Before I discuss that, I wanted to mention an ignorant video game bashing (and male-bashing) article from the Times-Herald of Dubuque, Iowa, which I found via GiantBomb. I am posting the article in its entirety due to the fact that online newspaper articles, especially those from papers with relatively low circulation, have a tendency to link rot.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Change 'culture of violence'
Teach boys that abusing women and degrading others will not be tolerated.
BY TIM MOOTHART
You and I began life as a being without a propensity to harm others. All of us, yes even the mass murderer on death row, began life as a child who would never think of harming another human being.
However:
* Some 18 percent of women in the United States have been victims of a completed or attempted rape.
* Riverview Center in Dubuque served 1,100 children and adults this year related to violence.
Who is performing this violence?
* Some 64 percent of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date.
* Typical perpetrators are not aliens or misfits. They are your neighbors, your relatives, your co-workers.
What happened?
Jackson Katz, noted expert on gender violence, says, "Most men who assault women are not so much disturbed as disturbingly normal ... they are influenced by broad cultural beliefs about manhood that shape their psyches and identities. And ours. They not only learn to be violent, they learn that violence is manly."
Yes, all of us together have created a "culture of violence" and live with its logical outcome, a society racked with pain and suffering inflicted upon each other by acts of violence. Violence is a learned behavior and all of us have been its teachers.
What can we do?
Like any skill or learned trait, we can learn to approach gender violence from a different perspective. We can all be teachers of a new approach.
First, it requires all of us to believe that WE have the responsibility to change our culture. It's not just the perpetrators or "them" that have to change, it's all of us.
Next, reject the idea that violence is inevitable and that some men abuse women. Hold yourself to a higher standard. Boys learn how to be men from observing other men. In Dubuque, let's make sure they observe that degrading women and abusing others is not part of manhood and will not be tolerated.
Take a look inside yourself. Men, do you believe that men should be in control in a relationship? Do you act as if males are "the stronger gender"? Do you treat and talk about others as if they were objects rather than fellow humans?
Show our children how to respect others even when you disagree with them or they have hurt you in some way.
Take advantage of those teachable moments. Let's say your 12-year-old boy asks you to buy him the wildly popular video game "Grand Theft Auto." Tell him, "I don't want GTA in my house because it is disrespectful to women. It teaches boys to think that violence against women is just a big joke. As a man, I will not spend my money on this and I don't want it in my house."
Join us as we work to change the culture of our community and our attitude toward gender violence. Help us educate all community members on its negative impact and what ALL of us can do to prevent it by the way we live.
Together we can learn to eliminate gender and domestic violence! What are you teaching?
The article reeks of the chivalrous male-bashing common among conservative nice guy manginas. He writes about how we need to teach boys to respect women and girls, etc., etc. Of course, no mention is made of teaching girls to respect boys and men. I am used to reading that kind of drivel so to me that was not the dumbest part. This was:
Take advantage of those teachable moments. Let's say your 12-year-old boy asks you to buy him the wildly popular video game "Grand Theft Auto." Tell him, "I don't want GTA in my house because it is disrespectful to women. It teaches boys to think that violence against women is just a big joke. As a man, I will not spend my money on this and I don't want it in my house."
It's obvious that this man has never played or even researched much about the GTA series. He's just a lemming who read an article in the newspaper or saw a report on Fox News telling about how players in GTA can commit violence against women.
The truth is, GTA has less violence against women than most modern games. True, you can have sex with prostitutes, then kill them and take the money, but this is not part of the main storyline. Pretty much all of the enemies you fight and kill in GTA, including both police and criminals are male (which is odd considering women make up like 20% of most big city police departments), unlike in many games where there are many female enemies. So I wonder why Tim Moothart didn't say that GTA disrespected men?
Via Feministing, I found a story from CNN regarding a video game called RapeLay. First off, RapeLay has been out for four years and RapeLay has been known among gamers and the Internet subculture for a few years. It is pathetic that CNN is only catching on now. The Old Media is utterly useless when it comes to Internet-related news.
