By David Futrelle
So over in the Men Going Their Way subreddit, the fellas are talking about what to do with “leftover” — i.e. unmarried — women after men finally step up and take the vote away from women, who are always voting for the wrong things anyway.
Apparently unable to understand that most women have jobs, the MGTOWs naturally conclude that in their version of utopia the single ladies — deprived not only of husbands and their resources but of Big Daddy government as well — won’t be able to support themselves. But the MGTOWs, kind ghouls souls all, don’t want to let them starve!
One brave MGTOW has a solution:
(Note: in the preceding quote “CC Rider” refers not to the famous song but to the infamous “cock carousel.”)
Naturally, other MGTOWs are enthusiastic about Mr. BCPrepper’s ingenious proposal.
BCPrepper goes on to praise himself for his “humanitarian” solution to the Leftover Woman Problem.
Such thoughtful fellows these MGTOWs are!
There was a raid going on at the suffragette memorial gym while I was there, and a little boy who wasn’t part of the demonstration shouted “I got ‘im!” and collected high-fives from his family. This promoted the half-dozen or so middle-aged women in my group to pull out their phones and go Pokemon hunting.
I didn’t get ‘im.
*The gym at the suffragette memorial, rather.
I have read The Iron Dream and enjoyed it, even while recognizing the satire–the Golden Age generation of pulp SF writers tended to skew rightward in their politics, and Spinrad was not gentle with them. It’s not for nothing that Heinlein is second only to Ayn Rand as a heroic literary figure among the Libertarian types.
The part I liked best was actually the alt-history scenario that framed it all, as expressed in the postscript section: The USSR, expanded by the conquest of Europe, versus the Japanese Empire and the USA. Spinrad could have gotten some hellacious alt-history stories out of that concept.
@Falconer Hey it looks like we are in the same town!
@dslucia
I am not saying that games cause fascism or reactionary ideas. I am making the point that most of these people are so far removed from reality, they are romanticizing worlds that could never exist.
I was curious about that as most of what he does that I’d come across has had nothing to do with Gamergate as he’ll periodically review games, he created a comedy character that’s kind of an overblown parody of gamers (which generally, regardless of the quality of the humor, he’s the target not others), spoken frankly on his struggles with his obesity and mental health issues, given vlogs on suicide prevention (including sharing his own struggle with it…his “please hold on” vlog came across as really genuine and trying to encourage those who needed it to get help), and the like. So now I know more. Sad that he’d done that in the past, root for him as he continues to work on his issues, but am a little saddened that he’d taken the position he did.
@ Falconer
Some of us are well over 60 and love nothing better than a big family D&D game, where my kids, their spouses and their kids get together and play. We have more fun than you can imagine. My eldest is a hell of a DM.
Also? You get a big internet cookie, flavor of your choice, for the Firesign Theater reference.
Fantasy tropes compatible with fascist thinking (off the top of my head):
-All-white fantasy world
-Nonwhite savages (eg, Dothraki)
-Always-evil disposable mooks (eg, orcs)
-The glory of war (tabletop games)
-An era of greatness that is now past (eg, Numenor)
-Rightful ruler returns the country to greatness (eg, Aragorn)
-Superior race (eg, wizards)
-Damsel in distress and other tropes subjugating women
-Corrupting evil that must be destroyed
-Corrupting knowledge that must be relinquished, in particular (eg, Prospero)
Not to say that any fantasy with any of these elements is fascist, but they could be used to support tenets of fascism.
@dslucia
About the fact that games don’t make people violent.
YES.
EXACTLY.
Death first, but I’d have to be taken down.
@SFHC
How did you get an Arceus?
Re: Pokemon Go raids, I recently spotted the (locally) legendary senior citizen lady whose level is now 38. She was attending a Tyranitar raid.
These fools can’t even spell collapse. In my personal post-apoc-fantasy I would hunt them down and steal all their resources and womens! Hah.
Having kids singeled out to be your wives whilst still in the womb isn’t a tiny bit paedophile is it?!!
