I’m with Mighty Ponygirl: This article by Rachel Shukert about how Rock Band saved her marriage was a nightmare. I enjoy writers willing to hang out all their personality flaws for the world to see, but it’s also amazing to me how some of them can describe themselves so well and not realize that these are the sort of soul-destroying personality flaws that will cause them massive problems. Shukert realizes, to a degree, that she’s a nagging, clingy mess, but she doesn’t seem to realize that this is something that is a major problem that can’t be fixed with a video game.
It’s too bad, because I was pretty eager to read the story, as I am both a fan of the video game in question and have a fantasy rock band with my boyfriend called Shitbird. We also have a band with a rotating cast of friends called Cleveland Steamers.* I can testify to the fact that there’s something very socially redeeming about the game. But Great Cat, even correcting for hyperbole, Shukert has it all screwed up and it wasn’t a breezy, fun read. She was making me mad.
Two points of exposure to the widespread stoner masculine culture this weekend: Watching Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay and watching some folks play the new Grand Theft Auto, which is based on a fakey version of New York City. It’s probably kind of hard to define the stoner masculine culture, and not everyone who enjoys its products are stoners or even men, but it’s something you know when you see it. It’s products that are designed with this widespread audience in mind: Young men who bask in modern bachelor culture, with heavy doses of porn and marijuana smoking, usually to a soundtrack of alternative rock and hip hop. To say this is not to diss it—this particular cultural strain has many positive values that lead to all sorts of excellent entertainments. There’s a hefty sense of humor and an anarchic spirit that has given us many wonderful things, from video games for adults to the Gen X comedy stylings of everyone from the South Park guys to Mike Judge. It’s a culture that’s become so ubiquitous that many of the things that have spawned from it have only marginal relationships to their origins. Video games for grown-ups have grown so popular that you don’t even think of stoner culture when you think of a game like, say, my obsession Rock Band. Irreverent Gen X comedy has become disassociated from this culture, to the degree that shows like “The Daily Show” can exist without much reference to their “South Park” forebears.
So I had the interesting if rare experience of being held up as “one of the good women” that can be used to bash other women. Reader Cola sent my post mocking poor K-Lo because she blamed feminism for the perceived dearth of men who wanted to settle down, get married, have kids, and give up all fun in part of the rat race struggle for suburban lawn perfection to the gaming blog Kotaku, who published it as a counterpart to all the articles they’ve been running from women who latch onto video games as the ultimate symbol of male irresponsibility. The irony, she is delicious, since K-Lo and all those other conservative women who run around trying to blame absolutely everything on feminism are doing so in a direct attempt to curry male favor. This whole link is a mixed blessing. On one hand, the female gamers there seemed to appreciate the sweet relief from woman-bashing posts about how women just don’t understand, man. On the other hand, I’m disturbed that such a stereotype is so routinely believed in, to the point where my post is framed as the exception to the rule.
But what’s really funny is how the stereotype that feminists are scolds completely confused some men who want so bad to write off women’s equality as some sort of de facto drag on their pleasures. Women who whine that men don’t fill some Father-Knows-Best role are hardly feminists, and K-Lo, who suggested that men who refuse to play Ward Cleaver are the direct fault of feminists who don’t entice men with submission, are openly hostile to feminism. This commenter, desperate to believe that it’s feminism that’s the bad guy guilt-tripping him about his video game consumption, just decided that it was me who wrote K-Lo’s whine, so that his worldview that posits that feminists are the hateful scolds wasn’t disturbed. It’s not that feminists don’t get tired of the “man-boy” thing, but it’s not that we don’t want men to be playful. We just expect that they understand that it’s not women’s job to clean up after them, and that they don’t whine if they don’t a devout, submissive woman to fetch their drinks while they play Xbox.
First of all, I haven’t posted a new book club because of the holiday. But it occurs to me that we could do a new one for the new year. Possibilities: on the non-fiction front, Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank and on the fiction front, The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta. Which would you like it to be? Also, for those interested in feminist history, I’m reading Susan Brownmiller’s memoirs right now and should have a review up.
