Quote: (09-05-2012 05:38 PM)Blackhawk Wrote:
I'm convinced that half the articles on jezebel are written by male feminists with pen names.
It's an echo chamber of un-thought.
Yeah, the women there are too busy writing serious intellectual articles about Kim Kardashian's ass and Ryan Lochte's grill.
Jezebel and Reddit are great tools for identifying nerdy internet lingo, and completely excising them from your vocabulary. "This, and again, THIS." 'Fail' as a noun. 'So much win.'
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"It's hypocrisy. How come they get women-only clubs and we don't get men-only clubs?" Because they're set up for different reasons, that's why. Male-only spaces are about excluding women from power, and making little boys whose balls evidently haven't dropped feel special. Female-only spaces are about creating a place where they are safe from vermin
Didn't realize MikeCF was referring to something that bad... (My emphasis)
Man, I'm waiting for the day this fucking coward hands his laptop over to a dude at Best Buy to get fixed, and they unleash the FBI on his ass after finding terabytes of child porn on it.
Whatever. Gamers are alternately the biggest white knights ever, or for reasons not cited in the article, man-children. I imagine guys are threatening to rape chicks on Xbox Live, but it's all in the spirit of shit talking. Guys don't see women as competition, so instead of threatening to kill them like they would men, they threaten to rape them. The ultimate act of submission is death for men, but rape for women.
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A Call to Arms for Decent Men
Ernest W. Adams
Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We're seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They're as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They're causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this.
Why us? Because it's our job to see to it that a boy becomes a man, and we are failing.
When we were little boys we all went through a stage when we said we hated girls. Girls had "cooties." They were silly and frilly and everything that a boy isn't supposed to be. We got into this stage at about age seven, and we left it again at maybe 10 or 11.
Then puberty hit and, if we were straight, we actively wanted the company of girls. We wanted to "go with" them, date them, and eventually we wanted to fall in love and live with one, maybe for the rest of our lives. That's the way heterosexual boys are supposed to mature, unless they become monks.
My point is, you're supposed to leave that phase of hating girls behind. Straight or gay, you're supposed to grow the hell up.
What might be temporarily tolerable in a boy when he's nine is pretty damned ugly when he's fifteen and it's downright psychopathic when he's twenty. Instead of maturing into a man's role and a man's responsibilities, a lot of boys are stuck at the phase of hating girls and women. The boys continue to treat them like diseased subhumans right through adolescence and into adulthood.
Men have more power than women: financially, politically, and physically. What distinguishes a real man from a boy is that a man takes responsibility for his actions and does not abuse this power. If you don't treat women with courtesy and respect –- if you're still stuck in that "I hate girls" phase –- then no matter what age you are, you are a boy and not entitled to the privileges of adulthood.
If you want to have some private little club for males only –- like keeping women out of your favorite shooter games –- you're not a man, you're an insecure little boy. A grown-up man has no problem being in the company of women. He knows he's a man.
If you freak out when a girl or a woman beats you in a game, you're not a man, you're a nine-year-old boy. A man doesn't need to beat a woman to know he's a man. A man is strong enough to take defeat in a fair game from anybody and move on.
If your masculinity depends on some imaginary superiority over women, then you don't actually have any. Manliness comes from within, and not at the expense of others.
And if you threaten or abuse women, verbally or physically, you are not a man. You're a particularly nasty specimen of boy.
When this puerile mentality is combined with the physical strength and sexual aggressiveness of an older boy or an adult male, it goes beyond bad manners. It's threatening and anti-social, and if those boys are permitted to congregate together and support each other, it becomes actively dangerous. Yes, even online.
Of course, I don't mean all boys are like this. Most of them get out of the cootie phase quickly and grow up just fine. But far too many don't. If we don't do something about these permanent nine-year-olds pretty soon, they're going to start having boys of their own who will be just as bad if not worse, and life will not be worth living. Life is already not worth living on Xbox Live Chat.
In addition to the harm they do to women –- our mothers, our sisters, our daughters -– these full-grown juveniles harm us, too. A boy who refuses to grow up has lousy social skills, a short attention span, and a poor attitude to work. Furthermore, all men –- that's you and me, bro –- get the blame for their bad behavior. And we deserve it, because we've been sitting on our butts for too long. We let them be bullies online and get away with it.
Some of you might think it's sexist that I'm dumping this problem on us men. It isn't; it's just pragmatic. Women can not solve this problem. A boy who hates girls and women simply isn't going to pay attention to a woman's opinion. The only people who can ensure that boys are taught, or if necessary forced, [Basil Ransom: Hmmm, and exactly what do you want to 'force' boys to do?'] to grow up into men are other men.
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Let's use our superior numbers and metaphorically moon the boys who can't behave. They're social inadequates, immature losers. Let's tell them so, loud and clear, in front of their friends.
Shut them up. The right to speak in a public forum should be limited to those who don't abuse it. James Portnow suggested this one in his Extra Credits video on harassment. Anyone who persistently abuses others gets automatically muted to all players. The only players who can hear them are those who choose to unmute them. Or another of James' suggestions: New users don't even get the right to talk. They have to earn it, and they keep it only so long as they behave themselves. This means a player can't just create a new account to start spewing filth again if they've been auto-muted. Build these features into your games.
Take away their means. If you're the father of a boy who behaves like this online, make it abundantly clear to him that it is unmanly and unacceptable, then deny him the opportunity to do it further. We don't let nine-year-olds misuse tools to hurt other people. Take away his cell phone, his console and his computer. He can learn to behave like a man, or he can turn in his homework in longhand like a child.
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Impose punishments that are genuinely painful. This suggestion is extreme, but I feel it's both viable and effective.
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"It's hypocrisy. How come they get women-only clubs and we don't get men-only clubs?" Because they're set up for different reasons, that's why. Male-only spaces are about excluding women from power, and making little boys whose balls evidently haven't dropped feel special. Female-only spaces are about creating a place where they are safe from vermin.