Sex and Violence: The "Demise of Guys"

The mental health profession is one with its share of quirks and oddities.  It's a field that's tried hard to analyze bias, avoid it, and generally comes out swinging hard with positive biases toward the underdog.  There are specific exceptions, and sometimes they're more evident than others.



As an example, many professionals I've encountered will refuse to work with violent or sex offenders, and the chronically and severely mentally ill.  There is an undercurrent, though, of also looking down on people that have different interests than the average therapist.  While sex-related bias is fairly common, it's particularly harsh in many professionals.  If you're interested in anything outside of heterosexual straightforward he-man she-woman missionary-style sex, there's probably a therapist out there who will not only shy away from hearing about it, but may very well try to use that to analyze your childhood or to assign you a diagnosis.  The particular vocal minority of therapists who engage in this practice have had their voice slowly eroded away to the point where they are dismissed as a non-factor in the profession as a whole.

A girlfriend who does not live in Canada

The other common bias, of course, is anything with a penchant for violence.  Bandura showed the dangers of exposure to any violence at all by letting a group of children wail on a clown doll designed to be hit.  Anderson and Bushman spent most of the '90s taking inconclusive studies and claiming they came out with a strong causal link between playing games and actually shooting people.  It didn't help that Anderson got about twenty minutes of fame after the number of very public school shootings, and he just pumped out another study each time to sell more books and get more grant money.  Each time another atrocity comes to light, and the perpetrator happens to have played a video game, the media (and the psychology profession as a whole) stop looking for reasons, point to a game, and nod their heads as if they'd found a Marilyn Manson poster in the perpetrator's room, a number of candles flickering, and a copy of Doom II.  Instead of asking whether the unbent would be attracted to fantasies of violence, they claim the exact opposite, usually to the detriment of their viewer.  There have been a number of studies that run contrary to Anderson and Bushman's work, but they simply do not have the backing of the press or parenting organizations with strong PR budgets.


I suppose it's not a surprise that Philip Zimbardo, a luminary of the field of Psychology, would come out publicly espousing both biases and blaming them for a massive change in culture.  I am, of course, referring to his book "The Demise of Guys."  It's a cheap sell, I have to admit.  It uses a catchy title and a controversial thesis topic to incense people into reading it, all the while utilizing an unrelated study to prove what is going to be a safe point to many of the readers.  It's quick, it's a guaranteed paycheck, and Zimbardo can move on to his next study of cults, mind control, and time manipulation.  If Zimbardo wanted to talk about the emasculation of the male gender, a more valid and more interesting study would have been on just how reactionary our culture has gotten to anything associated with testosterone in a non-sport setting.  Sure, it wouldn't have given him a large paycheck for a few days' work like this did.  Instead, he chose the easy way out, and somehow has sold CNN on the idea that availability of exposure to sex and violence somehow makes today's men no longer exude sex and violence.  To this, he adds that gamers specifically cannot hold jobs, concentrate in class, or attract women.  While I realize that I'm preaching to the choir here, as the average person who actually clicks through likely a) has a job and b) has at least a romantic partner, I can safely say that Zimbardo is out of his depth and has little idea of what gamers are actually like, in the same way that the average parent in the '70s had no idea what the devil rock music was like and the average parent in 1956 had no idea why young women flipped out over an attractive man with a seductive voice who shook his hips on national TV.  Zimbardo's study comes across as the ramblings of someone struggling to comprehend an entirely new generation and in the process demonizing all that is new.


What extremely disappoints me is this tripe published by CNN.  I do understand that it's really just a press release for Zimbardo's book, and that disappoints me further.  CNN is supposed to be an analytical news service, not a venue for people to publish self-promotion masquerading as news.  But this statement takes the cake:

"Norwegian mass murder suspect Anders Behring Breivik reported during his trial that he prepared his mind and body for his marksman-focused shooting of 77 people by playing "World of Warcraft" for a year and then "Call of Duty" for 16 hours a day."

This one sentence is sandwiched between thesis and a brief analysis of the study, as if it's at all relevant to either, when it's an unrelated statement intended to demonize gamers and the game industry.  It was a cheap, but expected, shot from Zimbardo, who is shooting hard to sell this book to as many worried parents as possible.  CNN should have known better than to publish this, especially since it hires correspondents to cover games.  Someone please tell me what on this screen helps me learn to shoot:

Well, done, CNN.  If I ever was going to take your gaming journalism seriously, it won't happen now.