Twit Her

"So let's enjoy, let the X destroy your spinal cord

So it's not a straight line no more

'Til we walk around lookin' like some wind-up dolls

Shit stickin' out of our backs like a dinosaur"

 

Eminem - Drug Ballad

___________________________________________

 

"There's a woman on the outside

Looking inside does she see me?

No she does not really see me

'Cause she sees her own reflection"

 

Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner

___________________________________________

 

 

Hearing some mixed-positive comments about Darkest Dungeon 2 and thinking I might buy it (despite my wariness of cash-grab sequels) I reinstalled DD1 to finally polish off the last few bosses.

 

Occultist / Houndmaster / Man-at-Arms / Bounty Huntard

Look, at least I returned to it faster than I did to Skyrim. And I swear, I'll take the last few steps to BG3's boss fight one of these months.

Yes, it's shaping up to be a bumper year for PC games. Whether it's titles stalled out around 2020 claiming to finally near publication (soon, soon, they swear!) or the twenty years overdue Homeworld 3, or maybe Frostpunk 2 which I've preordered (and which, judging by page hits, a couple of you are also excited about) unless it's drowned out by nuclear war, much clicking shall be heard across the land in '24.

Which means soon after we'll also be just about due for another wave of mass paranoia and vituperation against video games destroying society. In case you haven't kept up, video games have been destroying all of human society constantly for the past forty years, to the point that if you listened to the quackiest loons there shouldn't be two bricks left stacked upright in the whole of the electrified world for Gordon Freeman and Mario's depredations. Though the evils of technology in general do catch their share of flak, you may have noticed it's games specifically (along with porn) that overwhelmingly get targeted by evangelists who run out of bible quotes, political pundits outside election years, journalists on slow news days and any facebooking soccer mom bored whenever the mailman's late stuffing her box.

For hints on why it's so much easier to badmouth some perceived internet vices than others (like, say, social media) let's watch and compare a bit of HBO.

Specifically:

1) Bill Maher bashing men (and specifically men, not people in general) as cowards, slobs, losers, deadbeats and school shooters for five minutes straight with lines like "angry, misogynistic digital eunuchs" over the crime of playing too many video games instead of surrendering our lives to women's control as is our natural lot.

2) Last Week Tonight's 2021 segment on misinformation in non-anglophone social networking, where a hispanic youth cites the prevalence of "'la tia del whatsapp' - it's the aunt that goes on WhatsApp and receives any type of conspiracy theory and forwards it to all her contacts" which John Oliver immediately reworded as generic gender neutral "family members" with "their" pronouns. (minute 9:50)

Do you notice how on one side gender is singled out and exploited for maximum abuse while on the other it's weasel-worded into willful ignorance despite the interviewee's actual wording? Aha, a clew! Maybe disparate demonization is less a factor of the activity itself than whether the sex preferring it is already demonized or beatified in our culture. After all, it is a cornerstone of our society that women can do no wrong. Whenever a gendered issue would reveal a female fault, everyone bends over backwards to avoid ever even hinting at the real culprit. You'll hear entire operas bemoaning the unfair or outright murderous labor practices in the chocolate or diamond industries while studiously ignoring that "chocolate and diamonds" may as well read "left ovary and right ovary".

 

Reuters for example ran a story on the rise of "fast fashion" (a.k.a. cheap disposable Chinese couture that even moths would scoff at) gaining so much traction that it's overwhelming air freight, burning endless jet fuel, proliferating sweatshops and feeding the world's largest and oldest dictatorship's economy while we're at it. The article goes on for two or three pages about such companies as Shein and Temu driving the industry. Yeah, you know who else is driving it? Their customers overseas, the vast majority of which I guarantee you are female, because "fast fashion" is just not in the standard dudebro vocabulary. I found myself surprised to wide-eyed incredulity upon hearing Americans throw out 37 annual kilos of clothing on average, but who do you think is driving that average up? The beer-swilling deadhead that owns three muscle shirts and five backward baseball caps and proudly wears his jeans to manly road warrior tatters? Or his box wine enthusiast girlfriend that drives a U-Haul to JCPenney?

Vehicularly speaking, let's also remember a constant we've been deliberately ignoring for the past few decades, best summed up by Scrubs in its ninth episode twenty years ago:

"You don't want a hundred-pound white girl mad at you. You'll flinch every time you hear a Range Rover."

