An evolving series of questions about race and gender. A magazine for straight white males and their allies to advocate for gender and race equality with self-awareness of privilege, but without self-loathing.
Penguin Toss is available for your
mobile device. Just don't be a dick.
I am competitive. If a board game has the slightest bit of skill involved, I spend the entire game focused on trying to win. I take the rules out of the box, try to exploit every loophole, and figure out how to come in first. When I'm riding my bicycle to work, being passed sends me into a huff of concentration to try to catch the passer, who fends me off with the exuberance of Lance Doping Armstrong. Once, I spent several hours playing an arcade game where a polar bear (North Pole) used a large fish to bat a penguin (Southern Hemisphere) until I beat the distance record. That's right, a polar-bear-hitting-a-penguin-with-a-fish distance record mattered enough to me to waste many hours, and many more dollars. Obviously, this is not healthy, but it is very masculine. All three of the dickheads of masculinity are shoved into this kind of competitiveness.
It's Not So Much About Winning, but Yes It Is
First off, I wanted to subjectify myself as the person who was in control of the polar bear fish batting penguin game. If I won, I won. It's pretty straight forward, but it also defeated the point of playing games, which was to hang out with other people at Dave and Busters, while having fun. I immediately thought of the other people around me batting their penguins as competition, in other words, thugs to be defeated. But the most important part of playing games and sports as a dick/masculine man, was that I got a consolation prize when I won. I may still have been beholden to extremely wealthy patriarchs for my basic food, housing, and healthcare needs, as they continued to fight any effort to clean up the environment while selling me stuff that I didn't need and made me less happy... But by golly, my polar bear sure hit that penguin a long way with that fish. If I just kept focusing on riding faster, winning more, and getting more of these consolation prizes, then I could forget about the true harm being perpetrated on the world by the patriarchal corporatocracy.
Competition is Fun for Everyone! Being a Dick is Fun Just for You.
I think most people have had healthy competition at some point. I used to love riding single track with my future partner. As we competed, we grew closer until eventually we decided to raise children together. When
These U.S. Sailors are playing kickball
with local kids.
competition is done correctly, it is fun, and it brings people closer together. Butif you find that you need time before talking to other competitors after the game, maybe you should sign up for a nightlight boccie ball league, or a hard drinking kickball team. I hate to break it to you, but you may not be a liberated competitive person. You may just be a dick.
U.S. Marine Diaper Derby
At some point I realized that, amazingly, most of the women in my life were content to play a little, have fun, then stop. While playing ultimate Frisbee or soccer, some women may have been rubbish, but when it came to being happy and free, they had me soundly beat. So, I started answering Man Up, with Man Back, Dude. Man Back. Or, when the double entendre was appropriate, Man Down.
The prime example of manning back is racing a toddler. When you footrace a toddler, you win when you think it's good for the toddler, and you lose when you think it's good for the toddler. Here, you are playing the game for the human interaction. You aren't playing for the love of the game, because who the fuck cares if you love a stupid game? You are playing for the love of a person, and that's what counts.
In Bronies -2, I Had Few Conversations About This Quote
" Stop teaching your girls about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, and The Hunger Games in an effort to liberate them. "
Children don't recognize The Hunger Games
as social commentary, because of the
plethora of glorified battle sequences.
It is okay to read the Hunger Games. If your children tell you they want to see the Hunger Games, don't dismiss the idea out-of-hand. The franchise can be considered a critique of American militarism. The stories identify the line between physicality and violence, and deliberately cross that line. If violence is physicality with the intent of hurting another person, then clearly we in America have some forms of entertainment that are violent, and to the extent that we do, can we justify those entertainment forms? Did our constant justification of entertainment violence enable us to justify violent action in Iraq in March of 2003? Does our paranoia that leads to NSA spying, TSA craziness, and black lists arise from our constant playing out of destructive and violent narratives in popular culture? These are legitimate questions raised by The Hunger Games.
by Franc1NE, this image is represen
tative of the cosplay surrounding
The Hunger Games.
However, if viewers were truly interested in The Hunger Games as a social critique, the popularity of nonviolent protest against violence and militarism would have increased after the first film was released. Sadly, the only thing that has increased as a result of The Hunger Games, other than the bottom lines of multinational corporations, has been registration in archery classes to practice wielding violence(or at best provide a nonviolent outlet for violent urges with roots in the franchise). The Hunger Games is a franchise dedicated to entertainment violence weakly justified on the back of a critique of entertainment violence. If your child isn't able to grasp this irony, then they aren't ready to understand the Hunger Games as anything more than propaganda for the military industrial complex.