And damn Carrie Brownstein for being a marvelous blogger on top of her musical talents. Or thank her, actually. This blog post examining whether or not you can really divide people into gamers and non-gamers when video games and in fact games themselves are everywhere is pretty damn good. Thoughts? Is there such thing as a “non-gamer” these days, at least in the under-70 set?
When Guitar Hero III came out, I expressed a lot of dismay at the way the new team that designed it caved into the urge to defang the female characters from the earlier games that apparently, despite being animated beings that don’t exist in the real world, were too much of a threat to anxious masculinity and had to be pornified in order to calm anxieties. Ethereal and cold Pandora was eliminated completely, hellbeast Casey Lynch was femmed-up and bleached blonde with explicit language about how she learned her lesson about being such a scary lady before, and Judy Nails, the pop punk goofball somehow gained 3 cups sizes, lost half her shirt and instead of having animations like smashing her guitar or hopping around with excitement, just vamped around stage instead. Violet nailed this tendency to put threatening female characters in their place in these sorts of entertainments:
The unwritten but unsecret rule in Hollywood, as in the rest of contemporary Western culture, is that if it’s female, it’s gotta be fuckable. Exceptions can be made, such as in the case of outer space creatures (Alien, for example, and while I haven’t seen the sequels I don’t believe the alien ever appears in stilettos and thong to do battle with Sigourney Weaver in a vat of baby oil, though I could be wrong), but these are rare. A powerful female who can’t be reduced to a butt naked fuck-me Barbie doll is a noxious and unnatural thing, too awful to contemplate, like Hillary Clinton or Janet Reno. So instead of Grendel’s Mother the Monster of the Mere, we get Grendel’s Mother the Super-Hot Naked MILF with Huge Breasts and Stiletto Heels That Appear To Be Growing Right Out Of Her Feet.*
My semi-AWOL status is likely to continue; Marc and I have had so much fun playing Guitar Hero II that we got the midnight release of Guitar Hero III last night. On the way home, Marc remarked that the game has really crossed the gender line in popularity, and I noted that it couldn’t hurt that the female characters in the game are remarkably objectification-free. The designers took the daring step of creating the female characters in the exact same way they created male characters, which is to model them off real people/types you see in the rock world. The singer seems modeled on Ani Di Franco. There’s Pandora, who’s the Bauhaus-style Goth chick, Judy Nails, the punk chick that looks like a cross between Kathleen Hanna and Jane Wiedlin, and Casey Lynch, who is clearly modeled on Ruyter Suys of Nashville Pussy:
Suys plays in her bra a lot, but she’s no passive sex object. In fact, she’s scary aggressive and the animators really captured her fuck-you attitude in Guitar Hero II. And all three women have normal-looking bodies, even. The game is really welcoming to women in that it doesn’t make you feel that you have to compromise Teh Rawk with Teh Twittery Sex Object to be a female guitar hero. And I knew that the new game was being designed by a new team (since the old one is busy doing Rock Band), and there was some fear that they wouldn’t carry on this casually non-sexist sensibility to the new one.
The verdict: So far, a mixed bag. The new designers wisely decided to slavishly follow the old game’s aesthetic, so most of the changes are minor, which is a good thing. However, they gave into this strange urge to tweak Judy Nails (made her more goth, as if that made her cooler, which is something that makes exactly no sense) and worse, the threateningly fuck-you, aggressive, half-naked hellbeast Casey Lynch has been cleaned up, with straight blonde hair and her character descriptions says something about her realizing she needed to be a bit more polished and feminine to really win them over. Now she looks less Ruyter Suys and more some groupie hanging out at a Poison concert. *SIGH*
I was pleased, however, to see that they did decide to inject some racial diversity into the character options. From the initial offerings of characters you can play, you have a chance to play a character modeled on Jimi Hendrix and a Japanese woman who apes the aesthetic of Shonen Knife. That tickled me, so I made her the guitarist for my band Pussy Oversoul.* My delight was softened, however, by the unnecessary racist joke in her character description that says something about how she put down her violin at age 3 to pick up the ax. Seriously, it’s like one step forward, two steps back sometimes.
All that said, if you want real analysis of these issues and video games, Mighty Ponygirl has a great blog. And reviving a question she asked on her blog: What song would you like to be able to play in Guitar Hero? I’m dying for Purple Rain.
*Zuzu: I told you I’d name a band that one day.
