Subterranean Hashtag Blues

Intel has resumed advertising on Gamasutra, bringing an end to the first and only time most people who aren't involved with videogames at an academic or professional level have given a shit about Gamasutra, advertising, or Intel. Within minutes of the announcement, cognitive dissonance--which was one of the Weekly Words not long before--set in, and an entirely plausible theory has been developed that Intel is not actually paying for ad space on Gamasutra anymore, since apparently it is common for ad-funded websites to post advertising for free.

Once again, people are happily declaring #GamberGoat dead. It's not entirely inaccurate; the mainstream coverage of #GillyGoop, for all the centrist bias our media demands, has been uniformly negative. The lone exception, Breitbart, is named for a man whose name is literally synonymous with politically motivated libel. There have been no victories to speak of, so anyone "joining" #GlimmerGong now--in the sense of taking up their iconography and collective identity--is essentially volunteering for ridicule and contempt. Mostly ridicule.

But this doesn't mean they're actually going away. They're the LaRouche Democrats of gaming: occasionally amusing, varying degrees of racist, and prone to fits of whimsy in their attempts at graphic design. They'll be around, putting Hitler mustaches on Anita Sarkeesian for the foreseeable future. Their ability to recruit has been severely compromised, but the dead-enders really do have nothing better to do. To say nothing of the neo-nazis, rape apologists, and actual honest-to-god terrorists that made up #GappaGoob before it had a name; they'll scatter when someone gets arrested, but they'll be back in some form or another. They've never not been here.

What people aren't talking about anymore is changing the hashtag. The argument for the change was that it would enable the conversation to focus on its stated purpose--ethics in games journalism--without legitimizing or tolerating its toxic origins. The argument against the change was that it would rob the group of momentum, which they needed for whatever the hell they were doing.

As with most things #GrizzleGoom, it's hard to tell whether this is ignorance or dishonesty, especially since the two can crossbreed in interesting ways where issues of identity politics are involved. The actual reason there can be no new hashtag, no separation from the hate campaign, is that the "legitimate" face of the movement is wholly dependent on the hate campaign. It's not just that the latter created the former; the former is built on a foundation laid down by the latter.

Back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, it wasn't all doxxing and death threats and stalking and slut-shaming. It was a crowdsourced disinformation campaign, and the "legitimate" movement is predicated on uncritically accepting those lies. The scandal for which #GombaGum was named--and it's frankly bizarre that so many people seem to think they can just gloss over this part--simply never happened. It's bullshit, it's obvious bullshit, and the press said as much once they'd realized it wasn't going to blow over and they had to address it. The accusations of censorship began with several websites deciding they didn't want to provide a platform for an obviously unstable individual's transparent attempts to ruin a woman's life, and continued with other websites' decisions not to publish the ensuing cover story for the entirely unfair reason that it was obviously, demonstrably untrue. The specific journalistic question raised by #GlammaGrrl concerned whether or not gaming websites were obligated to publish slander based on hearsay. (They are not.)

But it's not about that anymore, right? The ensuing accusations followed the same pattern: unadulterated horseshit, easily disproven, and widely distributed. #GanderGibb's rhetorical strategy has been to tell so many lies that people will uncritically accept at least a few of them. Jenn Frank's malfeasance? Lies. The attacks on TFYC? Lies. "Gamers are dead?" Well...

I'm not sure quite how to characterize this argument. Leaving aside the claim that a dozen articles on the same subject constitutes a conspiracy--see also the thousands of news sites who all started talking about the 2014 election results at the same time--and leaving aside that only one of those actually contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and it wasn't the famous one, you'd still have to laughably misread them to come up with anything like the preposterous, genocidal screeds #GuppyGatt claim to have been offended by. You'd have to not know that "gamer" has been a contentious term for years specifically because it denotes a large, varied, fun-loving audience but connotes a hostile, exclusionary hive of anxious masculinity. You'd have to ignore that Leigh Alexander spent much of the iconic "gamers are dead" post lamenting how embarrassing this shit is, and how the assorted anti-feminists and crypto-fascists who kicked off this "consumer revolt" are representative of a wider problem of arrested development and toxic masculinity, a pissed-off, chronically insecure clique who don't realize that Chuck Palahniuk is making fun of them. You'd have to imagine that it contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and read it as...I don't even fucking know.

Reading it literally would seem to be out of the question, because being dead is not, traditionally, a morally loaded thing. Short of a relapse of Cotard delusion, it's hard to imagine how this could be applied literally, yet the gators assert their physical alive-ness with seemingly no awareness of how ridiculous they sound. Some people seem to have read it as a threat, an interpretation it's difficult to believe is being offered in good faith. But the weirdest part isn't so explicit. The canonical #GabbaGone response to discussion of cultural conflicts within gaming culture was to act as if they were being attacked from outside, from people with contempt for a rather important part of this particular techno-cultural moment. You'd have to believe that the people who've devoted their lives to videogames--building them, experiencing them, taking them apart, putting them back together, and sharing their experiences with the world--hate the technology and culture they've helped build. You'd have to believe that Alexander, who commemorated a successful no-kill run in Metal Gear Solid 3 by permanently inscribing the Pigeon icon onto her goddamn body, hates videogames and wished everyone would just give up and get really into puppet theater or something.

You'd have to believe a lot of really stupid shit. And so they do. So do lots of people; sooner or later, I'll run into the LaRouche Democrats in Harvard Square again. Sooner or later, there'll be another manufactured scandal. Sooner or later, we'll have to do all this bullshit again.

But the conventional wisdom on this particular outburst has been set down, and it's not changing. They lost. They'll probably lose next time, too.

Screengrab courtesy of @SJWIlluminati

Gamers are alive.

Kill the gamers.

New Moon

It's been a month, and I should probably update this thing.

My mind has been everywhere except games this for the last couple of months. When it did manage to wander there, it usually took a nap while I did the contemplative, one-thing-at-a-time thing, which lends itself quite poorly to writing. It's been a poor month for narration. A good one for long car trips and bonfires and sleeping on strange new couches, but crap for this word-after-a-word thing I try to do here.

There's been other writing, here and there. Back in June, I wrote a piece about the Santa Barbara shooting, out of a vague, anxious sense that I should do something to help. People waited in line to give blood after 9/11; I guess everyone finds their own way to feel useful. Personally, I dealt with 9/11 by taking a weird, serious detour in what was supposed to be a lighthearted short story about the apocalypse. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes writing can't get in the way enough.

A new follower on the Twitter had a question about DBT, having seen it referenced in the most recent post, and it reminded me that I really need to set up a best-of page or something, so people don't wander in to be greeted by dense, sporadically emotive Community recaps. In the meantime, in an effort to keep myself honest, some things in the pipe:

• More Community, obvi. I've apparently had the notes for Social Psychology sitting ready for cooking for an entire month now.
• Something substantive about my experiences with DBT. Currently trying to figure out if it might be two articles fighting for independence.
• Semiotics and UI in turn-based strategy games, because gaming is Serious Business.
• I dunno, something about guns, probably.
• More posts explaining how and why I haven't been writing.

Undisciplined Platinum members will have access to the various works in progress that make up my textual life, of course, but the rest of you will have to wait in line like everyone else. In the meantime, July is over, and you, like me, survived another month. Sit with that thought for a moment, taste the air in your nose and throat, note the tension and creeping pain in your fingers and wrists, and selah.

You're alive. Do something fun.

Memento Morghulis

Hey, kids. How're yez? Been workin' on some stuff.

Convergence of Masculinities in Gamer Culture

Masculinity Without Men: The Sontarans and Relational Gender in Doctor Who

Going through the backlog, might get some more stuff up soon. Need to set up a general purpose "bunch of shit I wrote" page.

In the meantime, zombie zoo, zombie zoo, who let them zombies out of the zombie zoo?

Moby-Dick for Girls*

At the end of 2012, I resolved to update this place more regularly, even if I didn't particularly feel like I had anything to say. I suppose it worked out fairly well. They're not all winners, but I wrote something in the neighborhood of 20,000 words here, and up until November, they're not too far between.