A Debate with a Welfare Libertarian (Mainstream Democrat from Gen X)
Gen X: I'm not going to censor my child's entertainment.
Me: It's not censorship. Censorship is when you remove something that you deem to be bad for society. Simply being conscious about the material that you procure for your child isn't censorship. It's citizenship.
Gen X: I don't decide for my child what he should read, watch, or listen to.
Me: If you don't, then multinational corporations will, and they've spent trillions of dollars over decades figuring out how to get your child to do exactly what they want him to do.
Gen X: Art is too important for me to foist my opinions on my child.
Me: When you procure The Hunger Games, or bondage child pornography for your child, you are indoctrinating them with your opinion of what is art by making an affirmative gesture to support it.
Gen X: Oh, calm down. It's just some fluffy entertainment. It's not bondage child pornography. It's The Hunger Games, a book written for children.
Me: But I'm arguing that justifying violence in our society is what leads to things like domestic abuse, rape, many assaults and murders, as well as inexcusable military actions and racist policing policies. The Hunger Games is an exercise in justifying violence, so it could be a root cause of these problems.
Gen X: So, you're saying I shouldn't let my child see The Hunger Games.
Me: No. I'm saying if your child isn't able to grasp the irony of violent entertainment as critique of violent entertainment, they aren't ready to understand the Hunger Games as anything more than propaganda for the military industrial complex.
Gen X: I'm not going to censor my children's entertainment.
Eye roll provided by Buster Keaton.
Addicted to Entertainment
Why is this so frustrating that I turn into Buster Keaton even thinking about it? Gen X never debates on the merits of the argument because they are too busy fighting the hypothetical. I am inclined to say that is because they know I'm right, but that would be unfair. They can't know that I'm right because they can't even get to the point where they are considering the idea that militaristic media contributes to social problems. The noteworthy thing is that their response is so remarkably similar to the response of addicts when they are confronted with facts that disrupt their addictions. It's kinda like the hysterical Portlandia sketch below.
Circular Arguments: Their arguments revolve around themselves and almost always start out where they began.
Unrecognized Contradictions: They argue that films are important pieces of art, but the very notion that films or sports they like may be making society worse leads them to spasms of "Calm down, it's just entertainment." Which is it? The same way that an addict can hold two contradictory reasons in their heads for why they take drugs (I am overworked and bored), Gen X has no problem arguing that The Hunger Games is an important social critique and a fluffy action film.
Denial: The whole point is to get social critics to stop criticizing the entertainment that Gen X enjoys. Sometimes, the braver welfare libertarian will debate the merits of media culture for a few sentences, but inevitably they revert back to the circular logic, contradictions, and tactics designed to shut the argument down. Several Gen Xers have admitted that they were not willing to come along with me on my critique, because they didn't want me to spoil the fun, which is hysterical because I find it more fun to critique the media than to passively experience it.
I haven't done enough reading yet, nor thought about it enough to conclude for certain that society is addicted to entertainment. However, with the availability of corporate commercialism at our fingertips 90% of the time on our computer/phones, and hundreds of cable channels beamed into our home at any given moment, it seems like the seeds of an opium-war-style societal addiction have been laid. If that is truly the case, it is more important than ever to be conscious about the entertainment that we provide for our children. And no, that is not censorship.
First off, I wanted to subjectify myself as the person who was in control of the polar bear fish batting penguin game. If I won, I won. It's pretty straight forward, but it also defeated the point of playing games, which was to hang out with other people at Dave and Busters, while having fun. I immediately thought of the other people around me batting their penguins as competition, in other words, thugs to be defeated. But the most important part of playing games and sports as a dick/masculine man, was that I got a consolation prize when I won. I may still have been beholden to extremely wealthy patriarchs for my basic food, housing, and healthcare needs, as they continued to fight any effort to clean up the environment while selling me stuff that I didn't need and made me less happy... But by golly, my polar bear sure hit that penguin a long way with that fish. If I just kept focusing on riding faster, winning more, and getting more of these consolation prizes, then I could forget about the true harm being perpetrated on the world by the patriarchal corporatocracy.
