These Other Blogs of Mine

It's come to my attention that I haven't been posting much at all over the last few months. I'm still trying to decide whether I'd like to keep this blog around or not, but in the meantime, you may wish to add my Tumblr to your bookmarks. It's not all (or even mostly) thinky stuff like this blog, and the format -- heavy on "reblogging" other people's content -- can be a little hard to get used to, but the design is in many ways quite elegant.*

You might also want to check out another project that I recently started about the intersections of style/clothing/fashion and identity.

*There are issues, of course. One that immediately springs to mind is the lack of a dedicated commenting feature, which is one reason why reblogging is so common -- it's often the only way to have a conversation of sorts going between blogs

Inclusion, Disruption, and First-Person Shooters

Over at The Border House, author Gunthera1 writes about an ad for the new video game "Call of Duty: Black Ops."

The commercial portrays a war in which a variety of people are the soldiers. The commercial includes people of color, men, women, people of various body types, and even a number of professions. All of these people are portrayed as equal soldiers in this war. This commercial implies that this first person shooter game welcomes adult players from a variety of backgrounds and is not simply a toy for men aged 18-25. I cannot speak to the plot or inclusiveness of the game itself, but this commercial is a great example of an advertising agency portraying all gamers. I applaud this ad and hope to see more in the future that feature an asortment of gamers. There are many of us in the community, but it is nice to see a company recognize that fact.

On the one hand, I reservedly agree with the author's sentiments about the recognition of diversity. On the other hand, my first thoughts when I came across this ad the other day were much less positive. Perhaps it was the way in which it seemed to be taking the "war is a game" imagery to a whole new level. In this ad, war seems to become a game for the entire family to participate in.

I think my doubts here are influenced by my uneasy relationship to the idea of inclusion. To illustrate: at PAX Prime earlier this year, I heard a few panelists talk about how "women want to shoot things just as much as guys." Now, I certainly don't want to place the burden of challenging problematic representations and themes in gaming on those who have been and continue to be excluded from the "gamer" category (such as women). Neither do I want to say that nobody can or should ever enjoy playing a game like Call of Duty. With that said, I found myself at the time making connections between the panel's message and that of mainstream gay rights organizations (e.g. HRC) lobbying for marriage and inclusion in armed services: "we're just like you -- we're normal." I wondered whether this message (that including women wouldn't require any fundamental changes to the industry) would be more palatable to some of the attendees than a more disruptive approach. It almost seemed like the disruptive, critical approach was not a possibility: women could be seen as either a niche market or else be incorporated into the general market for games like Call of Duty.

In a later panel, I heard speakers challenge the unproblematic desire for inclusion into dominant genres and fantasies that I'd heard voiced earlier. So there was definitely some discussion that weekend of disrupting dominant narratives and representations in gaming (indeed, even a little organized discussion of cripping gaming). And there is, of course, a great deal of amazing, critical work being done in progressive gaming communities (like The Border House!). The inclusion/normal narrative still looms large from my perspective, though, and when it's adopted by large firms like Activision, I wonder to what extent this is an attempt at neutralization of non-traditional gamer communities and a normalization of the dominant content and genres of the medium.

Political Identity Versus Policy Preferences

NYT: As G.O.P. Seeks Spending Cuts, Details Are Scarce

...which, you know, isn't all that surprising according to James Stimson's book "Tides of Consent." I have some issues with the book as a whole, but one interesting bit of information arises when Stimson talks about people's policy preferences versus their self-identifications. As it turns out, Americans generally prefer to identify as "conservative" rather than "liberal", but prefer "liberal" policies (expansion of government services) to "conservative" ones.* Thus, the GOP emphasizes symbols of conservatism while downplaying actual policy details, while Democrats avoid the the symbol "liberal" while emphasizing what they're actually going to do. Hence the phenomenon documented in the linked article: Republican candidates emphasizing cuts to "bloat", "waste", "overspending", and so forth, without any real explanation of what these cuts will entail.

*The lack of real investigation into why this is the case is one of my problems. Stimson seems to attribute it to the more positive meaning of "conservative" as opposed to "liberal" in nonpolitical settings. I would have wanted to see some consideration of "liberal" as a stigmatized identity in the US, especially after the era of McCarthyism, but that's just me.

A Nice Guy State of Mind

For a while now, I've been very interested in the phenomenon of the Nice Guy. No doubt part of the reason is that I'm a something of a recovering Nice Guy myself.

To wit: in high school, I wrote a song called "The Chauvinist." The song was inspired by a guy I knew at the time who projected a very masculine leftist/anti-authoritarian image. Inspired by an incident in which this guy hooked up with a friend of mine whom I had developed a Massive Teen Crush on, I penned the song as a bit of revenge (though I doubt he ever realized it was about him). At the time, I thought he was being unethical and exploitative of my friend, since he did not frame his desires in any kind of romantic narrative. Of course, looking back now, it's all too easy for me to pick apart the intensely problematic aspects of my thinking and the song that it produced: the idea that someone can be "stolen" away, the fetishization of a kind of chivalric romantic love, and so forth. It took me a long time to realize that these sentiments were not tremendously helpful to anyone (and were indeed quite damaging), but I'm sure that at the time I felt greatly superior to the swaggering target of my ire.