So, here's what I did in the intervening days, weeks, and months:

• Read Jenn Frank's Allow Natural Death, and was inspired to give up on writing. Stewing on that for a few days, and realizing that I seem to have no other skills, I amended that inspiration toward writing with a bit more blood and fire.
• Visited family in California and friends in Florida, during which I did much thinking and no writing. There's stories to tell there, but I'm not sure they're blog-appropriate. Not this blog, anyway, and Undisciplined After Dark isn't ready for launch yet.
• Finished a short story I began in 2008, as an experimental treatment for writer's block. It sucks, but it's over, and it feels refreshing to not have it in my mental cache. I can only have one Big Writing Project in my head at a time, it seems, and that was a strange one. At least Amber Benson understands me.
• Wrote a short piece about depression, unemployment, and Far Cry 3. I'm pretty happy with it, which is why I didn't bother to post it here. I have no idea what the fuck I'm going to do with it.
• I have lined up another exciting blogging opportunity, via the aforementioned associate from undergrad. I'll keep you all abreast, assuming I can come up with something interesting to say about masculinity between now and mid-March.
• Bravely Default. Jesus, this fuckin' game. Gameological's Samantha Nelson explicates what happens when Final Fantasy fucks a Facebook game. Also, if you're playing, I need your friend code. (3050-8545-2096)
• Fighting the weather. The snow isn't too bad if you stay on top of the shoveling. It's the frost giants that're the real problem.
• Just now, checking to make sure I hadn't already used that joke in an earlier post.

And that's where we are now. The future shows up earlier and earlier each year.

*Since nobody seemed to get it for Albert, Somme, five American dollars for anyone who gets that reference.**

**Dollars may be metaphorical.

Three Things That Suck About Being a Feminist Dude

(Hey, kids. I wrote this a while back, planning to send it to one of those fancy modern websites. It didn't really fit their thing, and rather than trying to recut it for the vague promise of publication somewhere else, I figured I'd put it up here. Mostly as a chance to play with format a bit.)

If you’re a first-worlder in the 21st century, feminism is kind of a no-brainer. It’s not really up to you; over the last couple hundred years, a number of radical, heretical claims have become well-accepted enough that people now think of them as natural, intutitive, and self-evident. Still, the word raises a few hackles, here and there. Those who choose to use it anyway tend to either develop some apologetic patter about not being “that kind of feminist,” to pre-empt the accompanying stereotypes that inevitably follow, or lean into it, accepting that it’s worth dealing with a little extra hostility. We've all heard 'em; feminists are ugly, humorless, sexless, or (in rare cases) Joss Whedon. For guys, the territory is more confusing, the stakes lower, the stereotypes still being focus-grouped. Nonetheless, like a piece of debris stuck in the gonads of an oyster, it can be pretty irritating. Case in point:

1) “You’re just trying to get laid.”

This is both the most common and the most emphatic critique: the argument from insincerity: you’re hoping to ingratiate yourself to women, therefore you don’t really believe what you’re saying, therefore it isn’t worth believing. If it’s true that your primary or exclusive motivation in learning and doing more in the service of social justice is the possibility that it’ll help you get your dick wet, I have some bad news for you. While it’s not going to hurt, it’s very unlikely that your showing up to a meeting will make the difference between not-fuck and fuck. The most potent criticism to be offered of such a plan is that it’s the sexual equivalent of countering Scorpion's spear with a Kano ball.

Niccolo Machiavelli popularized the rhetorical device of “critique, segue, Mortal Kombat reference” in The Prince.

And yet, they seem to take issue with the goal, and not the tactics: “You should just admit it,” says the message board guy. “Then we’d respect you instead of spitting on you.” (This is quoted from memory of an actual Message Board Guy. I am assuming he had been spitting metaphorically, but you never know on Fark.) At some point in this discussion, it became a shameful thing for a straight guy to pursue the possibility of sex with women. Perhaps they think trying to be likeable is cheating, and that the only real way to play--the only noble way to play--is to fuck women who actively despise you.

Double points for nailing a girl who's actually tried to kill you. 5x bonus if you ejaculate during Star Power.

Because if wanting to fuck women were an acceptable pursuit, it’s hard to see why becoming the kind of person women want to fuck wouldn’t be the most obvious and laudable method. It’s not dishonesty that’s being criticized here, but the lack of dishonesty. This is what “game” is about: the artificial imposition of difficulty. Besides, what don’t you do to get laid? Is there anything you like about yourself--any quality you’re proud to possess, and skill that took great effort to acquire--that’s definitively not going to make you more attractive by improving the way people think of you? It turns out that most of the things you’d do to get laid are also worth doing for sundry other reasons, and very few of the things that aren’t worth doing for other reasons are worth doing for a few minutes of sweaty genital antics either. Interesting people are more fuckable than boring ones. Visible people are more fuckable than invisible ones.

YOUR CHARACTER IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD.

And people who can converse knowledgeably about things that interest you--like, say, human rights issues that affect you personally--are more fuckable than people who are just waiting for you to shut up.

2) The vocabulary

The title of this piece bears some scrutiny. The first draft used the term “feminist dude,” which is not something I hear very often, but it has the advantage of not being “male feminist,” which I fucking hate. My antipathy toward the adjectival “male” stems from the popularity of the nominal “male,” which sounds really awkward outside of a nature documentary. Unless you’re Katniss Everdeen and you need an appropriately depersonalized word to describe a tall combatant with long legs and the kind of chest and shoulder muscles you want for melee combat--because it literally hasn’t occurred to you that men’s bodies could be useful, desirable, or fun for any other reason--the adjectival “male” is a strange choice.

For any new readers: if you didn't like The Hunger Games, we're probably not going to be friends.

It’s most commonly employed when discussing other species, and in most places “man” or “men” are better choices than “male” or “males.” (The converse--the use of “females” where “women” would make more sense--seems to employed almost entirely by men’s rights activists and the Ferengi.)

The Ferengi, to their credit, seem to be entirely aware that they're assholes.

At the moment, there isn’t really a consensus on whether men ought to be referred to as feminists at all, or rather the more qualified (albeit more descriptive) “feminist allies,” or simply “allies.” The whole thing can get pretty confusing, and if you don’t believe me, you’ve never spent hours locked in an unwinnable game of Axis and Feminists.

Since drafting this article, incidentally, I'm told that "feminist dude(s)" has also been co-opted by assholes, although not the same assholes who earlier co-opted "male feminist(s)" "Guys who get it" has been suggested, but it's meaningless as a self-descriptor. I cannot, by definition, know whether or not I "get" something outside my own experience; if I didn't get it, I wouldn't know. It is, as they say, an unknown unknown.

So the title kind of sucks, and I might have just argued against the validity of my own writing on the subject. Clearly there’s some awkwardness right out of the gate. When you're writing about this stuff, you’re not always sure, in advance, what’s going to be insightful and what’s just going to piss people off. There’s no way to “solve,” this. It’s not about you.

This is a more jarring thought than it seems. If you’re a guy with internet access and time to waste reading my blog--especially if you also happen to be white, straight, and economically stable--you probably don’t realize the extent to which language and culture are bent to your experience. Yes, there’s a huge chunk of the culture devoted to the unique interests of women; it’s just that its primary purpose is to make sure you want to fuck them, and make sure they want you to want to fuck them. You don’t have to think about it, or even know about it to benefit from it. This phenomenon is known as privilege, and it’s one of those terms ends up being a rallying flag for misogynists. It’s a straw man’s wet dream.

Editor's note: do not google "straw man's wet dream."

Still, even well-meaning people bristle at being accused of ignorance or false consciousness. The joke, of course, is that it’s basically just a reification of the idea that you don’t intuitively understand other people’s perspectives. “You aren’t not-you” isn’t revolutionary; it’s a fucking tautology.

While “privilege” will get you derision, “rape culture” will get you pitchforks and torches. (This is hyperbole. It will actually get you derision, defensiveness, hostility, and, once in a while, rape threats.) As with privilege, it’s a lot more intuitive than it sounds, and as with everything else, it wouldn’t be substantially improved with different vocabulary. These concepts are difficult to see, for sure. For you. Because you don’t have to think about them very often.

3) You won’t like what you learn.

