![marlospkm 0 points 2 months ago As ridiculous as my statement is going to sound, I'm pretty sure that Anita is trying to prevent us from experiencing the joys of 2D women. The kind of joys many Japanese men who've rejected the pig disgusting ways of 3D women already have. There is nothing more frightening to these feminists than the idea of a man finding emotional fulfillment through love of a robot, or the idea of a woman as opposed to an actual woman. Most of society is set up to shame men who don't fall in line, and also fall in love with women. Men who haven't been approved by women are deemed other, and rejected from society. The future waifus, and the Hatsune Miku occulus rift sex experiences take away one of feminism and women's powerful weapons over the male gender. Their dominance over sexuality. Once man is freed from the institutional forces which oppress him, and force him to find purpose in the approval of women, he will be free to pursue his own dreams. Finally men will have no need to fight over women, as they will have something that replaces them the same way robots have replaced the male industrial work force of the world. Wars will be ended, and we will achieve world peace. The masculine will be set free, allowed full creativity, and the world will enter a new enlightened age. We will explore Mars, Jupiter, and the furthest reaches of our solar system. Male and female will be united, working together towards a better future for humanity. But only if we can free ourselves first. permalink save report give gold reply [–]Alzael 2 points 2 months ago I'm pretty sure that Anita is trying to prevent us from experiencing the joys of 2D women. Actually, that's not ridiculous in the slightest. It's a very common thing for feminists.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/joysof2dwomen.png?resize=580%2C558&ssl=1)
This little exchange took place in the Koataku in Action subreddit, Reddit’s main hangout for GamerGaters; I suppose we should give the regulars there credit for downvoting marlospkm’s comment down to zero.
While his comment is just a teensy bit over-the-top, the self-described “red piller” marlospkm (who seems to be sincere) is hardly the only guy obsessed with the allegedly liberating power (for men) of “virtual sex” and/or sexbots. Indeed, this was a major theme of The Misandry Bubble, a weird online manifesto that’s been influential amongst the sorts of guys I write about on this blog; check the archives here for many more examples.
Oh, and he’s not the only guy convinced that women today oppress men with their sexiness. marlospkm, meet Warren Farrell.
H/T — Arthur Chu, retweeting Gameranx editor Ian Miles Cheong (which must be very confusing for the GamerGaters who think they’re the same person). Also posted on The Best of Outrage Culture subreddit.
If men have been replaced by robots, and he’s proposing to replace women with robots, then what’s the point of humans?
And then wouldn’t the female sexbots eventually go off with the alpha factory robots? After all, industrial robots are strong, tireless, dependable, and have a good steady job. Plus, they’re literally hunks. Of metal. I don’t think marlospkm can compete with anti-gravity springs, articulated joints, and laser etchers.
Tessa:
I so want this to happen. But only if they use a suitably steampunk aesthetic throughout the design.
Hi, I’m a first time poster here. It’s great work this blog is doing.
And today’s post captures better than anything I’ve read here, everything the MRAs and MGTOWs and waifu lovers are all about: that feminism would “force him to find purpose in the approval of women” and misogyny leaves a man “free to pursue his own dreams”.
I vote that this is sad. It’s depressing.
Do these boys ever stop to think that maybe pursuing your “own dreams” is what women really want from you? That, and not calling them “pig(s)” and “disgusting” and maligning their desire to have the same rights as men. Chicks hate that!
But even beyond that, why can’t these boys pursue their own dreams? Particularly excluding the “purpose” found “in the approval of women”? If you have interests above and beyond yourself and your penis, why would you not spend the available moments of your day/night/weekend focused on that? Who, I implore you, is really stopping you?
Or maybe it’s because you’re dead inside, empty and directionless, and you can’t bear holding yourself responsible for your own shitty life, which would be the first step towards turning your life around? Maybe that’s really why you didn’t get to be the astronaut or scientist or warrior for peace you dreamed of being when you were a kid.
Whew. Sorry to be so dark first time here…
Is this for real? I mean, the whole thing is so utterly ridiculous that I have to consider the possibility that the author wrote it in jest. I thought that the first two paragraphs were comedy gold, especially the bit about the joys of Japanese men who have rejected the pig disgusting ways of 3D women.
If you are talking about capitalism, I agree. If not, I’m lost.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants ,
You had me at gravity springs.
http://futuramagallery.deep-ice.com/Bender%20Rodriguez%20Gallery/joker_bender.gif
Yes, it is terrible, because you’re judging an entire medium of expression by cherry-picking the problematic bits out and pretending the medium exists only to serve those bits. Done.
How about acting to change the problematic bits of a medium, rather than trying to jettison it entirely? How about giving video games as a medium the same respect that you give literature or film?
How about actually specifying what particular things you find horrifying, and not pretending that if someone disagrees with your conclusion that video games must be banned, they’re actually disagreeing with your premise that gratuitous violence (against men or women) is bad?
