If there’s one thing the hot tub meta of 2021 taught us, it’s that Twitch’s policies around nudity can be incredibly confusing for everyone involved, including Twitch itself. When your massive streaming platform has to issue a public statement assuring fans it’s not going to punish anyone for being sexy, you probably have to acknowledge that something has gone wrong somewhere.
But maybe things are about to get more relaxed, because in the wake of a series of viral and slightly risqué streams, Twitch has released a set of new sexual content guidelines that are a bit more forgiving and a little less puritan, with new carve-outs for previously prohibited content and allowances for “artistic depictions of nudity.”
In an FAQ posted to the Twitch blog, the platform announced that some types of content that was previously verboten on the service would now be allowed if it had the correct labels attached. That includes “Content that ‘deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region,’ even when fully clothed,” as well as drawn, animated, or sculpted “fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender.”
To be clear, I’m fairly certain Twitch means female-presenting breasts plus genitals or buttocks of any gender there, and is not trying to invent the new and scary concept of female-presenting buttocks. Maybe this new system isn’t that much simpler after all.
Anyway, the FAQ has a few more naked changes in store. Twitch will now also allow for “body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or buttocks regardless of gender,” which it says is a rule more in line with its already existing Twitch Attire Policy. Also, you can now perform “erotic dances that involve disrobing or disrobing gestures, such as strip teases,” if you slap the appropriate label on your stream. Meanwhile, popular dances like “twerking, grinding, and pole dancing,” will be allowed without a label from now on.
You still can’t stream pornographic games though, although things like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3—where nudity isn’t the focus unless you’re a very specific kind of player—are still okay.
The new changes come after a number of streamers participated in a “topless meta” over the last couple of weeks, streaming themselves from deceptive camera angles that made it look as though they were, well, topless. Twitch, as you might expect, swiftly handed out bans to the offending streamers, but has now come out with these new policies to clarify and relax its rules around nudity.
Which is probably for the best, given we as a people could probably stand to be a bit more normal about nudity, but I doubt it’ll help much. Although these policies are more forgiving than Twitch’s old rules, they’re still attempting to square the circle of establishing a kind of nudity that is straight-up pornographic (and thus forbidden), versus nudity that is somehow more tasteful, more artistic, and that won’t scare off Twitch’s advertisers. I think that’s doomed to be a fuzzy distinction forever, and one that plenty of streamers will end up violating either by accident or on purpose for as long as Twitch is around.
