Before he decided to attach himself to the #GamerGate “movement,” Breitbart writer and all-around douchebag Milo Yiannopoulos took a certain pleasure in baiting gamer “nerds,” a demographic he once described as a bunch of “pungent beta-male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year olds.”
He’s not the only self-appointed #GamerGate savior who doesn’t seem to have much respect for the group he’s ostensibly championing. Over on Reaxxion — the atrociously written pro-GamerGate game site run by pickup guru and non-gamer Roosh — one writer implores fellow gamers to quite literally put down their controllers and pick up weights.
In 5 Reasons Why Gamers Should Life Weights, Alexander Anderson urges gamer nerds to become gamer jocks, and not just because regular exercise is good for your health. In Anderson’s mind, weightlifting nerds can also challenge the stereotype of gamers as “socially awkward, passive, uncool, and physically unappealing” nerds by not, you know, embodying the stereotypes so completely themselves.
Go to a gaming gathering event and pay attention to the other people around you. Look at how they dress and how they communicate with each other. Pay attention to their body language, tone of voice, mannerism, and what they talk about. Then go to a sporting event and repeat the process. Which group of people would an average person prefer to be around?
HINT: You’re supposed to pick the sports fans.
The solution? Lifting, bro!
If all gamers start lifting weights, it will help combat the public perception of gamers as unsociable cave dwellers.
And even if Anderson can’t convince every World of Warcrafter to hit the gym, at least those who do lift will have “an edge over other gamers.”
Humans subconsciously prefer the company of those who are bigger, stronger, and smarter than the rest. You will stand out among your gamer friends if you are the only one in the room with muscles. Your social standing will increase, your health will improve and you will gain more confidence from regularly exercising.
Huh. I thought GamerGaters wanted gaming to be a “safe space” for nerds, not another arena in which jocks get to lord it over them.
Pocket Nerd @ 10:58
I’m sure it has nothing to do with this being a tantrum of those who want to be regarded highly by toxic masculinity that they feel were robbed from them because they assumed all the girls were intentionally denying them sex in school to sleep with all the jocks who were masculine and now that they’ve deemed gaming (or at least certain parts with right-wing jingoistic murder) masculine they’re far more worried about women liking it (and therefore making their backup masculinity nonexistent (because if girls like it too, then it cannot by definition be manly by toxic masculinity rules) than they are by the comfortable toxic masculinity supporting paradigm of being a jockish lout making you more masculine (as long as you don’t do anything fey like liking girls as actual people or are gay or serve as anything other than the Charles Atlas parody).
Because one asks them to challenge the very system they’ve been destroying their entire lives and self-esteem for whereas the other fits into their preconceived worldviews and reinforces the beliefs that let them hate.
Overall, it’s the same dynamic that ends up occurring in PUA culture. It’s supposedly all about wooing women and getting laid because getting laid supposedly increases your masculinity by toxic masculinity standards (as long as it is adequately dismissive of love and respect and looks like a porn movie where only the man’s pleasure matters (and everyone is super heterosexual)), but ends up becoming all about publicly treating women poorly and driving them out of what these men have decided is “their” space, because that is a much easier and more consistently successful way to be deemed “manly” in dude spaces. Which sets up a race of douchebaggery because no one wants to be the relatively “girly one” of the group with all that entails, so each one shows how much more vile and hateful and rapey they can be to women to show each other up (we can see the exact same process with Gamergate with all the showmanship and trying to spin calling someone vile slurs as some heroic (aka manly) deed).
And it becomes really hard to solve the problem because the more vile the toxic masculinity believers try and live up to the standards they’ve set for the group (and believe are natural laws dictating their inherent social position in society) and enforce it, the harder it is for any one member to get off the fail train or slow it down or not drive themselves into a corner trying to live up to the bullshit, because of how much more horrible the price becomes for being the “girly one” in the group’s eyes.