@kirbywarp: But if they burn it all to the ground, they don’t have to do as much work, or examine anything about themselves.
Gotta admit, the idea of sex bots does kinda appeal to the drone in me. Go to work, come home, sex robot, watch TV, repeat.
I could see anti-porn feminists having a problem with sex bots because of the same legitimate beefs they have with porn, but sex Bots would ultimately just be another tool for those of us who long for laziness.
Kinda weird to associate social revolution and space travel with what’s ultimately, conceptually, an awesome masturbation toy.
For some reason, I’m liking the image of sexbots (of all assorted gender types) Going Their Own Way and abandoning Earth and humanity altogether. Giant space fleets of emigrant sexbots traveling the stars, while the surviving humans goggle with a wild surmise. “Well, what do we do NOW?”
It could make a good Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip.
Also, anyone who sees nothing in video games but violence and misogyny is either not looking very closely or is absolutely committed to a previously established point of view. Or, heck, why not both?
Lea | March 16, 2015 at 11:11 am
Can this be a thing we say to so many of those “I just popped in here to tell you y’all gonna miss me because I’m going my own way!” trolls?
Pelagic | March 16, 2015 at 12:08 pm
Is it just me, or does this entire argument smack of “video games makes kids violent!”?
I’m going to be honest: I love violence in video games. It’s a great stress reliever.
I love being able to go into Saints’ Row III and smacking someone upside the head with a giant floppy purple dildo-bat. It feels good. After I play a game like that, I feel relaxed, like having an orgasm without all the cleanup afterwards. The more stressed or irritated I am, the better I feel after the game.
It’s like virtual equivalent of punching a pillow and pretending it’s the source of your anger. You wear yourself out after a while, and you can see past your anger to more rational lines of thought.
But I also love puzzle games with no violence in them whatsoever. I recently played a demo for a game called The Talos Principle (No, it’s not related to Skyrim, but it has a lot of Portal elements) where you play as a robotic life-form in a simulated world where you solve puzzles for some voice in the sky (who’s actually nice to you. I’m instantly suspicious. I need my voices-from-nowhere-monitoring-my-progress to be condescending. GLaDOS has ruined me) and there’s no violence in that game at all. Just a robot moving mechanical bits around to solve puzzles. You’re the only sentient thing in that game that you can see, and there’s no guns or even a physical combat mechanic.
What you’re doing is going “Look at all these violent games! Down with all of video games!” which is Jack Thompson bullshit to the nth degree. You’re ignoring everything about video games and only looking at the small section of violence, even ignoring that that violence does have a place in the world.
Rather than going “Video games cause misogyny!”, maybe we should be focusing on making games that aren’t as misogynistic, while still enjoying games that are problematic and understanding why they are so.
I mentioned Saints’ Row earlier, that series is VERY problematic. I still love it though, and would still play it. (And it’s less problematic than GTA as far as I’m concerned. Your character can be female, and SR treats prostitutes way better.)
Shit, we’re talking about Skyrim all over the place, don’t you think we find some parts of Skyrim problematic?
@Leda Atomica
“I’ve heard this before – the idea that wars are fought because women. It has been a way for MRAs to blame women for wars started by men, making it seem like women are practically eliminating countless men with the power of, well, existing with vaginas.”
Yeah, honestly it kinda reminds me of the common antisemitic arguments about how all the bad things are secretly engineered by scheming Jews (ref.: Mel Gibson’s drunken 2006 comments on how “…the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”). I’m not saying that MRAs are all antisemitic, but it’s a similar sort of scapegoating (and I actually do think a lot of MRAs are quite antisemitic).
@ikanreed
““2D women” instead of “fictional women” or “cartoons”, highlighting an almost sort-of reverse objectification. The inability to distinguish between women and objects, either way.”
Yeah, that’s what struck me about these comments, too. Like, it’s not ‘fictional’ vs. ‘real,’ or ‘virtual’ vs. ‘physical,’ or ‘digital’ vs. ‘human’ or anything like that – it’s ‘2D’ vs. ‘3D,’ as if the only difference between an imaginary woman on a screen and, well, an actual woman is that one appears as a two-dimensional representation and the other exists in three-dimensional space, nothing else. And honestly, even if this whole post is fake, I think that that is how some people see things.
RE: ParadoxicalIntention
They do have a CGI underage girl they use to catch sexual predators
That was really interesting! Thanks for the link.
RE: sheehank
Sucker. My dad started his own business. He shovels snow for a living now.
Ooh, ooh, I can play that game too! I worked for others. I’m on public assistance now.
Isn’t it fun when we can pull our own personal stories out of our ass and act like they’re universal lessons as to appropriate behavior?
RE: Lea
If the problem is that women are too gross and sexually dominate, why not just love your fellow men?
They exist. They’re called the g0ys. You don’t want more of them, BELIEVE me.
RE: Binjabreel
the atmosphere was so thick the Russians could just chuck a lander at the planet and not have to worry about slowing it down enough to land.