When you do think about them, it can get pretty dark pretty fast. Eventually, you have to turn your Mighty Critical Gaze on yourself, and then you’re kicking at the other side of the problem from #1. Being a better person might make you more interesting, give you an in with a new social circle, or get you laid, but if you’re being a better person for those reasons exclusively, or even primarily, it’s going to end badly. Spend some time reading about white knights and predator theory, and put two and two together: earning someone’s trust is an valuable, laudable thing, and makes the best parts of the human experience possible. It’s also, for most people, a prerequisite for abusing and exploiting people and getting away with it. You learn that unexamined assumptions and self-deception have made your own motives are often murkier than you’d like, and you can’t inherently trust that your heart is in the right place because it’s yours. So, you’re going to learn stuff that isn’t pleasant. And it’s stuff that some people in your life--nice, well-meaning folk by most standards--aren’t going to know about, or care about, or spend much time thinking about. You’re not going to like it very much.

Yeah, there aren't really any jokes in this section.

You’ll find that the lives of women you care about are a bit darker than you’d thought. Fears you’d thought of as transient, when you thought of them at all, turn out to be around all the time. You’ll find that what you’d thought of as idiosyncracies have solid roots in anxiety, embarrassment, and quite often, trauma. As they learn to trust you more, you’ll realize how nervous they’d acted before, when you thought they’d trusted you. You’ll learn about your mistakes. You’ll learn that you’ve marginalized people without realizing it, been demeaning when you thought you were being wry. It’s a difficult feeling, because moral authority is a real thing, and guilt is ultimately a subtype of fear. Especially because you really didn’t think of yourself as being that way. Nobody wants to be the kind of person whose ass they’d want to kick. As for dealing with it, you have some options. You can decide that it couldn’t be true if it makes you feel bad, and blame those dastardly feminists for making up these elaborate hoaxes so you’d let your guard down, allowing witches to steal your penis. You can concoct elaborate conspiracy theories to explain why women run the entire Western world, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Or, you can let go.

You can stop worrying that a subset of people will think you’re part of a different subset of people that behaves badly, and just focus on not behaving badly. You don’t personally need to be the standard-bearer for Justice, Logic, and Objectivity; you can even admit that you might not recognize them when you see them, because there’s shit you haven’t thought of. You can just listen. Once you make a habit of it, it’s immensely freeing. In that light, even minor annoyances I’ve here described in an overlong fashion are negligible. The only thing that sucks about being a feminist, for anyone, is misogyny. The rest is gravy.

Pictured: feminism.

4) Internet comments.

Seriously. Fuck you, internet commenters.

Prudence, IN

Are there advice columns that aren't terrible? You never seem to hear about them. Perhaps it's because good advice is, in practice, usually pretty obvious, and the tough questions involve choosing between several terrible courses of action.

It's neither here nor there, of course, when a professional advice columnist fucks up one of the really easy ones. Case in point, Dear Prudence's Emily Yoffe's recent piece for Slate, with the impressively on-the-nose title "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk." The article in question splits its time between asserting the title's imperative and apologizing for existing. If you're interested in reading a thoughtful rebuttal, I recommend Erin Gloria Ryan's How To Write About Rape Prevention Without Sounding Like An Asshole.

Yoffe's article is attempting to suss out a tension that seems to be inherent in the prevention model: you can only issue direct advice to people already interested in preventing rape, since they're the ones reading the damn articles, but you can't really do so without engaging in victim-blaming or undergirding complicity narratives. There's also the not-insignificant problem that most rape prevention tips aren't worth the fear they're printed on: beyond proximity, about the only reliable common denominator is that rapists like raping people and don't like going to prison. They tend to target people to whom they have easy social access, and people who aren't likely to call the police, or who the police aren't likely to believe.

So, basically, we're talking about women, children, ethnic minorities, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, sex workers, and God's own favorites, the poor.

Don't be in any of those groups, and you should be fine.

Even if this the risk-avoidance tactics of the prevention model were reliably successful, a more fundamental question remains: who gives a fuck? Living in fear does not solve the problem. In many ways, living in fear is the problem itself. Take it from #DepressedBane, relentless hatred and defiance will wear you the hell out. Teaching our more vulnerable citizens to be strong in the face of fear is all well and good, but seriously, fuck strength. Mere safety should not require strength. My allegiance, now and always, lies with the weak. There are a hell of a lot more of us, you see, and the strong don't like those odds.

Which brings us to the retaliation model. We tend to think of law and law enforcement as preserving safety, and, when well-designed and implemented, they can do that. Nonetheless, safety is incidental; the immediate function of law enforcement is not to make anyone's lives safer and happier, but to make criminals' lives more frightening and dangerous. Clearly, there are an awful lot of people out there whose lives are not currently dangerous enough, and rather than making victims responsible for deterring the behavior of their attackers, I wonder if it might not be more productive to focus the national conversation on ensuring that every rapist is arrested, charged, and convicted: to focus on breaking the secrecy in which predators necessarily operate, punishing police that scuttle investigations, and making prosecutors do their jobs.

If nothing else, focusing on the retaliation model it might help us cut through some of the bullshit about what a woman might "expect" to happen should she find herself drinking until she's drunk--you know, the way many college students do when they aren't too afraid--by moving to an entirely different expectation: that when someone is raped, drunk or sober, we expect the state to respond with all its fury, on her behalf and our own.

How to Crowdsource Assault

Social media platforms live and die in a fiercely attritive Darwinian environment. Platforms gravitate toward their "natural" use, and those that fail to do so quickly disappear. MySpace, in its day, thrived on teen girls who wanted attention and the adult men who wanted to give it to them. Facebook is prized for its ability to passive-aggressively micromanage your interactions with exes, as well as get in fights about political slogans. Also, Candy Crush Saga. (Again, sorry about that, Joey.)

Twitter, surprisingly enough, has shown an impressive aptitude for social activism. 140 characters is short enough that people will actually read most posts all the way through, and the hashtag functionality allows for the building of memes that are more complex than your average bumper sticker, but a hell of a lot more spreadable than a Rachel Maddow monologue. Women Action Media! recently used the #FBrape hashtag to publicly embarrass Facebook (and its advertisers) into revisiting their definitions of "abuse," which is more than anyone else had managed to do. More recently, and more hilariously, right-wing attempts to "expose" Planned Parenthood--by revealing that Planned Parenthood provides health care, including contraception and medical and surgical abortions, to women who want those things and might not otherwise be able to get them or afford them--were hijacked by liberal jackasses like myself. This is how I discovered Jenn "not @jennfrank" Frank, the way all new contacts should be made: drunk, and making puerile jokes. (Frank was not drunk. I'm assuming.) When the dust settled, I had a few more followers, and a few more followees.

The outcome of this episode is that my feed isn't as uniformly gave dev oriented as it had been before, and more of the really real world has been seeping in. Ana Mardoll wrote this helpful editorial over at Shakesville, describing the recent dust-up over Twitter's then-proposed "report abuse" functionality.

The logic of threat is a pretty deep topic, but one should probably start by acknowledging that the threat of violence is inherently coercive, and therefore functions as a form of violence. The harm done to you by an act of violence visited upon a stranger is the dread that grows involuntarily your mind when you hear about it; the same part of your brain that thinks you're having sex when you watch it on TV does that empathic magic for the bad stuff, too. The severity of a threat exerts its dark gravity on a mind regardless of plausibility. Of course, the more plausible a threat, the more seriously it must be taken--even a minor threat demands one's attention if it's particularly likely to be realized.

Of course, there are some places where over-the-top threats are considered entirely normal: sports, general infantry, and, apparently, fighting games. Any place culturally coded as particularly masculine is going to its own flavor of friendly hostility, often with its own specialized vocabulary. It's part of the bonding process, and nobody--the men issuing the threats, or the men receiving them--takes them too seriously. They don't have to. And no matter how many metaphors for rape are employed during a heated round of Halo trash talk, (adult) men generally aren't at a meaningful risk for sexual violence. ("Meaningful" is vague here, but I suspect anyone who isn't trolling gets the denotation.)

Threats directed towards women, in or out of these spaces, are more plausible. Consequently, they provoke a lot more anxiety. Ninety-nine out of a hundred death threats might not be serious, but when you receive two-hundred of them, it's hard to like those odds.

That's the point, of course. The more focused campaigns of abuse on the 'net are launched with the intent of annoying or frightening someone into shutting up, and by definition, we only hear about the campaigns that fail. Because of the acceptance of ritualized hostility in masculine spaces--in this case, the goddamn internet--people can feel perfectly fine saying things they'd be mortified to let loose in person. The anonymity and depersonalization of the medium doesn't just insulate them from criticism, it diffuses responsibility. It's not their fault the target pulled their entire site off the web, because who the fuck takes that kind of thing seriously? It's the internet. And besides, who's to say which particular broadside made the difference? So many to choose from. Every griefer contributes, and when successful, every griefer gets what they want, but none of them are obliged to feel that their particular contribution was meaningful.

