Cards Against Humanity Dragged Into Real-Life Rape Controversy

The party game “Cards Against Humanity” is about the most fun you can have with a group of friends and a box of cards, and the tabletop set is also unapologetically offensive and not shy about this fact — the name itself is a wordplay on “crimes against humanity,” and the tagline is “a party game for horrible people.”

Cards Against Humanity is also an independent success, both open source and not owned by a major company… it was started by a group of friends and became a sensation by word of mouth and through incidental traction.

Controversies involving Cards Against Humanity have thus been somewhat few and far between — after all, when a game has cards like “Auschwitz” and “—-ing off into a pool of children’s tears,” it’s pretty hard to pull its makers up for political incorrectness.

There have been small kerfuffles and cards removed over rape jokes, and one cissexist card about “passable transvestites” was also removed from the game in a show of support with the trans communities.

However, a newly spreading rape allegation involving one of the game’s creators is the first real controversy with which the popular Cards Against Humanity has had to contend — and fans are not quite sure how to feel about it.

The issue tipped at the point over the weekend, when creator Max Temkin addressed the whispers head-on in a post on his blog Maxistentialism. In the post, he lays out the facts of the rape claims directly, giving his side of the story — as well as a significant indication he both understands the issue at hand and its gravity, and that he does not wish to even legally address the claim for fear of discouraging rape victims from coming forward generally.

Temkin’s blog post was shared to the Cards Against Humanity subreddit, where it gained a bit of traction, and in the original post, he explains his side of the story in response to the allegations — of which he learned when someone he believed was making a joke called him a rapist:

“I had a really brief relationship with this girl in college; her dorm room was next to mine, and after a few evenings staying up talking all night, we made out. We spent a few nights in each others’ rooms, but we never had sex and neither of us pressured the other into doing anything we weren’t comfortable with. After a few nights, I broke things off in the cowardly way that 19-year-old guys do, and I just stopped returning her calls and texts. I can imagine she was hurt by this, I know that I would be hurt if someone broke up with me that way.”

His accuser responded, rebutting:

“… it took eight years for me to heal enough in order to tell my story. It took eight years for me to be more angry at my attacker than I was with myself for ‘putting myself’ in the situation where I could be attacked by a relative stranger. It took eight years for me to stand up for the scared homesick kid that I was.”

By all accounts, and to even all involved, the Cards Against Humanity rape allegation issue is at an impasse — both parties have declined to further pursue the matter by their own admission, and as such, it leaves users in a strange position to decide how to proceed.

The woman, who has identified herself as Magz, has called for a Cards Against Humanity boycott over the rape claim. Do you think the game should suffer because of this allegation?