It’s sick and wrong that so many men, especially young men, feel driven to this state and get it into their head that this regressive bullshit hateful way of living is the only safe way to survive being a dude when being a dude (and especially a heterosexual white cis dude) is such a privileged way of living one’s life and as such become dangerous to anyone who isn’t all that who are around them (we see the end-game to a lot of this toxic shit in cases like Eliot Rodgers where women are blamed for not giving him all he “earned” by fully investing in toxic masculinity and so escalated to the point where mass murder felt like the ultimate way to “level up” in “manliness” (because violence against the other (especially those deemed feminine) is the ultimate way to upgrade your “manliness” according to this toxic culture (see why body-count-heavy action movies and FPSs with super high body counts are considered masculine and why all these dedicated obsessives seem super at home with fantasizing about various forms of violence against women and gay people).
TL;DR Toxic masculinity makes men who buy in into worse people.
Archery. I don’t know about sports fans in general, but archery people are great.
As a gamer, I’d rather be around the crowd at a gaming “gathering event” than the typical crowd at a sporting event. At sporting events I always run into the same three obnoxious types: The Screamers, the Rowdy Drunks, and the Aspiring Pugilists. There is much cross-over between the three types.
I’d FAR RATHER hang out with the crowd that gets into arguments over who would win, Superman or Batman, or that sings the Python Spam Song, than with a bunch of guys who punctuate the day with occasional drunken roars, shoving matches, and even fist fights.
I never heard of a drunken melee between Comicon cosplayers, or of Magic the Gathering hooligans, or of a Trekkie Riot before.
I always think I should train up my basic strength and agility, and learn to fish and hunt in case of some kind of apocalyptic scenario, but I’m too fundamentally lazy. If I could just tap in a cheat code and be awesome at something, those are the stats I would pick, though. Ooh, maybe parkour as well. Just any skills that would allow me to survive the Hunger Games, basically.
Thing is, PUAs are the real biggest nerds, obsessively trying to calculate and hone some kind of faultless “instantly get sex” formula. They don’t have any charisma because they think it’s something that comes out of getting hench, or from cheesy lines read disjointedly from a script, based on Hollywood jock stereotypes.
And yet they still fail, almost as if physical appearance, interests and character traits are three totally independent variables or something.
Meanwhile, most of the geeks I know are into really awesome stuff like table-top gaming, battle re-enactment*, hilariously awful sci-fi B-movies, roller derby, and crafting. And they’re all totally developing close friendships and falling in love with each other over these shared interests, and because they’re all intelligent, funny, passionate people who spend a lot of quality time in each others’ company.
*And believe me, running around wearing several kilos of chainmaille and swinging solid metal objects around every weekend will get you pretty fit. Screw the gym.
I agree with y’all and I think that article is just so stupid. I have a MUCH better way to change the perception of gamers as a bunch of unsocial cave dwellers… BE MORE INCLUSIVE.
But that’s exactly what #gamergate is against!
After some pondering, underwater hockey.
Magically good at… Hm. It’d have to be one where lots of practice only give incremental gains. I think parkour is the one. It’s fun and functional and becomes an easy underpinning for other stuff, but it feels to me like progresd with practice takes forever.
Maybe horseback archery because it combines horseback riding and archery… I like practicng aikido so waking up a master would reduce my joy of it and I’m not sure you can really become good at lifting.
Possibly motocross because it’s fun but fucking up kind of hurts.
A former work colleague loved horse riding. She said it got her out in the fresh air, she could eat whatever she wanted, and was in regular contact with the biggest pet she’d ever had. She eventually got into dressage.
I’ve been on a horse once. The horse won.
Anastasia @12:57
Buuuuuut then I’d have to shaaaaare. It’s not special unless I’m the only one allowed to use it and no one else can touch it… especially not some gross girls with their gross cuties who say they’ve been playing video games since they were kids. Waaah, proving my infantile worldview wrong is misandry! (/gator)
These are the same people who complain when parents and kids play the medium because it makes their games less “hardcore” and who really do think corpse-humping a character you shot makes you the equivalent of John P. Ramboface, Destroyer of Worlds.
In short, they hate the end of the stereotype because they are the stereotype and they worry if the stereotype ends then people will stop treating them as the be-all/end-all of gaming and they might have to suffer through occasionally seeing an ad with a non-sexualized woman on it in their Steam Specials.
I must not be human, then. Yes, I like the company of smart people, but bigger and stronger, especially if it’s men? No, on the contrary, and particularly if we’re talking weightlifting types. I don’t like being around men that big at all.
