Seriously, these guys need to get a life.

Cacophony of Flesh

The streaming platform Twitch has done an about-face just two days after changing its policies to allow "artistic nudity."

In an update posted to the company blog on Friday, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy admitted that allowing some forms of simulated or suggested nudity, including angles of topless people with breasts cut off just before their nipples are shown, was a bad idea.

The entire debacle began earlier in December, when, as Kotaku reports, a bunch of men on the platform got really, really mad that streamer and OnlyFans model Morgpie was depicted seemingly topless from the collarbone up, with the top of her breasts showing. The user in question was banned — though as she clarified in a tweet thread, that happened due to "off-screen [breast] clapping," not because she actually appeared in the nude.

Curiously, Morgpie claimed in a taped interview with the streaming blog Dexerto that during the offending streams in question, she was actually wearing a flesh-colored tube top and jeans below where the camera cut off.

Survive and Thrive

After the Morgpie scandal — which again, occurred because male gamers were mad that women were stripping down of their own accord — Twitch updated its sexual content policy to include "fictionalized nudity" like the so-called "topless meta" where streamers would pose topless with the camera cutting off just so, suggesting nudity without explicitly showing everything. That decision was made, as Clancy wrote in his post reversing the policy, to "allow the thriving artist community on Twitch to utilize the human form in their art."

According to the CEO, the policy change came with somewhat of an uptick in sexual content policy violations, but more so because of "community concerns" regarding the content that had sprung up under the new guidelines. We can't say for sure, but that sounds a lot like kowtowing to angry misogynists.

"Upon reflection, we have decided that we went too far with this change," Clancy wrote. "Digital depictions of nudity present a unique challenge — AI can be used to create realistic images, and it can be hard to distinguish between digital art and photography."

While it's impossible to say what the Twitch C-suite knows that we don't, it seems like this is yet another instance of angry internet men successfully policing women's bodies — and it's all the more pathetic that the sexual expression they were so up in arms about was far less explicit than what one might see on an HBO show.

More on misogyny: Tech CEO Accused of "Enslaving" Assistant


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