(no subject)

[kradeelav]

there was a line in an article i read recently - it wasn't a bad article per se, mundane statistics about gamers and not too opinionated, though I thought a little culturally sloppy in that it liked grouping vast swaths of gamers together (regions/gender/generations/etc) -

- but there was a line in there with a jab at women with parasocial relationships with (game) characters, which is interesting because the topic doesn't even normally come up on the radar of most people in the news/academic circles. also interestingly this was the first time i saw it paired with a jab at male gamers who waste time on games (yay #equality amirite).

(i don't even mind it when the criticism is legitimate, just make it even-handed research, you know? anything in excess ain't good for you. too much excersising can wreck your body as much as too little, same as dedicating too much time to one thing while neglecting other areas of life. )

but anyway it's not the specific criticism of the former (it existed twenty years ago in a much more vicious way it's gonna exist twenty years from now lol sigh) as much as the hnn, gendered(?) tone difference that bothered me. something about the slightly off topic tone really reminded me of echos of historical criticism -- like for an article writer that positioned himself as ~*In*~ and ~*hip*~ it was jarring echos of something old and dusty in a skeevy way?

so i poked around a few 'history of criticism against women reading' articles (i really need to add a few of those books to my censorship pile), and damn. yeppppp literal exact same arguments/tone LOL. choose your poison of "damages women's mental health", to "distracts them from more important work" to the oh so classic "degeneration of culture" line. this downloadable pdf had the best quoted historical lines (also just a great read), though this slate article wasn't bad for a real quick wikipedia-level summary that had a more macro global take.

what's old is new is old etc.

Comments

[sleepyquail]

This sounds so infuriating and weird! How exactly did they say someone can have a parasocial relationship with a videogame character?! Don't you need some sort of real life person on the other side for it to be a parasocial relationship? God, shit like this pisses me off. Like you say, it's just the same regurgitated "think of the silly little women!!" arguments in an endless cycle.

[kradeelav]

hahaha the memory's starting to slip now but i think it was mostly in the 'they're wasting time on games/characters and not Actual Relationships' which sounds more lolworthy summed up here vs in there.

mind, i've seen some pretty far outliers like one lady way back on deviantart who was pretty dang serious about being pregnant with sephiroth's child to the point of posting sonograms (and even more sketchy ones during modding a dA club), but those are exceptions and it's usually pretty obvious they're dealing with Life Stuff.