February 21, 2009

• Current Absurdities

   

  One of the featured blogs on Xanga’s front page today is a rant against a particular new video game I had never heard of, RapeLay.  In hysterical tones — various forms of text emphasis as well as exclamatory punctuation and forceful, frenzied verbal expression — the writer declares her judgment against Japan — the entire nation — for this abomination.  There are clues within the text suggesting that this woman considers herself a feminist and thinks the existence of that game is a feminist issue.

  I am impelled, under the circumstances, to wonder if she would feel as strongly about a game in which players raped men.  Would she enjoy playing a game in which the challenge involved going around raping men?  …Japanese men?  I had been briefly tempted to ask her, and got as far as clicking on her comments.  The first one I read was from a man who implied that in the light of this information he now feels better about playing Grand Theft Auto.  For the information of those out of that particular loop, GTA involves a lot of killing, the victims or enemies one kills are predominately male, and all the sex, with girlfriends and female hookers, is consensual.

  I was reminded of the very vocal movement, prominent during the ‘nineties, to suppress violent video games on the theory that they promoted actual violence in real life.  After much discussion and consideration, my family concluded that violent games are more likely to harmlessly express and sublimate violent urges than they are to stimulate them.  It works that way for us, and for others we have observed and consulted.  We think that a person who would take video game violence out into the real world would have had some serious mental health issues even before exposure to the game.  Since rape is about violence and not about sex, I assume that the same conclusions would be valid there, too.

  One thing is obvious:  if there were not a market for such games, nobody would waste resources creating them.  If nobody has created a game for female players to turn the rape around on men, they might be missing out on a business opportunity.  A while back, my half-Japanese friend Lyn, who lives in a suburb of Tokyo, told me that the feminist movement in Japan is much more rancorous and contentious than was the American women’s liberation movement of the ‘seventies.  That makes sense, given the greater degree of female subjugation traditional to their culture.

  It also helps explain the popularity of rape fantasies among Japanese men.  Lyn said that many women were treating men with great contempt, exploiting them and inflicting public humiliation.  That could be expected to arouse backlash from men who have for centuries enjoyed the privilege of exploiting and contemptuously humiliating women.  On a superficial intellectual level, I think I understand that Xangan woman’s offended feminist sensitivity.  I just think she has taken it to an absurd extreme, in a mistaken direction, on a false premise.  …but I’m not a feminist any more.  I now support equality for all.

  As I started writing this, Doug awoke on the couch just off my starboard beam, and I took advantage of the opportunity to consult my video game expert.  I asked him if he was familiar with a game in which the play focused on men raping women.  He informed me that it is an entire genre, a subset of eroge (エロゲー), or hentai-based video games.  He considers eroge to be, “too much effort for too little payoff.”  He doesn’t have a favorite genre and enjoys playing everything but sports simulations and straight racing games.  He says, “Basically, I enjoy playing games that let me do things I can’t do in real life.”  Me, too.
  

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  Much of the news I hear lately involves the nation’s economic difficulties.  NPR has been giving the story some personal touches by talking to people about the specific ways in which it is affecting their families.  Early on, it dawned on Greyfox and me that we have some big social advantages now, conferred on us by virtue of our having grown up in families who lived below the poverty line.

  He mentioned last night that he had heard or read about previously prosperous people who had lost their incomes, and could no longer afford to feed their families.  Reduced to going to a food bank for groceries, they would walk in, look around, say, “I can’t deal with this,” and walk out empty-handed.  If they lack such a simple skill as asking for charity, how likely are they to be jumping into a dumpster to steal a little salvage?

  In most jurisdictions, it is technically illegal to take trash unless you are doing it in your official capacity as a sanitation worker.  The rationales for such laws include issues of privacy (bullshit) and public health (probably a valid issue for the ignorant and careless masses).  The privacy issue is bullshit because even if one doesn’t consider the presence of dumpster divers, everyone presumably knows that cops routinely search through trash for evidence, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together would assume that garbage collectors skim off the best of the mungo they collect, and have to look through the trash to find it.

  Greyfox‘s forays into the dumpsters at Felony Flats are aided by garden tools that let him handle things remotely.  Personally, I prefer wearing waterproof gloves and getting up close.  Fortunately for me, Greyfox recently salvaged several hundred protective vinyl gloves from one of those dumpsters.  …but I digressed a little there.  I had meant to say something about the people who are inconvenienced or even suffering because they now have less money to spend on luxuries, not about those of us who have traditionally benefited by sifting through the useful things they habitually throw away.

  Maybe I should stick to writing what I know.  I know that we have not felt the economic pinch yet.  Our deadbeat clients still don’t pay us for our services — nothing new about that.  Those clients who do pay us are not paying any less than they used to, and the proportion of clients who say they will pay and then don’t has not risen noticeably.  Greyfox’s business remains as marginally profitable as ever.  Apparently either the Alaskans who buy guns and knives haven’t felt the pinch yet or, if they have, economic insecurity is impelling more people to purchase weapons.

  My being positioned for and skilled at wild foraging, and Greyfox’s access to abundant sources of salvage, as well as his retail acumen and Doug’s practical skills and talent for crisis response, have set us up to get through hard economic times with much less stress and strain than is being experienced by more prosperous Americans.  We’ve marvelled all our lives at those people who toss out all that good junk with which we supplement our incomes and enrich our material existence.  Even if their currently reduced circumstances result in a reduction of the mungo stream and more competition in the dumpsters, we will muddle through.

  

  • 4:16 pm
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