When you phone in a fake bomb threat, you're profiting from the terror provoked by people who phone in legitimate bomb threats. When you play psychopath for kicks, you're complicit with the ones who aren't playing.

Because, of course, this phenomenon isn't about masculine spaces or bonding rituals at all. It isn't even about the internet. It's about how anonymity functions in groups of varying sizes, and how the mind buries responsibility where the conscience won't find it. Psychopaths and the people hoping to profit from their actions didn't wait around for the internet to do their thing, and they don't particularly need it now. Case in point, this Pandagon post about a coalition of anti-abortion groups trying to close George Tiller's old clinic on the basis that anti-abortion groups are comprised of violent lunatics who threaten the physical and mental well-being of everyone around them:

What’s happening here is that the anti-choicers spend all their time hanging out with each other and reinforcing the opinion that the clinic doesn’t deserve to exist and that any tactic used to take it down is acceptable, and with that kind of group dynamic, they completely forget how idiotic they sound to come out and say, “This clinic has to go because the temptation to picket it and threaten its workers for violence is more than we can bear.” It’s worth mulling this over, because this attitude—that the harassers are entitled to run someone off the internet for, say, making a series of videos about video games—tends to get blamed on the tech a lot, because forums and and other online gathering spaces create an echo chamber where the idea that you get to force someone out of business (rather than say, simply stop visiting their site/following their Twitter feed if you find them so provocative) stops sounding like the overly entitled idiocy that it is, and starts to seem nearly sensible. But as this example shows, that kind of thinking can kind of sprout up anywhere, and it’s usually less about the “echo chamber” than an outgrowth of their arguments being unable to persuade, forcing them to embrace immoral tactics to win, because they can’t do it fairly. 

I think it's more than a matter of not realizing that people are going to realize that this amounts to an open threat of ongoing violence. I think they sincerely think that their organizations--the ones that they're alleging to be inextricably bound up with acts of domestic terrorism--are fundamentally unconnected to those acts. They couldn't function without the terrorists, of course. It's impossible to deny that the constant threat of violent death doesn't make operating a facility that performs abortions more expensive, dangerous, and generally more difficult. Since 1973, terrorism has served their interests a lot better than lobbying. I think they honestly think that the violence arrives ex nihilio, called into being by the existence of the thing they abhor. After all, Randal Terry's sure as hell not going to spend the rest of his life in prison to kill a handful of his enemies. The fact that the extremists have defined the mainstream discourse to the point that actual threats are indistinguishable from your standard press release has nothing to do with it.

Granted, the internet folk who pledged their honor to defeat Sarkeesian or Jane Austen or whatever aren't nearly as organized as the anti-abortion lobby, and so far they don't have the body count. Still, I wonder if the former might be a more advanced version of the latter. I wonder if we might be seeing another demonstration of emergence, the curious tendency of large groups to spontaneously organize. I wonder if the properties of this medium and this cultural moment have developed a way to delegate not only terror, but guilt.

Whips, chains, whistles, dildos, and a book.

So, I was on Twitter the other night. building my brand, developing relationships with fans ("influencers"), and talking about the problems of "correspondence" epistemology with @DoritosOntario. A number of my feedlings, notably the loudly thoughtful @HULKGAMECRIT, were discussing some scandalous doings over at Destructoid, with which I'm only barely familiar. But I followed the breadcrumbs to this essay by one Ryan Perez. It gave me pause. Afterwards, it gave me quit, and soon after that it gave me watch Arrested Development.

You see, dear reader, this essay is a piece of shit. It's that uniquely gamerly combination of defensive, self-pitying, and self-congratulatory. It's utterly unremarkable, in that way, but the material it covers was fresh in my mind from something else I'd been working on, and it happened to be in front of me, late one Saturday night. I wanted to make a joke about it, but found too many opportunities. It deserves better than 140 characters of mock. It's so bad that it deserves to be taken seriously.

This is a terrible essay. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I'll skip the opening paragraph, because fuck you. If you clicked the above link, you already read it anyway. So I'll rejoin the essay already in progress:

What instantly draws my gaze toward these oh-so-common floggings is the most common factor: those carrying the whips.

Wait. It's always the same people? I assumed it would be a general assemblage of garden variety liberals. But if it's the same dozen people who are mounting these vilification campaigns against you and your colleagues, and they're not famous enough for me to have heard of them, it seems like you could probably indemnify yourself by just blocking them so you won't be tempted to respond to their criticism.

Like clockwork, they labeled Allistair “transphobic,” demanded that he be punished, and seemingly dusted their hands off for what they perceived was a good deed. This is not the first time they’ve done so.

Well, he'd done something that was apparently offensive to the trans community and their allies. These individuals were offended because they believed his actions were motivated by, and likely to inspire, antipathy toward transsexuals. "Motivated and/or likely or intended to inspire antipathy towards transsexuals" is the definition of "transphobic." By organizing public sentiment against a perceived injustice, it's entirely sensible that they would think they were engaged in "a good deed." Public sentiment is important; it's less accurate than it used to be, but most humans intuitively think of their popularity and reputation as matters of life and death. This is why people often react very severely to what are, from our pleasantly distant perspective, quite minor. But props on the whole "lurking horror" connotation there.

Ironically, they are the biggest proponents for positive change, yet they seem so consistent with their own negative behavior. Their usual approach is far from persuasive, and is even potentially damaging. An eye for an eye, if you will.

Leaving aside that "positive" and "negative," in this context, are utterly meaningless terms employed to create an illusion of moral distinction: an eye for an eye? Really?

How one gets from "far from persuasive" to "retributive violence" is difficult enough, but "eye for an eye" refers to using exactly the appropriate amount of retaliatory force and no more. In the Hammurabi Code, and later the Law, the principle was employed to prevent feuds from escalating into bloodbaths. It does not gesture towards reconciliation, but it does settle the issue as far as everyone is concerned. So it's not just a matter of hyperbole, it's also fucking stupid. (In all fairness, Perez refers to his "devoutly religious beliefs." Just because his beliefs are devoutly religious, we cannot assume out of hand that he is as well, and it's possible he just knows fuck-all about what the Sermon on the Mount was actually about.)

I can’t really avoid pointing this out here: In the past, I made a stupid mistake on Twitter that cost me my career and a lot of respect.

Considering that the stupid mistake in question was almost a year ago and he's still being published, it's hard to see how it can be said to have cost Perez his career. Perhaps he had a second, unrelated career, and now must fall back on writing about games.

Similarly to Allistair, I had a significant (and somewhat unjustified) amount of hate and criticism hurled my way. I admitted my poor actions, and also accepted much of what resulted from them, but it made me raise a brow toward similar instances of public scrutiny that others have faced. Leaving my own experience out of the equation,

That is not what this paragraph does.

I looked to others whom were “burned at the stake” for their trespasses, both minor and extreme. In the process, I made two inquiries: What is the intended goal of those with torches, and what lesson are the ones aflame supposed to learn? Not enough people ask these questions.

Congratulations?

In fact, too few individuals even bother considering every potential result when it comes to their actions, particularly those convinced that they are doing something noble or good. It’s a damn shame, because some of the worst offenses anyone can commit are often perpetuated by God, “justice,” and a personal sense of absolute morality.

Actually, almost all violence is deployed for the purpose of asserting or maintaining social norms. I'm not sure it's really worse than the minority of violent actions inspired by greed, sadism, or simple boredom. I'm even less sure what this sweeping moral claim has to do with being yelled at on the internet. Nevertheless, having established a line of argument popularized by middle-schoolers, we continue:

Nevertheless, those two questions remained, and the answers I found are as follows:

1. Concede, you piece of shit! Disagreement is almost always accompanied by a desire to persuade. The main reason we enter debates, discussions, or arguments is to potentially convince someone to see things from our point of view. Even those who present their case with exposed teeth aspire to have the opposition kneel before their passionate conviction. 

Sometimes, sure. But we don't execute people because we think it'll help them learn a valuable lesson, and we don't respond to embarrassment with rage because rage is an effective rhetorical strategy. Here's a hint: did you and the aggrieved party have your dispute in person, in a room that contained no other people? All the examples provided here happened on the fucking internet, the most public forum in the history of ever. People were watching, and there were more of them than there are of you. Which means that, in terms of influencing opinion, they matter more than you. This is going to be a theme, so I hope you're taking notes: not everything is about you.