However, I think there was a tiny seed of protofeminist thought present in the song as well, in that it involved attacking the kinds of dominant attitudes towards women that I saw around me at the time. And that's one thing that's interesting to me about the Nice Guy train of thought: it starts with a recognition of some issues of gender inequality, then comes to vastly different (and intensely problematic) conclusions than feminist analyses do. For example, it seems to get stuck at a stage of blaming individual women and men (but mainly women) for perpetuating the state of gender relations, rather than moving on to a consideration of the bigger systems of oppression at play.

I wonder if this incipient sense that something is wrong with gender relations can somehow be nursed into a recognition of the existence of systematic sexism. Unfortunately, insofar as the Nice Guy complex is found amongst geeks, I think that any such effort is going to be met with strong resistance due to the tendency of some straight white geek men to equate their experiences of subordination (especially in high school environments) with the experiences of socially marginalized groups. This leads, in my experience, to a resistance to identity politics. Getting people past an individualized approach to sexism is hard enough most of the time -- it's that much harder when the people in question believe that they, too, have been persecuted (as "beta males") and thus know just as much about the topic as women. Let me be clear: geek men often do suffer by virtue of failing to live up to hegemonic masculinity. However, they are nonetheless still men with all of the privilege this entails, even if their patriarchal dividend is slightly smaller than that of some other men.

I started off this post with the admission that I'm a recovering Nice Guy. I say "recovering" because it seems like those same thought processes that inspire Nice Guy-ism can creep back in the most insidious ways. For example, whenever I try to distance myself from problematic expressions of desire for women on the part of men, I am effectively saying: "I am different from those men. I am not like them. We are fundamentally different and their desires are morally worse than mine." I don't believe that this is a particularly productive way of thinking, but it's easy to fall into. I'm all too familiar with it, because these kinds of categorical distinctions between Good and Bad people are at the core of Nice Guy thought.

On the Men Can Stop Rape Poster Campaign

This composite image of several ads from a campaign by Men Can Stop Rape has been going around Tumblr lately. On the one hand, I'm an enthusiastic supporter of anti-rape ads like these, which are targeted specifically at men (for another example, see here). On the other, a couple of things about them bothered me. The tones of "cookies for basic human decency", for one. As X put it:

Woman: "Thank you for not raping me! *swoon*"

Dude: Oh yeah, I'm awesome for not raping you

I also have a more generalized discomfort towards the idea of rebranding masculine strength as a tactic. I know it's about expediency, but my knowledge of the history of men's movements makes me nervous about these kinds of attempts, which seem to risk reinforcing gender differences (men = strong, women not) rather than really questioning or deconstructing them.

That said, I do really like these posters and want to see more like them.

Masculinity as Competence

Recently failed at a simple task: hammering some nails into a bookcase. Got somewhat upset. My father later remarked that different people have different skills and jobs, and that if someone asked him to write a paper on some subject, it'd take him ages. Partly I was just annoyed at myself for my lack of competence at what ought to be a relatively easy action, but my failure got wrapped up in gendered notions about what a man "ought" to be able to do that I thought I was more or less past by now. Evidently not.

Technical competence (in terms of craftswork, tool use, etc.) is not my thing, and never really has been. Thus, when I went and subscribed to MAKE magazine recently, I found myself asking why I was doing it. True, I'd like to expose myself to a wider range of hobbies and communities and DIY sounds fun. But I also wonder whether part of me might not be hoping to gain just a bit of masculine cred by building up some competence in this milieu.

Teaching about Oppression: Asshole/Daifugō

Two things I like: games and youth-focused anti-oppression education. So when I was playing the card game Asshole (you may know it as President) the other day, it struck me that the game could be used as a valuable teaching tool.

If you've never played before, then you might want to get a sense of the rules here (Asshole, according to Wikipedia, is an Americanized version of Daifugō, a Japanese card game, and that page explains it more thoroughly than that for Asshole/President.). The most important thing to know is that the game is played over a series of rounds with a single deck of cards. During the first round, the distribution of card values between players is totally random. Thus, controlling for skill levels, each player has even odds of coming in first place. After this first round, however, standings in the previous round determine a player's rank in the next. The first player is "president" for the next round, while the lowest-ranked player is the "asshole". In a five-person game, the president is allowed to trade two of hir worst cards for two of the asshole's best, the "vice-president" trades hir worst for the "vice-asshole's" best, and the "neutral" player trades nothing.

In the basic set-up, there is no cumulative advantage, because the game only tracks how well you did in the last round. It doesn't matter whether you've been president for one round or five, you still only get that two-card trade. That said, the president has an advantage that makes it much easier to remain president, while the asshole has a large disadvantage (from a random hand, having two of hir best cards replaced by two of the president's worst) that requires some skill and a great deal of luck to overcome.

As it is, I think the game could be a valuable tool for illustrating how historical oppression works in a very simple, visceral way. Anyone who has played the game has probably encountered a situation where a bad first hand has locked them into a position from which it's very difficult to escape -- one is more or less at the mercy of luck. I wonder, though, whether by modifying the game to incorporate a sort of positive feedback structure whereby advantages and disadvantages accumulate, it might work even better as a demonstration of how historical processes work. I'm envisioning this as a simple tool for explaining these kinds of things to children, because there's a very visceral and immediate sense of unfairness when regardless of one's knowledge of the rules and strategy of the game, one is unable to succeed due to an initially unfavourable hand.

Of course, this is all quite rough, but the game seems so well-suited to explaining these systems (one alternate name for the game is actually Capitalism) that I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before. Has anyone read about or else actually used this game or something similar in this kind of capacity?