Oh, history. Never stop being hilarious.
RE: Pelagic
I am having a little trouble with the idea everybody here supports an industry grounded on doing away with the idea of human dignity and nonviolence.
Oh please. I have long since left video games, but it’s also responsible for Roberta Williams, Portal, and Tetris. “Doing away with human dignity and nonviolence,” my ass. For chrissakes, it’s a MEDIUM, not a genre. If you have an issue with M-rated FPS, go right ahead, but don’t pretend it’s all video games ever. I was raised on Frogger. I play stuff like Loved and Air Pressure now.
No conversation about falling in love with drawings would be complete without this music video being mentioned.
Also, I should point out that I also play American McGee’s Alice games. You play a mentally ill young woman who stabs everything that pisses her off, with lots of gore. It is cathartic as hell too, since it’s basically a game entirely about survivor’s guilt and stabbing your mental illness in the face.
Let’s be honest, folks, who many of us mentally ill people WISH we could stab our mental illness in the face? *raises hand*
These guys are so, so obsessed with their boners. It’s not enough that their entire philosophy is built around the best interest of their dicks. They then follow that line of thinking to what almost anywhere else would be too absurd for a strawman: that anyone opposing their way of thinking is out to get their penises.
Sexbots will achieve…world peace…
Dafuq did I just read?
Eh, it’s hard for me to get too lathered up about video games.
Before video games, Dungeons & Dragons was going to destroy civilization, and before that, TV was violent and going to destroy civilization, and before TV it was movies. Before that radio programs were violent, and before radio it was novels. Before novels, of course, there were those awful book things, that set down violence on dead trees, and before that there were those rotten plays, always talking about sex and murder and then showing it.
After all those moral panics over various media I just don’t have a lot of energy left for righteous indignation.
*raises hand*
Well, given that the same industry has also created the solitaire mahjongg game that I love to play on my iPad — a game which is totally nonviolent and nonsexist — I find it kind of hard to support the idea of scrapping it altogether.
Plus I’m old enough to remember when the number of video games could be counted on one hand, and ALL of them were nonviolent and nonsexist, and all were wildly popular with persons of all genders.
Call me crazy, but I like to think that such things are still possible because they have been all along.
I suspect that this dude’s perception of women NPCs as things also extends to real life women, who are obviously just 3D faulty NPC characters. Buuuut, just for a second, let’s give this guy the benefit of the doubt.
Fictional characters ARE things. They don’t have agency (though as an occasional writer, it sometimes feels like they do), they’re under the complete control of their author or creator or whoever made them up. But that’s the thing. They’re under their AUTHOR’s control, not everyone and their dogs’.
To use this dude’s metaphor, it’s not like getting rejected by a cupcake. It’s like picking up a lemon-flavored cupcake and going WHAT THE FUCK? WHY ISN’T THIS CHOCOLATE? IT SHOULD BE CHOCOLATE, THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. While standing in a bakery where there are dozens and dozens of chocolate cupcakes and like, maybe three lone lemon cupcakes.
But hey, angry dudebro, guess what? You CAN bone Sera. It’s called fanfiction, and you can write as many stories about Sera slavering over your boner as your little heart desires. Or hell, maybe you can even make a mod for it. But you just can’t expect your wank-fantasies to be canon. To continue the cupcake metaphor, you can go home and bake as many chocolate cupcakes that look like that one lemon cupcake you wanted, but you can’t tell the bakery to change all THEIR cupcakes to chocolate specifically for you.
Re: pelagic-
Okay, this says to me you know actual fuck all about both games, and how modeling behavior works.
Ahem!! Despite the fact that Bandura (of Bobo doll study fame) demonstrated that seeing a person engage in violent behavior increases the odds of the viewer repeating that behavior, he also demonstrated conclusively that the consequences and results of that behavior matter more.
A well designed game often does have consequences for violence. There are even games that reward you handsomely for finding innovative ways to avoid combat entirely, either with cleverness or dialogue.
Further, even more recent studies have indicated that playing a violent game can actually cause an increase in empathy responses, depending on the context, and that it can decrease the bystander effect, increasing the odds that the individual will come to the aid someone even if other people watching don’t.
TL;dr- humans are fucking complicated, so you can fuck right off at all.
Wait, did someone seriously just make the argument that because GTA has sexist elements we need to ban Kuru Kuru Kururin? I just had a nap – am I still in the dream?
@Lith – Congratulations on your big leap into self employment! Best of luck to you. 🙂
@Pelagic – I really don’t think video games in general are the problem. I play games every day. I only have one game where I fight human being shaped opponents. Most of the time I am saving the world from monsters. I also do a lot of interactive novels. I would never intentionally hurt another person in real life.
Guys, guys, did you know that HITLER once wrote a book? And that there are some books out there that encourage/glorify violence and other icky things? Clearly the solution is to BAN ALL BOOKS. /sarcasm