When this piece goes up, maybe a dozen people are going to read it. Perez is almost certainly not going to be one of them. The rhetorical "you" situates the preceding paragraph for the people who are reading, for whom it's largely irrelevant whether Perez actually exists at all, or is just someone I made up to represent a point of view.

Many people seem to forget two things: Opinions are only worth the amount of thought that goes into them, and a part of getting others to consider them is a matter of presentation. Yes, the “tonal argument” is indeed a logical fallacy, but let’s be real: People don’t like being spoken to like they are inferior … or evil, in this case.

I'm not sure about the first one. Statesmen, scholars, and clerics have put an enormous amount of thought, over the centuries, into arguments for white supremacy. It takes a lot of thought, because the idea is counterintuitive to a lot of people. Non-whites, for example. Also, lots of whites. Whereas some opinions don't require very much thought at all, but nonetheless remain correct under scrutiny. Epistemology does not have participation trophies; you have to actually be right about shit.

As for the second, I'm somewhat sympathetic. I think the tonal argument is quite appropriate when discussing marketing, public relations, propaganda, or any other persuasive pursuit. When the issue is "how," talk about how. Where the tonal argument becomes irrelevant and/or intellectually dishonest is in discussions of "what." I'm not interested in how our friend the white supremacist makes his argument. I disagree. If I believed that I could be convinced by a better presentation, it would only be because I already agreed, in which case I would need no convincing. Furthermore, I'd much prefer that the people who are amenable to white supremacy reject it. Our friend would have to be very stupid to think I was legitimately interested in helping them improve their sales pitch. A smarter interlocutor would be insulted.

Your argument is your product, and you are its salesperson. No matter how compelling and valuable your commodity may be, if your sales pitch consists of vilifying language and a condemning regard for your hopeful customer, they will not feel inclined to give two steaming shits about what you’re selling.

Your ethical argument has a lot of merit, but I'm not interested in being a better person if you're going to be mean.

When people stumble — myself, Allistair, and even greater authorities like David Jaffe and Jim Sterling — the goal is to make us learn from our mistakes, but what do we learn if the lesson is delivered by a figurative bat to the head? Treating offenders like dirt not only gives them a reason to ignore you, but it can also reaffirm their original position, as well as reinforce any negative preconceptions they had about you and your case.

Who gives a shit? The lesson is for the onlookers. We're the present, they're the future. They matter more. And while humor, derision, and spite might make you like your opponent less, they sure can help get the crowd on your side. Every retweet counts.

2. If you don’t yell, they won’t plug their ears. Do you want to know how to gain a valued, loyal customer?

Dude, you're writing an essay about how you got fired. This is not a time to brag about your salesmanship.

I was raised in Bakersfield, California. For those who don’t know, “Bako” is quite conservative … and a bit of a shithole [...] This, coupled with a Christian upbringing, meant I retained a relatively non-existent knowledge regarding gay people. I don’t hide the fact that, when I first moved to San Francisco nine years ago, I was genuinely homophobic. I hadn’t a single clue about how to feel or behave when it came to gay men and women.

While my Christian upbringing was considerably more liberal than most, I didn't knowingly meet a gay person face-to-face until undergrad. I had no clue how to act around anyone, so if there was any specific awkwardness relating to gay students, it got lost in the general terror. I don't recall ever having a lot of questions for them. I never found it particularly mysterious that some people wanted to fuck different people than I did.

I didn’t hide it then, either. Given my inquisitive nature, I was open and honest with gay people when it came to my devoutly religious beliefs, what I was taught, and my confusion regarding their sexual orientation. Considering my exposed Christian tattoos, I couldn’t hide it, even if I wanted to. All I desired was to gain some perspective, some understanding. An odd thing happened, though. The gays I spoke with weren’t angry. They didn’t despise me for knowing so little about their ordeals. They didn’t lambaste me for being raised to believe that their way of life was wrong or immoral.

That Perez feels it worth pointing out that these things didn't happen  implies that he had reason to suspect that they might. He didn't. People you've just met have not spent their lives thinking about how you feel about them. Their emotions are tied up in people and things that they care about.

They heard my case, considered my misinformation, and carefully answered with some of the most valuable and level-headed responses that I’ve ever been given in my life. Due to their kindness and patience, I was sold. I had absolutely no excuse to be repelled by homosexuality or the issues it faces in this country, and I never will.

Woohoo!

Though I’m no longer religious, I can’t help but feel a sense of amazement that people could go through such trauma, yet never bother to use my past faith and upbringing against me.

This is a really weird thing to say. It's like bragging about being petty.

So many of them (particularly gay women) were incredibly grateful that a straight, white male would actively desire to learn what it meant to be a gay American, and I was equally thankful that they didn’t scold me for not knowing in the first place. For several years now, the gay community has had one more supporter because of it.

Great that it worked out that way for you, but it's not incumbent upon them to convince you to be a decent human being. That's your responsibility. It sounds like they felt your heart was in the right place, and were willing to be patient with you on your behalf, but I suspect your account leaves out a great deal of eye-rolling and condescension.

The paradox of shelling a munitions factory. It’s not difficult to understand how some can feel so hurt that they resort to armed retaliation.

Dude, that's aggravated assault. Call the fucking cops.

But to fire back at the “bad guys” is to equalize the battlefield. In that instance, villains and victims become grayed. Treating anyone like they are subhuman is equally as deplorable as whatever behavior may have instigated it.

Forget the cops, call the UN. When you insult Felicia Day, the internet strikes back with motherfucking genocide.

This industry certainly has its issues, and I dare not deny that its transgendered, gay, and female members have and will face an unfair amount of problems. But their target demographic — those who do not fall under the three aforementioned categories — will rarely provide their patronage if the service being offered is laden with glass shards and caltrops.
We all desire for others to understand us. In the process, though, we so often become the new embroiderers of scarlet letters (“M” for misogyny). We claim to have the high ground, yet voluntarily remain in the piss-soaked dirt of the struggle below.

Who is this "we" of which you speak? The ones who are mistreated, or the ones who aren't sufficiently insulated from criticism when they mistreat the first group?

That provides nothing substantial or positive to the games industry we claim to serve, and it perpetuates an even greater disconnect between social groups.

I'm glad Perez is looking toward a broader understanding of ethics in a complex and interdependent society. I was beginning to worry this was just self-serving whining justified by false equivalencies.

“Goodness” and “kindness” are not subject for debate, nor are they anyone’s to redefine.

Three thousand years of moral philosophy would like to have a word with you.

If you still feel that fighting fire with fire is a reasonable and justifiable strategy for extinguishing a societal blaze, then perhaps you should spend more time off to the side, watching the flames burn everything to the ground.

As of press time, the internet is still here. Destructoid is still here. Perez is still here. Pinsof is still here. Aside from no longer maintaining writing gigs at one particular website--and apparently having sewn large, garish Ms into their clothing, for some reason--Perez and Pinsof seem to be doing ok. They aren't in jail, they haven't been doxxed, and they aren't regularly threatened with rape and murder. They embarrassed their employers, and will try harder not to embarrass future employers.

I, personally, think Perez and Pinsof were thoughtless and stupid, and are unaccustomed to being called on it when they had done thoughtless, stupid things. That said, when you do stuff in public, you will be criticized. Some of it will inevitably be unjustified.

This is ok.

Total strangers--the ones who might be convinced by things they read about you on the internet--aren't ever going to have an entirely accurate picture of what kind of person you are. Hell, an entirely accurate picture might not even be possible. But your friends and loved ones won't care. Your fans, if you have them, aren't going to be easily swayed either. When someone accuses you of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other recently discovered sins, you are not actually facing imminent violence. If you find yourself on the privileged side of any of those -isms or -obias, you're still basically protected. You really do have the option of just saying, "Yeah, that was inappropriate. I'll try to be a better person" and letting it go. You can think it over on your own time, decide whether or not you feel it was valid, and make changes accordingly. Talk about it with your friends. In private. Don't worry about being unfairly maligned, worry about being hurtful and deserving to be maligned, irrespective of whether or not you get called on it.

