Europe.

Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing.

> The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world

Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more restrictive.

Germany also has a history of banning violent video games and its again much worse than the US e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/ki12if/steam_now_reg...

Post "Online Safety Act" UK is not that much better either.

US is very tame and less "puritanical" by your definition than those countries. The core difference being that the government can't really regulate it directly so credit card companies might be acting as some sort of a proxy.

Or are you implying that US somehow turned Germany and Australia more "puritanical" than itself and there would be no domestic support for censorship there otherwise?

https://www.collectiveshout.org/campaigns includes a number of campaigns against porn in general, so yes, they absolutely are targeting all sex games - simulated rape, incest, and child abuse are merely their first victory.

(To be clear, I'm not saying that there weren't existing cultures there before the US expanded out further west, but I imagine most people would agree that the US today isn't culturally as influenced by them as much as from the the colonies and pre-expansion US.)

Please explain.

"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany. "

I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.

I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.

> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.

Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.

To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.

But the divergence between US and Europe didn't happen until the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.

e.g. according to the census of 1851 ~40% of people in Britain were regularly attending religious services. No hard figures for the US from the time but from what I can find the proportion in the US was comparable. Except while mid 1800s was pretty much the peak in Britain in US it kept rising and reached its highest point in the 1950s while in UK religious participation had almost reached current levels by then.

IMHO the rise of political secularism, socialiam and the near societal collapse across much of Europe during and after WW1 and WW2 had a much bigger impact than whatever happened 400 years ago.

e.g. 20% of all 15 year old in the UK have at least one drink each week:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...

Despite the legal age being 18.

Also what does this have to do with anything? e.g. adult-only games are simply unavailable on Steam in Germany. It doesn't matter at all how old you are.

I don't have any experience living outside of the northeast (although not New England specifically since high school), but I definitely agree that there's certainly more religion in New England than might be obvious from the outside (more Catholic than the rest of the country, which also might explain some of the differences).