One Foot Forward...

And another step back. I always find it funny that when women aren't allowed to do something or go somewhere, it's sexist, but when it happens to a man it becomes progress.

As a man, over the course of my life I have been asked to think of things from a woman's point of view more times than I can count. "Imagine yourself as a woman in 13 century France," "imagine yourself as a woman in Victorian England." Never have I been in a class where we were asked, "Imagine yourself as a large, sweaty viking in 7th century Sweden." While there are exceptions to this, in my experience, this one-sided way of thinking and being taught has led to surprisingly large lack of knowledge about men and the male experience in women today.

Don't believe me? Last year in my Literature By Women class, I and the two other males in the class had to explain to the entire class (of 34) the concept of "urinals". Perhaps my favorite quote comes from a shy girl who timidly raised her hand and asked, "So it's like a trough?" I then proceeded to tell her that troughs are in fact used in many restrooms, particular at sports arenas. This is in no way the only case of a lack of knowledge about the male experience I have encountered in my time at UPS. It is, in fact, bad enough that I have been working on a lecture on manliness as a concept, as of the the women I have polled on this campus, none of them have understood it.

I don't have any more time to talk today, but I'll be back tomorrow to continue this subject. If you're really good and leave some comments I may even have a teaser of my lecture on manliness. Also I apologize for the shittiness of these past two posts, I haven't had the time to write posts that I normally enjoy, which allows for things like proofreading.

P.S. 5 days until brawl.

Woopsie

Apparently I forgot to write up my post last night, so um, sorry. It's really kind of sad considering I spent most of the day thinking about what I wanted to write about as well as lining up the articles that I was going to discuss. In all honesty I wanted to stop talking about men and women, but then monday morning I found three new articles that were written in response to Hymowitz' article (or at least mentioned it). Three three articles: Kathryn Jean Lopez on Juno, Kate Muir's The Dark Ages. and Amanda Marcotte's response to these articles.

I'm not going to go really into depth on these articles (though I feel each one is worth reading for one reason or another), but I guess I can give a little bit of my thoughts (if you want more of my thoughts just ask me questions in your comments). 

Lopez makes a solid argument and a nice review for Juno unless you've seen the movie (or in my case guessed the plot and talked for a couple of hours with someone who had seen it without them realizing that you hadn't seen it, just for kicks), in which case you realize that Lopez focuses her article a surprisingly large portion on one of the smaller characters while completely neglecting to mention the other male who is interested in Juno (the pregnant teen), but isn't a complete douchebag (Marcotte brings this up much more eloquently, and she also brings up an interesting note on the douchebag character that I hadn't thought of). Lopez also seems to fall into the pitfall of using fiction as evidence or support for things in real (like Hymowitz though not nearly as absurd).

Kate Muir starts off her article sounding completely ignorant of what gaming and men are really like, but towards the end of her article she actually seems to get a little more intelligent and actually seems to understand that men are losing all of the things they can do to show off their manliness (sports is really the only area left relatively untouched), and that games are a new venue for this (honestly, what's more manly than chainsawing your way through an alien army trying to destroy everything you care about, chainsaws are manly, killing armies is manly, and protecting your home is manly).

Finally, Marcotte's article (post?) was something that I wasn't expecting, what with female gaming, especially female gaming that isn't in the casual market (Bejeweled, Solitaire, Tetris, Mahjong). Marcotte makes some generic comments against feminism, though her wording sometimes gets a little awkward and it was hard to tell if she though feminists hated men or not, but that isn't the real meat of her article anyways (despite its title). The real meat of Marcotte's article, at least for me, came in Marcotte's insight that if your boyfriend or husband or whatever is sitting around playing XBOX all day, that you can go do something yourself (outside interests for women? Why I never), play with him as if he's playing Halo 3 it definitely has Co-op (two players or more working together to complete objectives, assuming you don't want to kick his ass which is always a possibility. P.S. Most guys will stop playing games when they start losing a lot, so if you "really" want him to stop playing, just hop on and beat his ass down) and you might even have some fun, or if he really is just playing games entirely and completely ignoring you, then dump his ass. At this point in my life I'm used to women not realizing (or wanting) that they can play games with their guys rather than just sit around and watching them but I just don't understand this complete ignorance of the fact that if they don't like a relationship they can just up and leave the guy hanging. WOMEN, you are much hotter than guys, every guy in a relationship that I know of thanks the stars that their girlfriends don't realize how much better than them they could do (though most of my friends at least have good personalities and intelligence to boost them up). And for god's sake if there is something in your relationship that you don't like, tell your partner about it, if the two of you can't work it out, then LEAVE!!! I'm tired of seeing battered women who don't leave their terrible boyfriends/husbands, because they think they can't do better.

Sorry for the massive asides and terrible grammar above, but, well, I just got a bit riled up. My point is that women have a lot more on their side, and a lot more options than they think they do (at least in my experiences with women). And for pete's sake ladies, go out and have fun!

-Cory Ragsdale

P.S. After I get out of class I'll be writing another post today, as an article just came out that may help explain why women don't play games as much and may explain exactly why I'm so interested in finding one who does.