Remember those gay folk that so impressed Perez? Want your own heroic narrative? Then show a small fraction of their fortitude that you claim to admire, and endure. Don't let your pride get in the way of what you believe is right. Your feelings are not more important than social justice, and you are not so fragile that you need to be kept in the dark about your fuck-ups. Own it. If you have a soapbox, stop justifying your behavior and work on preventing other people from making the same mistakes.

Who knows? If you do it right, if you're influential enough, the people now lionizing you for standing up to the forces of political correctness will be sending you death threats. And then you can talk to us about moral fucking authority.

What a bunch of assholes.

Oh, and while we're on the subject: Osama bin Laden had ten daughters to David Jaffe's two. Just sayin'.

The X-Men Theory of Human Relations

It's hard to imagine how homo sapiens managed to do “myth” without the benefit of cross-media promotional tie-ins, but they managed. We have our modern myths, we are told—big, sprawling projects by fat, bearded white dudes. We have films people want to live in, and worlds people want to play in, and behave like jerks. Myth is four letters long and a mile wide, and it's one of the things we're pretty great at. Give yourselves a hand, people.

My metaphysical ideas are confusing, but if I were to settle on a particular myth or mythic structure for our present day—not so much a religious pantheon as a collection of symbols we all agreed to behave as if our anscestors used as a religious pantheon—it would be the X-Men. Not so much for the inherent cleverness of the concept, or the writers who've ably employed it over the decades, but because it's flexible, renewable, and strong. In the sense that, with a cast that big, it has to hold an awful lot of fuckin' weight.

In the most famous of the various stories that circle through the various media of the franchise, such as the Mutant Registration Act, the Weapon Plus project, the Cure, the rise of the sentinels, etc., there's invariably one particular villain who anchors the action, and a bigger, vaguer villain painting the scenery. The government, the army, men in black. Frightened teenagers all over the world, many of them with hilariously silly names and fashion choices, cowering in fear that some unstoppable entity is going to take them out of their homes and away from their families, to be put in a cage where...

...where what, exactly? What exactly is the concern with any large-scale investigation into these loveable superbeings? Why does Sanctuary need to operate in secret? Why do the diamond-realdoll vampires of Twilight give a shit if people find out they exist? Why all the hiding?

Sure, people want to kill them. But that's not the fear. Plenty of our supernatural heroes face the prospect of violent death every day; so do plenty of people here in the really real world, and the supernatural heroes are a hell of a lot better equipped to deal with that fact. Cassandra Nova's inspirations aside, the sentinels aren't interested in genocide. There's no profit in it. Whereas there's quite a bit of profit in a prison full of properly licensed, corporate-owned mutants? Now that's something special. Not in the sense of being interesting to read about, as it ends the story. But there's money to be made.

The common element of all of our fabled supernatural warriors--the reason we like reading about them, dress up as them for Halloween, etc.--is that they're unique and useful. They can do things we wish we could do. Which means they can do things we wish we could have done for us. Often, there are things we'd like to do to/with them. Many of the people in their diegetic worlds feel the same way. People want them. And when people want something, there's an awful lot of money to be made in procuring it for them.

At risk of going in way over my head, things aren't valuable because of inherent qualities, or because they're useful, or because they're rare. Market theory holds that things are valuable because someone's willing to pay for them, i.e. make a sacrifice proportional to the assigned value. I need not have an opinion on the theory, which is fortunate, because I am untrained and it wouldn't matter anyway. For my purposes here, however, I will amend it to say that what ultimately makes things valuable is want. People sacrifice for things they want, and you can make a very nice helping to assuage that want.

There was another plagiarism scandal today, so I'm going to have to link to the generally execrable article I'm going to be quoting:

Go look outside. See those cars driving by? Every car being driven by a man was designed and built and bought and sold with you in mind. The only reason why small, fuel-efficient or electric cars don't dominate the roads is because we want to look cool in our cars, to impress you. [...]

All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this -- historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?
It's all about you. All of it. All of civilization.

How one gets from the first paragraph to the second without noticing a rather disturbing analogy, I can only presume. Suffice to say, the car isn't about women. It wasn't designed to impress women. It was designed to be sold at a profit. In this case, sold to men, who tend to have more money. And who tend to want women.


The second paragraph demonstrates a purer form. Property comes from a prior agreement to honor the concept of property with violence. In its absence, it amounts to whatever you can seize, whatever you can hold. Whatever you can carry off. The word in Latin is raptus. Historically, the opportunity for mass rape is part of how mercenaries are paid. The prospect of owning a woman motivates car-buying and mercenary warfare, in these examples, but neither of these things is about women, unless you've already accepted the idea that the defining characteristic of women is that men want them.


It applies for basically any group that can be seized, carried off, exploited, enslaved, or generally exploited by another, but X-Men seems to dramatize it in a way we're all comfortable with, so that's the label I go with. The X-Men theory of human relations is this: if your value as a thing that is wanted exceeds your value as a thing that acts--if what you are is seen as more important than what you can think or do--you're fucked.

Like a Trash Can Fire in a Prison Cell: Twilight Continued

Finished Twilight? Good. Now, get on with your life.

If you insist on continuing to read, I suggest you put on your theory glasses. Because Twilightas series is a much darker and funnier story. Not for the writing, or the plot, but because of the ideas of a woman named Andrea Dworkin, who made it all clear to me.

Dworkin is not a popular name in feminist circles these days. Truthfully, she wasn't a terribly popular name even during the wave for which she's often cited as an icon. Which is the first thing to notice about Dworkin these days: she's hugely popular with people trying to discredit things. Right-wing authors cite her to discredit feminism, third-wave-or-better feminists cite her to discredit second-wavers/white women/the 80s. I, personally, have once cited her to discredit the writing on True Blood. Dworkin is versatile that way.

But the defining moment in my travels with Dworkin came in the post-script to Woman-Hating, in which she railed against the tyranny of punctuation, and claimed that punctuation was the difference between an essay read in a book, and a conversation had between people. I so rarely get to use my media studies cred to pull rank, but this was one such opportunity: paper and ink is the difference between an essay read in a book and a conversation. And if it's not good enough for you, I've got bad news for you, because Andrea Dworkin is fucking dead and not conversing with anybody.

But, like mt feelings on Twilight, this should not be read as a condemnation of Dworkin. I'm a fan. I just feel she needs to be approached as something of a mad hierophant. Living writers can do a fine job writing about what patriarchy is, how it works, and even how it feels. Dworkin writes the way patriarchy smells, the way it tastes. Because our present is only an ongoing escape from our past, and our past is darker, sicker, and scarier than most of us can imagine. We can never be so far from it that its horror won't leak through when we aren't watching.

Lunatics, like Fools, are useful to have around now and then.

In Woman-Hating, Dworkin looks at fairy tales and pornography, two rather disparate ends of the media spectrum, and essentially comes to the same conclusion about them. For the patriarchy's purposes, man exists, and is good, in a pleasantly Augustinian sort of way. Woman is the opposite of that. So, since it is good for man to be active, it is good for a woman to be passive; since it is good for a man to be bold, it is good for a woman to be timid; since it is good for a man to be awake, it is good for a woman to be unconscious. And, of course, since it's good for a man to be alive, it's good for a woman to be dead.

There are, of course, active women, who seek to gain and wield power, and go about their value-defining way. The evil queens, the evil stepmothers, witches and paganae galore. Their counterparts, to be heralded as right and true and noble, are the sleeping ones, the poisoned ones, and the dead. Men exist to fuck, kill, and eat; women exist to be raped, killed, and eaten.

Which brings us to Bella Swann.

Aside from being a whiny little shit, as is to be expected from an early-21st-century American teen, Bella seems to have quite a bit going for her when we meet her. We are told that she is, diegetically, quite smart. She is well-read, although it doesn't seem to affect her conversations very much, and we never see much of her writing. Her parents appear to be semi-literate morons, and her success is even more impressive in that light.

At school, she is presented with an established clique of people dying to be her friend. She plays it down, preferring to complain to us about her physical awkwardness. In fact, the only thing that interrupts her internal monologue of complaint is that there's a boy who doesn't seem to like her. She obsesses about this for weeks.

