>Virtual Women, Real Annoying

Hey fellas! Are you tired of dealing with actual women? Would you rather spend a nice evening at home chatting amiably with a tiny virtual woman who lives inside your computer instead? If so, would it be OK if instead of resembling any woman you’ve ever met in real life this tiny virtual woman instead acted as though she’d been designed by some dude who’s never actually spoken with a real woman? 

Also, I should add, if you chat her up cleverly enough, she’ll take off her virtual clothes and show you her virtual lady bits. 

If this all sounds like heaven to you, you may want to check out a little “game” called Virtual Woman Millennium Edition. A friend of mine found it on Download.com theother day, and naturally thought of me. The game, such as it is, allows you to create the woman of your dreams. As the game publisher, an outfit calling itself CyberPunk Software, put it: 

By “compete against,” the game makers mean, basically, that you chat with her until she either tells you to fuck off (you lose!) or she takes off her clothes (you win!). Sex, evidently, is something that women own, and the point of dating, for guys at least, is to sweet talk – or wheedle, or con — the ladies into giving it to them. Women “win,” by contrast, when they force guys to listen to their inane blather without giving the poor schmucks even a glimpse of their titties. (I’d like to think that when my dates take off their clothes we both win.) 

I played the game the other night – or at least as much of it as I could stand. The first time, the game crashed before the conversation started. The second time, I played as a raging misogynist and offended my date by calling her a “whore” and a “cunt,” and she left in a huff. The third time, I chatted long enough to convince my date to remove her top. At which point real life asserted its demands, and I set the game aside, never to resume it.

Let’s just say that the conversations I had with each of these imaginary women were something less than sparkling. The woman who eventually took off her top blathered happily away about her hair for a few minutes, then segued into a conversation about how she hated going to new supermarkets because she wouldn’t know where to look to find the milk. She was shallow, silly, and self-absorbed, a virtual incarnation of every sexist stereotype of modern womanhood.  In other words, she seemed to come straight from MGTOW central casting. My “conversation” with her only lasted a few minutes, but it seemed to take forever. If real women were like this, I think even I would consider Going My Own Way. 

As one review on Download.com put it:  

That pretty much hits the nale on the hed. 

So many questions:

Were the makers of this game deliberately trying to make the women as annoying as possible, or do they think women are actually like this? Was the inanity of the conversation a bug – the result of shitty artificial intelligence programming  – or a feature? Probably a bit of both. 

More to the point: who could possibly enjoy a game like this? You’d have to have a pretty low opinion of women to be able to put up with the game’s casual misogyny. But if you hate women that much, why would you want to spend your evening talking to an imaginary woman about shopping and hair? 

Perhaps that’s why the publisher seems to have abandoned the game; the latest update on its web site is from 2008. 

As I’ve pointed out before, a small but significant number of “mansosphere” men are eagerly looking forward to the day when sex robots and/or “virtual” women will give men what they see as a real alternative to real women, thus putting supposedly spoiled “western” women in their place and destroying feminism to boot. One of the many fatal flaws in this scenario is that the only people who seem to be interested in making sexbots and VR women are guys who have no fucking clue what actual human women are like. But, hey, if it gets these guys out of the dating pool, that’s pretty much good news for everyone.