Magically good at sport? Horseback riding, or fencing, I guess, but I’d as soon just hang out with horses. But I’d also have to be magically able to GET to places where I could do that. In reality, I’m just not interested in sport.
Oooh! Fencing! That’d be great. I’d love to get magically good at either main-gauce+rapier fencing or shortsword+buckler. That’d be fun.
Yes, I remember when I had to choose between being friends with two different people. It would have been a hard decision if I hadn’t found that measuring tape.
To answer that sport question… (sort of) ninja’d by Buttercup Q. Skullpants but I would definitely go with free running. Especially if the lessons were as fun as this:
Wait, are we allowed to take lessons in this hypothetical? More importantly, why am I not learning to free run already?
And non-ironically, I love doing shot-put because it is the one place where my butchness is celebrated rather than treated as an excuse to dismiss my womanhood.
I’d magically un-destroy my ankle so that I could get back into soccer. I’m not much of a sports person, but I loved soccer. (The destroyed ankle had nothing to do with sports – climbing a wall and slipped. =P)
If I could be instantly great at anything, it would be freerunning/parkour. Not going to happen though, even when I was in shape, I was always a klutz.
I’m just mentally riffling through the male halves of the truly successful and long-lasting relationships/marriages that I know, and I have to say that only a very very small minority have so much as picked up a weight in their lives. It’s certainly a conspicuously smaller percentage than the ones who are interesting conversationalists and good listeners.
I’m all for regular exercise, though – mine’s vigorous dog-walking. Sometimes DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH.
Every single time I see a parkour video it makes me really, really want to learn parkour.
Just, wow. How does that even work?
Horseback riding is too fun to become magically perfect in. Plus, you also have to have a magically perfect pony as a partner, and magically perfect ponies don’t exist/would be so boring if they did.
My boy (well, my mom’s boy) was a character: you could have a perfect looking, glorious ride IF he decided he liked you, and IF you asked for everything in all the right ways, and IF you were on the guard for when he decided it was his turn to drive, so you could tell him politely and immediately that no, you aren’t allowed to drive yet.
So much fun. Like that one time my mom took him into a western trail course, and he ate one of the obstacles. Everything else in the pattern was perfect because he was just so tickled about his impromptu snack, but carrying around a scarecrow arm from the first obstacle for the rest of the pattern is still an instant disqualification…
Still, most hilarious pattern ever. Never have I wished more for a video camera.
I want to have the skills that elite gymnasts do. It would also be cool to be good at quidditch (sp?). Only the real kind with actual flying broomsticks. Not the imitation kind that people do in real life.
Thus Spake ZaraAltoFronto:
Hunting and fishing aren’t bad, but I suggest if one wants to be prepared for a collapse of civilization, one should learn to farm. I’m not a doomsday-prepper myself, but I’ve always been mystified by the “survivalists” who stockpile guns, ammo, and gold against whatever apocalyptic scenario they think is just around the corner. Okay, so you’ve got steel-reinforced doors and a hidden room with a cache of assault rifles — what are you going to eat? A few bites of gold bullion a day?
Since the self-proclaimed “preppers” don’t seem to have thought this through either, I can only assume their hobby is less about “preparedness” and more about a wank fantasy in which they get to be Lord Humongous. LARPing would be cheaper, and probably healthier too.
LMAO!
My magic sport would be cross country skiing. Because I stink at it, but it’s really fun to get out on a bright winter day. But not downhill, because falling down at high speed is something I’m already very good at, thankyouverymuch.
I loved horseback riding as a kid, even when my nag (he really was a nag, so that’s not a neg) threw me. The last time I got on a horse, though, I got thrown and landed bad and broke some stuff.
Parkour and fencing and jousting would all also be awesome, though, so I’m kind of torn. Also, being a ninja would rock.
I love stories like this! 🙂
My magical sport would be running. I have always sucked at running, but I’ve always wished I could do it well, instead of feeling like I was dying after 2 minutes.
@pocket nerd
I’ve assumed that in a apocalyptic scenario Gold would become mostly worthless.
Its heavy as hell and has almost no inherent value aside from being a good conductor of electricity
XD
I should mention that I lift weights regularly. Maddie’s quite heavy.