The same thing happened to Marilyn Manson, who was blamed for the Columbine school shootings, even though the shooters themselves hated him and didn’t listen to his music. One media report simply decided Manson was to blame, and the rest followed suit.
When feminist critics began taking tentative steps into the sphere of games criticism, the new allegation was that even though games can’t make you violent, they can make you sexist. These were not psychologists or researchers who had data to back their claims. They were “gender activists and hipsters with degrees in cultural studies,” according to feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers.205 They didn’t know much about video games, but they knew cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist oppression when they saw it.
What I call the left-wing war on fun has a long academic pedigree, stretching back to the rise of “critical studies” in the late 60s and 70s. Critical studies viewed art, literature, and entertainment through only one lens: how it critiqued, or failed to critique, dominant “power structures” (capitalism, Christianity, patriarchy and all the rest).
No longer were these forms to be criticized on their ability to inspire, awe, shock, fascinate, illustrate, or depict: all that mattered was how well (or how poorly) they critiqued the boogeymen of gender studies departments.
Like overzealous Freudian psychologists who manage to link virtually every human experience back to childhood sexual trauma, progressive cultural critics find a way to interpret every artistic expression through their own particular lens of victimhood.
Lisa Ruddick, an English professor at the University of Chicago (an institution in the running for the smartest and most forward-looking university of modern times) is one of a growing number of dissidents challenging this orthodoxy. In her influential essay, “When Nothing Is Cool,” she describes how one scholar used critical studies to turn Buffalo Bill, the sadistic antagonist of Silence of the Lambs, into a gender-defying feminist hero.206
By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill apparently refutes the idea that maleness and femaleness are carried within us. “Gender,” Judith Halberstam explains, is “always posthuman, always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body bag.” The corpse, once flayed, “has been degendered, it is postgender.”
Halberstam blends her perspective uncritically with the hero-villain’s posthuman sensibility, which she sees as registering “a historical shift” to an era marked by the destruction of gender binaries and “of the boundary between inside and outside.”
The lunacy here isn’t just that a serial killer who targets only women could in any way be a feminist hero, it’s that the scholar who wrote it actually thought her interpretation was believable. To most people, Silence of the Lambs is simply a masterful psychological thriller, full of compelling characters, emotionally powerful moments, and no deeper meaning beyond the protagonist’s terrifying and engrossing journey through a world of cannibals and serial killers.
To a left-wing culture critic like Halberstam, it’s unacceptable that a movie could simply be intended to entertain, shock, or amuse. It must say something deeper, even if its creator didn’t intend it to. And if a piece of art or entertainment really seems designed with no hidden political message? Well then, that means its creator and those who enjoy it must be just fine with the status quo—this makes them either blind, or the enemy (depending on how far gone the libtard is).
To a culture critic, everything is political, even when it’s not trying to be. The Los Angeles Times interviewed Jordan Peele, the creator of Get Out, one of few politically motivated movies that still manages to entertain, and asked him about the significance of one of the white actresses in his film drinking milk. “Milk,” The Los Angeles Times offers, “is the new symbol of white supremacy in America, owing to its hue and the notion that lactose intolerance in certain ethnicities means that milk-absorbing Caucasian genetics are superior.”
Get Out is about a white family that kidnaps black people so they can brain swap with their younger, “cooler,” and physically superior bodies. The theme could not possibly be more racially motivated, and still, the The Los Angeles Times has felt the need to find racism wherever it looks. Peele did not back up this milk drinking as racism thesis in any way, and yet, Los Angeles Time’s headline still read, “Jordan Peele explains ‘Get Out’s’ creepy milk scene, and ponders the recent link between dairy and hate.”207
Little wonder that culture warriors hate video games, many of which are clearly designed for no purpose other than wild abandon. Imagine the fury of Anita Sarkeesian and her dour erstwhile male assistant Jonathan McIntosh, as they scoured games like Team Fortress 2 and Pong for hidden political messages. Imagine it dawning on them that the millions of people who log into World of Warcraft every day are doing so primarily to have fun with their friends, and not to consider how well Illidan Stormrage symbolizes inexorable patriarchal forces.
To a leftist, where everything is political and nothing is fun, gamers are a nightmare. Gamers feel the same about their critics.
Gaming culture is naturally resistant to political correctness. Online video games were the original social networks: gamers were chatting on games like Everquest and Runescape years before Facebook and Twitter came into their own. And, crucially, communication in these games tended to be anonymous. Like 4chan and Reddit, the furthest most people would come to identifying another player was via their pseudonym—and there’s not much you can do to track someone down when the only lead you have is a username.
Anonymity, mixed with the competitive nature of many online games, led to a culture of “trash talk” amongst gamers.
Keemstar, a popular YouTuber, explains how alien and shocking gamer culture must seem to polite society:
I’ve received many death threats. I’ve been told that I’m going to be raped. People have said they were going to do sexual things to me while I was playing these games, because it’s part of gaming culture. I’m not saying it’s right, but any real gamer has experienced this, and they know it to be somewhat normal. This is what people say online to each other while they are gaming.208
If you’re not familiar with gaming culture, the whole idea that this kind of talk is normal must seem very strange. But this is merely the kind of joshing that goes on between best friends, especially in young male communities. Nobody feels threatened because everyone knows the rules of the game.