If men are certainly guilty of buying ridiculous country-fried pickup trucks even though they work in downtown Detroit and never haul anything bigger than a laptop to work, it's women who buy more overbuilt gas-guzzling SUVs (y'know, for those five kids you're definitely gonna shit out once each and every one of you hooks an investment banker) and that's not even counting all the sports cars bought by men to satisfy the female gaze or all the "family" cars bought on a husband's cash but driven almost exclusively by the wife. Or, as news channels so triumphantly trumpet:

"Sixty-two percent of all new cars sold in the U.S. are bought by women, according to research from Cars.com, which also found that women influence more than 85% of all car purchases." And: "Women are less impressed with horsepower and high-speed handling. They want cars that look nice. Styling is important." A needlessly long-winded euphemism for "shallow and impractical" not that you'll ever hear a public figure admit it. The exact same "85% girl power!" statement is held unspeakable in the context of all the waste caused by the auto industry. Why? Well, to quote Reuters again randomly, in a comment that routinely crops up in some form or another in every political campaign, but almost always in the cozily feminine:

"Living in a slum in central India with her widowed mother and two young daughters, Nayantara Gupta says she owes her relative prosperity in recent years to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party."

Politicians have long known that if you get women's vote, you also get men's. We're long overdue to also admit that the economic impetus driving action undertaken by men also comes from female approval or disapproval.

The webcomic Kevin&Kell joked a couple of years ago that even in the absence of predation, overpopulation could be prevented by "male stupidity" showing a typical Darwin Awards hold-my-beer moment. Pretty standard joke. Except males who do not strive to outdo other males, who do not stand out somehow, anyhow, whether by plumage or action, bling or stunt, will not attract mates. Therefore evolutionarily they do not exist. It is female mate choice which has bred that male stupidity into the populace and continues to do so, and female majority consensus which reinforces it by every giggle, coo, batted eyelash and every other minute sign of attention which instinctively validates men's very existence. And by the way, men killing ourselves or each other does precious little to dampen population curves; it only takes one Prince Charming to inseminate the tribe's females, and they're quite happy to wait their turn for a ride. If you don't believe me, ask your nearest rock, sports or sitcom star.

I started this post with Darkest Dungeon, whose narrator gradually confesses his various crimes as you advance through flavor text. Engaging writing and voice acting, but every so often listening to his grating, loquacious, lurid admission of past crimes driven by pride and greed I'd wonder... was there ever any chance at all of this character being female? Of an old woman assuming all guilt over the ruination of your family, its name and the surrounding countryside by her selfish, sadistic and profligate pursuits? Since the same actor/character appears reiterated for the sequel, allow me to posit a "no" answer.

 

DD's Lovecraftian setting steered that train of thought toward a deservedly obscure novel titled The Inevitable Conflict. It's (mis?)attributed to HPL but reads nothing like either his style or quality, aspiring to grandiloquent commentary on race and the sexes (Mongol invasion of a matriarchal America) but crassly, artlessly mangling both with passages like:

"Men must adventure and die that the race may go forward," he continued. "Women must safeguard all that courage and sacrifice have won. Theirs it is to have, to hold and to transmit to the next generation, cradled in their arms and learning from their lips the lessons of patriotism and noble thinking."

Published in 1930, a futuristic caveat about a male rebel overturning and rescuing a matriarchy by masculine open military conflict can certainly be interpreted as a reaction against the then-new fad of chixz0rz voting and flappering, but if so, how pathetic a reaction is it? The male backlash against matriarchy consists of men begging to be permitted to suffer more for women, to give women more, to sacrifice themselves so women can sit on an ever fatter pile of pinched booty. Then again, artless it may be but it did hit upon a central feature of human mentality now declared taboo in polite discussion.

 

You'll notice that despite my stance on gender relations, I don't make a habit of quoting men's rights activists. They're not particularly quotable, and leave it at that for now. I do appreciate though their spreading the term "gynocentrism" for society's fixation on female needs, wants and whims. Sociology aside, on a basic psychological level it succinctly distinguishes that for women not leadership or action but centrality and control embody powermongering. Another webcomic, Selkie, accidentally put its thumb on it (on page #1337 no less) when the child heroine declares:

"I don'ts wants to hurts people. I just wants to stomps arounds and haves everyones worships me."

Great... except worship, stomping, hurting, etc. are not separate issues, but facets of intra and inter-tribal conflict in which violence is supplied to fit concomitant demand. To be worshiped is to outsource hurting on one's behalf. The same knee bent before one's mistress in supplication is the knee crushing the enemy's throat. We have no trouble seeing that for what it is in rare gender-flipped examples like Charles Manson shielding himself behind his groupies. We admit his guilt. Why then turn a blind eye to the dynamic's far more pervasive embodiment in the pampered princess ideal?

 

We know social networking sites are frequented generally by women more than men, in fact by half again as many women as men in the case of sites like TikTok, Pinterest or Instagram. (And that's not even counting hours per day.)  We know that teenage girls are far more likely than boys to report both positive and occasionally negative impact on their lives from such sites, a.k.a to be heavily involved. We know their main appeal, a hypercharged version of the directionless village gossip mill of ages past.

