Video Game Violence, Censorship, and Sexism

Arguing against banning video game violence but arguing for a ban on animated child pornography is sexism.

The reasons that we censor pornography have always been motivated at least partially by sexism. There is no other way to explain it. How is it that consensual sex is so horrific that some consider breastfeeding in public as obscene, but partaking in a simulation of the quartering of a woman dressed in highly sexualized clothing is not? How could it possibly be that the act of creating life is obscene, while the act of ending life is not?

The obvious answer is that our narratives have convinced us that women hold the power in consensual sex, but clearly it is men who hold the power over violence.

J. Scalia points out in his recent opinion on age-limits for the purchase of violent video games that literature is full of violence from Homer on down to today's copy of the New York Times. Isn't it also full of sex? Wasn't Lott fucked by his daughters (Genesis 19:30-36), and didn't the men of Greece rape the Trojan Women at the end of the Illiad? And yet, interactive depictions of these acts are sold in XXX shops to people 18 and over.

J. Scalia also argues that pointing out how much video game violence is racist and antisemetic (as J. Alito does) makes a case that it is art and therefore free speech. But an inordinate amount of child pornography is sexist. Does that mean that child pornography is art?

In an earlier case that banned animated child pornography, despite the fact that they cited no studies indicating that animated child pornography harms children, they were willing to believe that it would feed pedophile's urges and make them more likely to victimize children. However, they are unwilling to look at the ample studies that prove categorically that violent video games increase violent behavior, decrease helpful behavior, and have led to countless assaults.

I'm not saying that I think we should regulate video games, but if we do not, we must not regulate animated child pornography either. But of course that will never happen because sex is so insurmountably abhorrent that even consensual loving sex is often an exception to the first amendment. On the other hand, violence is necessary to keeping women in their place.

Violence is necessary because we need to train little boys, and I mean tiny little boys who have no reason to hate anything, to grow up into killing machines. We need to convince men that killing one another is a feat that not only is acceptable, but is rewarded on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the Fourth of July and by saying, "Thank you for your service" when we encounter a professional killer on the street. I do not mean to trivialize the service of our men and women in uniform. They are professional killers, but if we are to live in an imperfect world we have to be able to protect our nation. However, we must keep their service in context.

These violent video games are aimed at boys because we need to train them to believe that it is exciting to kill and be killed. In video games, it is easy to say I "shot him" and he is "dead," and even I am "dead" or I am out of "lives." It is all so trivial, fun, rewarding, and exciting that the military itself uses these video games for training and recruiting purposes, and sponsors the creation of these video games. We are training boys to live lives of violence. Violence requires victims. Many of these boys are not able to find legitimate victims so they turn to one another, or their wives, or their children, or people in the street, or themselves.

And the reward is even better than it seems at first. The reward for all this violence is the continuation of the gender hierarchy that puts men on top, keeps women on their backs (and I do mean it that way), and aligns the world all right (and I do mean it that way). If the little girls flinch when the little boys cheer, it just proves to us all that little girls and the women they grow into are not cut out to do what needs to be done to run our country, our world, or our society. Girls need to be protected, so they should play Dora the Explorer, or at worst Super Mario Bros., but leave the violence to the little boys who are "just naturally drawn" to beating prostitutes to death before decapitating another victim.

The worst problem with this holding is that it completely misidentifies and aids the true threat to our freedom of speech. We are no longer living in a world where governments (Egypt, China, and Iran) are able to control what we say. We now live in a world where the most active censors are corporations, the same corporations that are making these video games. Sometimes corporate censorship is the kind that we know traditionally, as is the case with Apple and Amazon.com when they ban objects from their platforms because they claim they are obscene (who gets to say what's obscene and how come it's always gay smut?).

More often, corporate censorship is the marketing of certain (usually sexist) products, while making other products mostly unavailable. They say that they market what the public wants, but if that were the case nobody would ever pay for marketing (I'll let you puzzle that one out). In fact, they spend millions attempting to get us to want certain products. Corporations use advanced psychological techniques that are as effective as brain washing, and they target children whose brains do not fully mature until as late as 25-years-old.

Which is what these corporations do with violent video games in California. They rate the game M for Mature, and recommend it for users over 16, but then market to 12-year-olds who buy the games by walking to their local Game Stop and then hiding it until late at night during a sleepover (where your child visits and plays it even though he doesn't own those kind of video games because he is a good kid). The question in this case was not whether the video game manufacturers should be able to sell to kids, or even market their mature products to kids who everyone admits are too young for the game. The question in this case is should those kids have to ask their parents for permission to buy those video games as they have to do already for pornography. The question is whether our puritanical society thinks consensual sex is worse than murder. The answer is clear. They are both terrible evils... [Excuse this interruption, I'm being handed a message from our sponsors. "Violence is awesome!!! Rip off some fucking heads!!! Rip them off!!! Yeah!!! Rip that hot bitch in half!!! Yeah!!! This rocks!!!"]