And we've covered that one, and it's past, and past is prologue. So let's jump ahead to the payoff: he dumps her, and she goes into a depression of horrifying mopiness, too bleak even for an emo montage. Out on the town, in an attempt to look normal again, she encounters a shady group of men she believes to be the ones who assaulted her the previous year, and, operating on instinct, walks toward them. It isn't clear why, at first; she's not trying to reclaim her violated sense of autonomy, she's not daring them to offer a repeat performance in front of witnesses. What stops her--and what inspires her to continue--is discovering that, as she intentionally walks forward into the vital prospect of pain, humiliation, and possibly death, Edward's voice pops into her head.

Clearer than in her memories.

Because the feeling of imminent destruction, especially self-destruction, reminds her of her ex-boyfriend more than all the My Morning Jacket songs in the world. She follows up this performance by buying a motorbike, which are diegetically considered to be dangerous even for people with nominal control of their arms and legs, a group that excludes Bella. Finally, Bella inaugurates New Moon's third act by throwing herself off a goddamn cliff. Alice, our friendly neighborhood psychic with pretty hair, thinks it's a suicide attempt, and is in all likelihood half-right.

New Moon opens with a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, so it's appropriate that the interaction between Bella and Edward consists of a kind of competitive suicidal ideation. Following Meyer's tradition of having about one chapter of better-than-mediocre material, there's an iteresting mediation about settling for Paris, and what that means for love, death, and superficial readings of canonical literature. Jacob, whose abs are certainly not described with the breathtaking narrative force Taylor Lautner would later give them, is basically just a trailer for Eclipse, in terms of Bella's world, but it's nice to acknowledge that it wouldn't have been impossible for him to have been a meaningful player in the present.

We move on. Edward and the Cullens are, predictably, horrified that Bella has been hanging out with werewolves. The Quileuttes are predictably horrified that Bella has been hanging out with vampires. It's too dangerous, they remind her in unison.

And the hell of it is, they're right. Even in this friendly diegetic world, vampires and werewolves are both incredibly dangerous. When Bella cuts herself at her birthday party, Jasper loses control and tries to eat her. Sam, Jacob's pack leader, is married to a woman who is missing half of her face, because he lost his temper with her once. One of Jacob's bros accidentally transforms in her presence, and only Jacob following suit seems to keep her safe.

I think all of us, at some time or another, have done things we aren't proud of in the heat of the moment. All of us have found ourselves staying a little too late at that party, having a bit too many rum-and-cokes, and saying things we don't really mean, like "I love you," or "I never want to see you again," or "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." But I don't know anyone who has ever torn anyone's face off in a fit of pique. Everyone I know who's torn someone's face off has done so with careful, sober deliberation.

Even with all the self-control that only twue wuv can bring, Bella stays physically intact--literature majors, please hold your comments until the end of the post--only be ensuring that the barely controlled supernatural forces around her are consistently in even numbers.

Bella just isn't interested unless she's got a reasonable chance of dying. And it seems she has standards as to what constitutes a good death. She's not going for some weak-ass chick-suicide like an overdose, and she's not going to butch up and borrow her father's handgun, either. No, the kind of death Bella wants, the kind of death she draws hearts around in her diary, is one in which she is beaten and broken, her soft, soft will spent against an unstoppable, relentless force of power and will and hardness. One that's both brutally fast and agonizingly slow. Bent limbs akimbo, her innermost fluids flowing out into the open air, under the watchful eyes of an impenetrable, invulnerable predator.

Conclusion to follow, in which, over a thousand pages into the series, something wet finally happens. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I think I need a cigarette.

The Weak Last Gasp of the Evening's Dying Light: the fucking Twilight Post Begins

As I have probably written here before, I like bad things. So it should probably surprise nobody that I've read the entire Twilight series, and enjoyed it very much. The most difficult part, in fact, was the terror that somebody would see me reading it. To that end, I prepared a short speech explaining that, after having spent the past month immersed in Andrea Dworkin, Ayn Rand, and Graham Greene, I was entitled to read whatever silly thing I wanted, to celebrate the fact that I hadn't yet blinded myself from the sheer horror of it all.

I shall acknowledge and move past what all Twipologists claim: they're light, they're fun, they're guilty pleasures. "Guilty pleasure" is a particularly useful phrase, because at times our beloved narrators manage to evoke authentic feelings of guilt and shame. Usually these are phantom travellers carried by nostalgia. I shall 'splain.

Think, for a moment, about your adolescence. Think about the very dumbest thing you ever did. The thing you are most embarrassed about, that you can laugh at when it comes up in conversation, but that you know better than to spend a lot of time thinking about. Remember how sensible you thought you were being? Remember how noble, how strong, how brave you were? Remember how utterly apocalyptic every (saner) alternative seemed to be? Think about that frame of mind, your brain pan filling up with water, an odd yellow-filter placed over your third-person memories. Think about what a stupid, self-indulgent little shit you were.

The people in Twilight live in that place all the time.

(I assume that anyone reading this is an alien researching human civilization. If that is, in fact, the case...man, did you ever go to the wrong place. Seriously. Go ask your thesis advisor if there's still time to pick a new topic. If you are a human who doesn't have this kind of memory of their adolescence, I wish you congratulations, and ask to subscribe to your newsletter. Finally, if you are currently an adolescent...shit, just try not to commit and violent crimes or die, ok? Good fucking luck.)

I didn't go to high school, so the dominant narratives presented to me by American popular culture are enacted by actors in their late 20s pretending to be teenagers having an experience I missed. Nonetheless, these high school narratives reliably provide some of that guilty nostalgia. Twilight is a concentrated form. If Buffy is weed and My So-Called Life is alcohol, Twilight is black tar heroin.

So, the shittier it is, the more embarrassed you are to be reading it as a more-or-less literate adult, the more fun it becomes. I don't think this qualifies as reading it ironically. I had a blast reading these books. It's just that it's the kind of blast I had watching James MacAvoy pushing a gun barrel through a man's face in Wanted.

And most of the time, the writing is sufficient to take you where you need to go. Generally, it ranges from competent to slightly-less-than, with one notable exception: the authentically interesting chase scenario that comprises the first book's third act. The trouble is, well, it's a chase. And you know what medium does chases really, really well? Film. A 2-hour film of the last third of Twilight would be one of the more interesting and ambitious vampire stories we've seen in a while. But in prose, it blurs in with the rest of the story, saddled as it is by a narrator who can't see most of the action and spends the climax unconscious. And in the film--yes, I have seen the first three, and in my defense I cite the existence of Rifftrax--it's completely wasted.

That said, Twilight could have been a lovely sprite of a novel had it ended with Edward losing control and tearing apart his one true love in a shower of blood, bone, and sinew. There's some humor in that ending, and some justice, and a sick kind of romance. Because vampires can certainly be effective stand-ins for superheroes, but their defining characteristic is that they will fucking kill you.

So ends the first post, because I'm pretty sure I should make some dinner. Stay tuned, imaginary readers, because if you share my disappointment that Edward jerked his story off its moral rails, the sequels will make your eyes bleed.

Not a game you can win.

When you write almost nothing, knowing what to write about can be a tricky biscuit. Most of my daily, procrastination-assisting reading these days arrives via political blogs by liberals, feminists, and the odd liberal feminist. Media and ethics come up frequently on these blogs, because it turns out that liberals and feminists have a thing about media and ethics. Who knew?

Yet, very often, I have little of substance to say about any of these posts, beyond the occasional comment. Occasionally, the blogosphere will go into a tizzy over an issue which, on paper, seems to be exactly my area of interest, and in these cases it's usually something rather dull and obvious that inspires me to write out of a kind of spiritual vindictiveness. I generally don't get far on those topics, and try not to make the attempt.

I have worked hard, very hard, to avoid blogging about Penny Arcade. For serious.

So now I'm feeling compelled to write about the Pick-Up Artist...thing? What is it, anyway? Motivational lecture series? LARP scenario? The ads I see on filesharing sites suggest it's a practical, monetized application of CIA's MKULTRA project, but I assume this to be bullshit. Not only because, to paraphrase Morbo, HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, but because if it were true, I'd be reading about guys raising zombie armies of girlfriend-samurai.

For some reason--by which I mean apparently offensive and poorly thought-out comments on Penny Arcade--whenever videogames come up on my daily blog roundup, PUAs usually follow; certainly, whenever PUAs come up, videogames make a quick appearance. It's part of the bouquet of the New Male thing we're working out, somewhere on the spectrum alongside Asperger's and Nice Guys. (I am too lazy to post the appropriate trademark symbol. If you want it there, get a permanent marker and apply it directly to your screen. If you're using a screen-reader, you can save time by just marking up your fingers.) Nice Guys, affable ensigns of the rape apology Federation, are a topic dear to my heart, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of way, and deserve a prose exploration significantly longer than I intend this one to be. Suffice to say there a lot of young dudes out there who don't seem to be very good at dealing with people, and since mandatory military conscription is no longer in vogue, they find themselves ignoring the problem until it interferes with what we are collectively told is a God-given right to get laid.