 

And you can see it in daily life as well. Uncharacteristically, I found myself at a local eatery among six men and one woman. Guess which of those spent two hours thumbing pizza grease onto her phone? Ooops, guess I gave it away! (Dose durn tricksy gendered pronouns get me every time.) Last year I spent some time with old acquaintances whose families offered brief glimpses at both the male and female variety of modern teenager. The boy did lobby to play with his phone, but could be modestly cajoled into riding a bike with his friends around the neighbourhood instead. The girl on the other hand was so glued to her magic rectangle of power that she looked as if she were hiding behind a tiny plastic veil the whole afternoon. (Perhaps a more apt analogy than I had intended?)

So sorry but evidently all the social constructionist garbage you can muster, all your multimillion-dollar misandrist brainwashing campaigns still will not change the reliable observation that gossip's more of a chick thing. Does it surprise you somehow that feminine power fantasies revolve not around what they can do, but around how much more entitled they are over others, how much of the world they can claim to have twisted around their fingers, how many eyes gaze and voices speak in their direction?

The princess walks into a ballroom wearing a gown worth more than a house, the latest fashion. She doesn't need to *do* anything. She *is* admired.

The princess is part of every major trend and conversation, at the center of it all. The spider in center of her web, everything must go through her, everyone owes her favors, everyone is emotionally dependent on her.

Maybe it's not quite the same effect, but social ape instinct seems to accept it in chump change just the same.

 

Now consider all the grousing and hand-wringing over the evils of video games must generally imply, interpret or flat-out invent consequences since games by definition occur elsewhere than the real world, while social media by definition is meant to impact the real world. No, teenage boys are not learning how to assassinate people by playing Call of Duty (they're learning it from their drunken army uncles with deer rifles) but real-life character assassination is a Facebook core feature. Over the past years, it's also gotten quite fashionable to bemoan social media's negative influence on society, from making tweens cry about their bad haircuts to staging a deadly serious yet somehow also comically incompetent coup d'etat, to TikTok as a whole being a Chinese datamining scam.

 

Yet where every reactionary outcry against video games will explictly or implicitly always boil down to "GRUNGY DUDE CLEAVE SKULL RAWR NECKBEARDS RAWR EYEBROWS" (even when pushing the male lead's chiseled features) the counterpart social media obsession is never admitted to be a flaw of women. If anything, the harder women dove into chatter sites over the past couple of decades, the harder all mainstream media figures have pushed the "crazy conspiracy uncle" image, terrified of commenting on the empress' new clothes.

When Mormons tried to convert me door-to-door in the Chicago suburbs twenty years ago, they sent a couple of cute teenage girls. Savvy marketing (especially from Mormons, even if they-technically-don't-do-that-any-more *wink-wink*) but they're hardly the only ones. Every political movement, religion, scam, corporation will fid it easier to placate critics and lower everyone's guard via friendly female faces. Why do you think every synthesized user friendly bot voice is female? Who skates by more with unchallenged bullshit claims and claims to your attention? So then, who is re-linking all that misinformation online? Who is spreading mass panic over social media? Is the demographic which predominates those platforms not due some scrutiny?

In fact, after the 2021 armed Capitol insurrection, it was occasionally pointed out that women play crucial recruitment, public relations and organizational roles in such events/groups, which were once again being conspicuously ignored even as images of the "QAnon shaman" flooded every media outlet. Moreover that a common thread in female participants' later court cases was more evidence brought against them from social media, where they had been noticeably more active than their male counterparts to the point of live-tweeting their own crimes. This was, as always, once again studiously ignored by the public at large.

Man bad, woman good; repeat the mantra.

 

Women can do no wrong. Buy what you want, waste however much you want, spread whatever lies you want. Even as social media addicts, we feel obligated to feel sorry for women, despite it being their own instinct driving them to obsession, just as men's instinct drives them to pull idiotic Jackass-inspired stunts. Y'know, maybe it's that video game I just finished skewing my perception, but perhaps there is some horrific, tenebrous, cyclopean and squamous horror at the core of our reality, mis-shaping all we perceive. Except it's no otherworldly entity but our perfectly mundane primitive instinct to protect and provide for women at any cost. We are all the same, at least in this.

 

______________________

 

P.S.:

You can probably tell by the title I initially jotted down notes for this post years ago, before His Muskness rebranded Twitter as X. Not that I ever liked Twitter to begin with; never had an account and I consider it one of the top scourges of the modern world. But "X" is a gigantic leap down in branding! "Twitter" sounded catchy, just goofy enough to instantly feel casual whenever you thought of it (which for most of you is 24/7) and pithy enough not to feel belabored. I can hardly be the only one thinking "X" sounds like a '90s teenager's generically rebellious caricature of badassery, to the point that if Musk didn't deliberately blow fifty billion on a high profile "X-ing a Paragrab" joke, I can't imagine what he was thinking. The platform's moderators should run with that aesthetic and call themselves The Xtreme Darkskull Flamedeaths or some other Y2K-era online guild title.

Anyway, if anyone needs me I'll be at the Sears tower, 'cause the Tower of Willie just sounds dumb.