@IP
Oh, through last year’s wifi events. ^^;
Hello.
Yeah, it is clearly incestual ! It is more horrible than creepy.
They are just like the damn Ushiromiya Kinzô.
How much perverted must they be to even thinking about this kind of possibility ?
Have a nice day.
– Kupo
Damn. The comment section should really have a “like” function 😀
@SFHC
Why do I always miss those? 🙁
@Otrame: Thank you! I didn’t think anyone would get it.
I do hope my sprouts like D&D. Right now they think it’s just about rolling dice, which they are totally down for. But they are also 4 and they still think hanging with their old man is the bee’s knees.As it
is, what I can manage right now is me and two other dads meeting at Panera’s at the crack of dawn on Saturdays for a few hours.
@Katz, in the D&D mode, there’s seizing territory and looting the natives, which I have only recently come to realize is very conquistador-ish, but may stop at imperialism rather than extend to full-on fascism.
Nope, it shouldn’t.
I’ve read “Iron Dream”. The part that surprised me was how closely it conformed to Heroic SF/Fantasy conventions while simultaneously telling a distorted account of actual Hitler’s rise to power. I think Orson Scott Card was the only other writer to pull that off.
My favorite nasty detail in the ‘editor’s afterword’ was that SF convention cosplayers liked dressing up as Sons of the Swastika. At the time it was written, that was an unlikely spectacle.
@Vanir85
I disagree. An anonymous system where any drive-by troll can artificially inflate the score of other trolls? no thank you.
@ EducatedRedneck:
My concern, and I think that of others here, is that there is no established correlation between enjoying fantasy or roleplaying, and being a fascist or approving of reactionary ideas. And there is absolutely no causal link between those things. One doesn’t lead to the other, in either direction.
A lot of people like fantasy, or RPGs (fantasy or otherwise), and are utterly opposed to fascism and reactionary ideas; maybe just many, perhaps most. What evidence links those things? What polls tell us about the demographics? Even if such evidence existed, that’d still just be at best correlation, and correlation can be found between all sorts of things. It’s problematic to assert sweeping associations between unrelated things.
Check out Spurious Correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) sometime for some great examples. E.g. there’s a very strong correlation between the per capita cheese consumption and the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets.
But (even though correlation is not causation, and one can find crazy correlations in all kinds of places) I sincerely doubt there’s any correlation whatsoever between liking fantasy and/or RPGs and liking fascism or reactionary politics.
So… the fantasy is
– female slaves impregnated “by someone else”. Let’s guess who gets to choose the someone else, eh?
So… female slaves exchanged amongst the masters for rape.
– Then (assuming the women survive pregnancy and birth without any medical care, because of course these MGTOW’s don’t know how to care, or how to do obstetrics)…
… either it’s a girl who will be raised in total obedience to be a “wife” – which appears to mean “female slave who (possibly) doesn’t get lent out” – and the master gets to decide how soon her “wifehood” begins.
Or it’s a boy, in which case the master gets to, let’s say, abandon it on the hillside for the crows, or quite possibly kill and eat it.
Or more likely make the mother kill, cook and serve her own offspring.
I’m way past the stage where I’m captive wife or captive breeder material, but I DO know a lot of plants to forage. Some are good to eat, and some are really seriously not.
If it’s a boy it will have to be gifted to an elderly pederast to teach it “The Ways of the World” in the Greco Roman style as championed by Milo.
Falconer: Oh definitely; in RPGs and adventure games, there’s the whole “everything is mine and I go around and take it from the NPCs” thing. Indeed, there’s the whole concept of NPCs as a class of Not Real People. (But, as you say, more imperialist/autocratic than specifically fascist.)
Did I mention “white person/human comes in and rules the brown people/non-humans” (Danaerys)?
Collateral Thought: Thanks for linking to a logical fallacy, always a helpful contribution to any discussion, but the deep role of mythologizing in fascism isn’t a spurious correlation, it’s a well-established historical fact (Wagner, for instance).