Yes, flirting is tricky. I, personally, am utterly insensate to it: even in my seven annual minutes of being friendly and communicative, if a woman attempts to flirt or flirt back, the romantic intentions bend around me, like light around the Predator, and quietly raise the self-esteem of the guy standing behind me.

What pricks my academic ears up--my academic ears, incidentally, are smaller, more muscular appendages located near the base of my neck--is the persistent use of "game."

We have lots of games. We have the spy game, the fame game, the political game. Anything in which multiple parties with differing, potentially mutually exclusive interests has likely been likened to a game in some dusty corner of the common parlance.

(Note to self: write book of poetry, title it "some dusty corner of the common parlance.")

And let's take a look at that. As any self-respecting American knows, the CIA doesn't train spies, per se, but rather trains operatives to recruit spies on the ground. What an operative primarily does is convince people to help them. Money, patriotism, ideology, blackmail, and good old-fashioned cash payoffs: the tools of the trade when you want to convince someone to do something that is certainly in your interest, but probably a disastrous, life-ending mistake for them.

Politics, by definition, means making strategic alliances with people you don't like, because people you like even less are making strategic alliances with people they like only slightly more than you.

Fame...fuck it, I dunno. Lady Gaga seems to have a good handle on it, ask her.

So games are tricky. Games might involve compromise or deception. But the most salient thing about the pick-up game, to my reading, is Bernard Suits' claim that the defining characteristic of a game, often as opposed to "free" play, is a layer of unnecessary complication or difficulty.

To wit, a game requires an opponent of sorts. And what is the difficulty involved in...whatever the hell the PUAs are selling cheat codes for?

You want to have sex with women, right? So why all the training? Why the hilarious Soviet mind control techniques? Why the carefully employed scripts? Because they want to have sex with you, right?

Oh, wait. They don't?

Well, shit. You do have a problem then. Because, as we've currently configured the sexy sex-language landscape, if they don't want you, it's not sex. It's a sin, and a crime, and (if you're a conservative) a persistent metaphor for everything bad that happens to you ever.

And the thing is, at no point in human history is it as easy as it is now to find people who want to have sex with you. We have the internet, we have craigslist, we have (out of pocket) birth control and (sort of) legal abortion. We have fetish forums and online dating and Chat Roulette. We have speed dating and Facebook and, well, dormitories. In the Western world, young adult men and women are allowed to hang out together, in a wide variety of ways, with the most minimal outside supervision.

Working these various social affordances can be complex, of course, not the least for their sheer variety. If you want to have sex--and, being male, you're more than allowed to be open about it--finding someone who wants to have sex with you can, in fact, be rather gamelike. There's not really a problem with that. Trying to alter or conceal your personality or intentions to gain sex from someone who'd run screaming the other way if you presented yourself honestly, well, that's sort of a game too. It's just that the win condition is a valorization of the skill it took to get there, not a thing freely joined, to be appreciated in and of itself. The story of this kind of hook-up is one of triumph over adversity, and reduces the hunted to a disposable, replaceable entity.

Which is why we refer to this sort of thing as rape culture.

The Sarah Problem and the gendering of genre

Hat tip to August J. Pollack for finding this. It's tempting to think of this sort of thing as mere ham-handed marketing with nothing more than the profit motive behind it, a desperate attempt to bring women into a consumer group perceived to be hostile to said women via tired stereotypes. It's easy because, well, it's largely true, but to dwell on that would be to miss the fact that this kind of thinking is surprisingly pervasive at all levels of the gaming community, from the players to the press, and even, to some extent, to the academics.

Richard Cobbett covered this territory more effectively than I ever could with "Writing A 'Girls In Games' Article", an essay that ought to be required reading for anyone attempting to discuss gender and games. Girl Gamer seems to flow from several lines of thought critiqued by Cobbett, specifically points 3, 4, 8 and 9, with the greatest emphasis on point 4.

Thing is, the idea that women, when expressed as as an arithmetic mean, prefer certain genres, modes and features was not arbitrarily pulled from the ether. Statistically, it has some support, and even for those of us who feel that the American faith in statistics is more often religious than scientific in nature, that support is hard to ignore. But even at their best, statistics are only empirical, prone to methodological error, and are not, in and of themselves, predictive. (That's where "theory" comes in. Creationists beware.) Group identities are useful things, but they are ultimately fictions. I like fiction; fiction can be compelling and useful, and you don't have to be a mystic to understand that things that exist subjectively can and often do affect things that exist objectively. To riff a bit on a quote from a dead conservative/libertarian humorist whose name I cannot, at this moment, find, women are only available in units of one. Out here in the really real world, they're not actually a hive mind.

Which brings me to the Sarah Problem. Sarah is not an average or a composite, but an actual human being, made mostly of water, and capable of reflecting on her own existence. While I haven't verified it directly, her name, physical appearance, and the image she projects suggest that she has two X chromosomes. She is, in short, a woman. And the rules we apply to women in the context of their relationship to videogames do not seem to apply to her. She's not big into The Sims or casual games. She isn't turned off by brutal violence or highly sexualized female avatars. (And yes, sports fans, she's straight. That should save a couple of comment writers a minute or two.) She bought her PS2 before I bought mine, and nearly every time I get into a bloodbath like Devil May Cry, God of War or Resistance, she's already bought, played, and usually beaten it.

This would seem to make her something of a statistical outlier, but I can't sign on to the assumption, implicit in many discussions of gender and videogames, that this makes her experience as a gamer or as a woman less valid. Because, well, she exists. She's a friend of mine. And her experience ought to be part of the discussion. Individual experiences matter. In addition, in a large enough sample group--say, people who play videogames--outliers can be comprised of rather large groups, and sometimes the exceptions to the rule are among the most interesting and important.

The need to create a "feminine space" in videogames, however worthwhile that goal might be, has led to an irritating phenomenon I refer to as the gendering of genre: Halo is for boys, The Sims is for girls. Boys like speed, competition and violence, girls like story, personalization and collaboration. And, if you were to take a poll, that's certainly true for some of them. But things like story, personalization and collaboration are important in and of themselves, not because they might be marginally more likely to appeal to women. We're seeing a great expansion in paidia play in nearly all videogame genres now, due to a combination of market demands and the new creative options available due to advancing technology. The development of new genres is a good thing, period. Will these new genres help developers and publishers expand their consumer base? Who cares? Electronic Arts' bottom line really isn't my problem.

The problem with gendering these aspects of gameplay is that actual flesh-and-blood women do occasionally fall on the "masculine" side of the spectrum, and this creates a conflict in our construction of the topic. If violent, ludus-heavy action games are masculine, then Sarah is something of a ludic transvestite. Whereas before she might have been thought of as unfeminine for playing videogames, now she can look forward to being thought of as unfeminine for playing the "wrong" videogames.

More to the point, treating Sarah's play experience as being "masculine," in the sense of being equivalent to the experience of a male playing the same games, collapses her into a group to which she does not belong. That meatsuit she wears influences her consciousness, her sense of identity, and the way she's treated by others, just as my (marginally different) meatsuit does for me. Her experience might very well be different from that of the "usual" gamer, and for research purposes that seems like it might be kind of important. Yes, it's always interesting to think about what games non-gamers might like to play, and a lot of those non-gamers happen to be women. But if there is some social good to be gained from having more women playing videogames (a question I'll not attempt here), it seems like women who already play and like games in multiple well-established, commercially successful genres would be worth listening to as well.

In Arcanum, female avatars are given a +1 bonus to Constitution and a -1 penalty to Strength. Even in a world of elves and dwarves, default status is issued to human males--white ones, judging by the available character portraits. The discussion of the "female problem" in the videogame industry does not have to function along similar lines. So let's all grasp a firm hold of our undergraduate understanding of the difference between "sex" and "gender," and remember that we don't know much about biology, culture and causality, and that demographic data that's true right now might not be for very long. To pretend otherwise, to reify what might be fairly arbitrary taste issues, would be stupid.