Anyways, the whole point of RapeLay is to rape women. It seems sick, right? But when you think about it, there are a lot of sicker games out there. In first-person shooters you slaughter hundreds of people, including unarmed civilians in some cases, to complete the game. In games where there is some sort of morality system present, such as alignment in Dungeons and Dragons-based games and the Renegade/Paragon system of Mass Effect, the player can do horrible things to people. In Mass Effect 2, you can beat information out of a prisoner (there's actually a few parts of the game that involve beating information out of people) and execute unarmed civilians and surrendered enemies if you go for the Renegade path. In Bioshock, you can kill little girls if you play as an evil character. True, you aren't required to do evil acts like you are in RapeLay, but the potential is still there and a lot of players do so.
Predictably feminists are outraged over it. I agree that stores should probably not be selling it, but their public outrage is only going to cause it to spread even further. It is something known as the Streisand effect - things that people try to censor on the Internet end up getting spread around more than they would have if they were just left alone. Indeed, CNN shockingly notes that the game went viral as a result of the feminists' protests and people can download it through tubes of the Internets. Who would've thought?
Of course, a bunch of feminist activists and Old Media reporters - or do I repeat myself? - wouldn't know anything about the Streisand effect or Internet culture in general. Which is probably a good thing. If they dug deeper into Internet culture, they would undoubtedly be horrified by what they would find, and we would get even more articles like this.
Predictably, feminists have a solution and it involves government regulation. For the article, CNN "interviewed" Taina Bien-Aime from Equality Now, one of the people who helped get the game removed from the shelves last year. Bien-Aime wants Japan "to ban all games that promote and simulate sexual violence, sexual torture, stalking and rape against women and girls." The fact is, as distasteful as games like RapeLay are, they do not hurt anyone. 0s and 1s are being "raped," not real women. Also, if governments can ban RapeLay, they will probably try to ban violent games and games with politically incorrect content later on. Yes, that involves a slippery slope, but when discussing government regulations the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it is generally a legitimate concern.
Perhaps Taina Bien-Aime and her Equality Now should put more effort into fighting real, tangible oppression towards women, instead of calling for governments to censor video games they don't like in First World countries where women are very well off.
Good points about the other games.
ReplyDeleteBut you also must concede that RapeLay is pretty sick. I guess the other games are pretty sick too. Though I think the difference is rape is more intimate than killing some faceless enemies and it's a longer act as well.
"But you also must concede that RapeLay is pretty sick. I guess the other games are pretty sick too."
ReplyDeleteDepending on how people play them, they can be sick. Killing all the Little Sisters in Bioshock is sick, but saving them, of course, is not.
What kind of game store would have this game on their shelves anyway? Kids go to game stores, often with their parents. I have to imagine that this was only being sold in porno shops.
ReplyDeleteOf course, now that I've heard about this game I have to download it. Or at least read more about it.
This article is based on the stupid lie that Women are well off in First World Countries.
ReplyDeleteActually, Women in America are far more likely to be Raped, far more likely to be sexually exploited, than Women in the Non-First World Countries of the Islamic World.
There's a lot more to whether Women are being treated well than how much money they have for buying goddamned shoes.
Also TAS doesn't seem to understand the fundamental difference between a Video Game where you shoot at Women who are shooting at you, and a Video Game where you seek out defenseless Women to brutally harm in the most sadistic manner imaginable.
To shoot at a Female Police Officer who’s trying to use her Gun to apprehend you is FAR less wrong than the sexualized killing of unarmed Women that is typical of that disgusting and evil Grand Theft Auto game.
"He writes about how we need to teach boys to respect women and girls, etc., etc. Of course, no mention is made of teaching girls to respect boys and men."
ReplyDeleteMaybe they would've put that in the article if there was a Video Game where Women Castrate defenseless Men.
But guess what!
There isn’t any such game, and this illustrates the simple truth that Men are a greater danger to Women than Women are to Men.
Why are men constantly marketed with negative pleasure like this? Maybe there should be a game where men are castrated then to show consequences.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is simple here, learn to respect all creatures, and before creating something give it good intention.
A pretty good article. And they forget the section of people for whom such a game is absolutely hilarious and absurd.
ReplyDelete