CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. – Normally, when a charitable organization turns down a contribution from someone in the adult industry, the reason for the rebuff is manifest in the facts: The charity group would prefer not to be publicly associated with the porn industry.
Therefore, when the charity AbleGamers turned down a donation from adult performer Mercedes Carrera, most expected the reason would be the usual: The organization doesn’t want its good name sullied by association with porn.
As it turns out, the rationale is far more complicated, and far stranger, than a reticence to accept charity from porn people.
According to the Game Politics blog, the issue is a lack of transparency – not transparency related to the identity or occupation of the donor, but over her video game politics, for lack of a better way to put it.
The issue appears to be Carrera did not disclose to AbleGamers the fact she’s “pro-#GamerGate.”
The prevailing reaction among the group of people older than 16 has been “WTF is GamerGate?”
As related on Wikipedia and the articles linked to therefrom, #GamerGate is a controversy revolving around video gaming, journalism, video game reviews, ethics, allegations of romantic relationships between a developer and a game reviewer and a whole lot of other stuff the world at large doesn’t care about, but which is apparently a very big deal within the “gaming community.”
(Side note: Is it just me, or is it extremely irritating that fucking everything now has a “community” associated with it? Seems like nothing but touchy-feeliness gone mad to me…but I digress.)
Apparently, when people say Carrera is “pro-#GamerGate,” this means she is among those concerned about ethics in video game journalism, and possibly by extension, not so receptive to the idea the gaming community is misogynist, sexist and a hotbed of sexual harassment, and needs to change its culture, accordingly.
#GamerGate consistently i described as “leaderless” and without any formal organization, so it really can’t be described as a “movement.” It’s more like a magnet that attracts comment from earnest people and trolls alike. In other words, it’s just like any other Twitter hashtag.
Here’s the #GamerGate situation in a nutshell: A group dedicated to promoting gaming among people with disabilities as a means of improving their lives initially accepted, then rebuffed, the charitable contributions of a porn star, not because she’s a porn star, but because she failed to disclose her support of a so-called “movement,” which is really just a Twitter hashtag, and the disabled gamers group is concerned about the lack of transparency represented by her omission.
This weird news arguably is good news for the adult industry.
That a charity like AbleGamers would get as far as initially accepting charity from a porn star shows how far the adult industry has come in terms of public acceptance. It might also speak to a generational factor: Even young people who are anti-porn aren’t anti-porn in the aggressive, zealous fashion of Morality in Media or Focus on the Family.
Mercedes Carrera’s response to the situation should be noted, as well. Rather than stomp her feet and carry on about unfairness of one sort or another, Carrera handled herself fairly gracefully.
“Unfortunately, my outspoken support for GamerGate’s mission of ethics in journalism and resistance to censorship became problematic and conflated with the stream itself,” Carrera said in a statement provided to Destructoid.com. “It was an unfortunate miscommunication and was never intended to mislead anyone. It was an error on my part but never an attempt to leverage their organization for PR or any other purpose, and I’m sorry they felt they were being used.”
Even though it didn’t work out in the end, if the Mercedes Carrera-AbleGamers situation is representative of the future of the adult industry’s interactions with mainstream charities, the future is looking pretty good…. Weird yes, but good, nonetheless.
