Editor’s note: This article is also available in Romanian.
To my own mental detriment, I stumbled upon a website where a massive group of feminists and social justice warriors were discussing this thing called #gamergate and some girl named Anita and all that. First, I am—as Cedric the Entertainer used to say—grown. By this I mean that I have a job and an education, I do not tolerate nicknames, my time on a computer is spent either working or reading or playing chess (I guess that’s a video game), and my only concern at this point is that I do nothing that will leave this Earth worse than the way I found it. Forget change, forget hope, forget ideology and silliness—I just don’t want to fuck the place up. You know, grown.
Here’s the thing about being grown. Your patience for certain things that younger people offhandedly say wears thinner with each passing year. It’s not anything in particular—let’s call it a tone that some young people, especially the social-justice-minded young people, take that is so frustrating that I literally want to pull out the hair that I no longer have.
I’ll give you an example. In this pit-of-sorrow website full of blabbering idiots that I made the mistake of entering, one young man who looked no older than sixteen described this little video game issue going on as a “battle.” He fawned over some girl named Anita, who he claimed was “going to battle against misogyny.”
I have nothing against anyone who enjoys video games. Young or old, for some I can imagine that it is an important part of their lives. I know little about this whole #gamergate thing other than what I read in a few articles, but it seems to me as though the people who are really devoted to games are not happy because they are the most recent to be singled out by the “Social Justice League” to be vilified and called terrible and evil and every other name in the book for doing and pursuing what they enjoy. Being that so many are young and inexperienced and probably not great at formulating articulate responses, they have lashed out. Since social justice warriors seem to have only one real move in their repertoire—cry victim and sulk—they chose their most recent target wisely.
Alas, I am grown, so when a bunch of bullies (standing around and calling a bunch of kids evil for playing with their toys is the definition of bullying to me) get up and play this kind of game where they toss rocks while crying victim, the old man comes out of the front door and has to do what he has to do. So, social justice warriors and simp feminists, I have five questions for you. Try to answer them honestly, if you can.
1. Have you ever seen a real battle?
I was part of what was called IFOR (or Implementation Force) in 1995 /96. This was the expeditionary force that entered Bosnia (officially) after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. I was also part of SFOR (Stabilization Force). If you’re not familiar with this time in history, Serbians killed a lot of Muslims (Muslims killed some Serbians too and Croatians got in the mix as well). They (Serbian soldiers) raped men, women, and children. They abducted women, took them east, and kept them in houses where they were raped repeatedly by soldiers on R&R. They cut limbs off of men in front of their wives, off of wives in front of their husbands, and left them cripples for life—or if they felt like it, they’d feed them to pigs.
The primary killing area was a place called Srebrenica. I lived there for a while and spent about 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, for about 7 months in those towns with those people. I got there weeks after the last of the Muslims were killed. I was 20 years old.
Say what you want, talk how you like, but just understand that grown men (and women) who actually have been in the world and made our contributions hear you use the word “battle” in regards to picking on some kids who just want to be left alone to play their games and what we really hear are big kids too afraid and cowardly to take on the real issues falling back on faux crusades to extend their sad, little self-righteous childhoods a little longer.
When fathers were valued, this didn’t happen so much. Silliness had a shelf life then. Now it just goes on forever.
So don’t call this a battle. It makes the people who know what those are a little sick.
2. Have you ever touched or talked to a homeless person?
For the most part, homeless people are men. Also, studies have shown that more than 60% of homeless people suffer from brain damage, mental illness, or some other condition that makes it impossible for them to function without assistance in the same capacity that you or I do. You certainly don’t know this, you proud warriors, but if you got up early in the winter and drove around to virtually every northern city in the country, you’d see that there are people who get up every morning and go around these cities handing out blankets and food. Unfortunately, in recent years, these efforts have been curbed in many parts of the country by local nonprofits that do not want to see their funds reduced because average citizens go out and do these things and since most of those funds go to shelters for women while most of the homeless are men … anyway, I made the rounds until my career made it impossible. I know a lot of other men who did, many of whom came from organized clubs such as the VFM and Rotary. You can walk right up to the doors of any of those types of organizations, knock twice, say you want to help, and I guarantee that you won’t be turned away.
Before you go throwing that word “social” around, reach out one of your clean, smooth hands and touch one that’s as rough as sandpaper and smells like shit—and do it with a smile. I mean, I may not believe it every time a young woman accuses the quarterback of the college football team of raping her and I may mention the fact that she wasn’t arrested after admitting that it was a false rape accusation (ya know, like recently with Treon Harris at the University of Florida), but I have done that much, and many others who would never dare to call themselves “social justice feminist warriors” have as well. Catch up before you run around declaring that everyone else is terrible.
3. Can you define the word “justice”?
When I hear these people talk, they like to throw the words “minority” and “victim” and “oppressed” around. Who do you think African-American men living prior to 1965 feared more—White women or White men? To appropriate the legitimate struggle, often life-threatening struggles, of truly oppressed people in an effort to legitimize a series of complaints posed by privileged White women that quite honestly amount to “You haven’t given us everything we ever wanted” is the very antithesis of justice.
Feminists have, at every turn, taken every measure to tear apart the relationships that held the African-American community together through what I can only imagine was a nightmare, all so that you can have never-ending accommodation and preference in all things at all times while crying woe-is-me, woe-is-me.
Maybe you need to lay off that word “justice.”
4. Have you ever had to do something not because you wanted to but because you had to?
No one makes the argument that video game characters embody some vague, divisive, and unprovable theory because they have to, unless it is their own psychosis propelling them to do it. That’s the action of someone playing an angle or killing time.
You’re not fighting evil when the topic of discussion is video games. I don’t care what you have to say.
The same is true if you are criticizing music or film or literature. Books are interesting and I’m sure that video games can be too, but if you think you are saving the world by pontificating on the ultimate never-ending power of shapes and colors on a television screen and how you are battling those shapes and colors and noise as a righteous social warrior, a card-carrying member of the “Justice League,” all I can tell you, as a grown man, is that you are a child and not a promising one. You are just bothering people who found some enjoyment in an often cruel and painful world.
People with real experience of this world always prefer to watch people happy at play than in an argument. People without … you get it.
5. Have you ever met a man? Sometimes it doesn’t seem as though you have.
The crux of the feminist argument is that men are inherently evil and undeserving of life. I know, you don’t really believe that, except that you think we need to learn not to rape and you think that we are violent by nature and you think that we have conspired with one another for centuries to deprive you of your every desire, but you don’t really think we’re evil and undeserving of life. You just kind of say it for the goodies.
I have a mother just like every other man and I love her. I have a sister and I’ve had girlfriends and I have female colleagues whom I respect and admire. Do you really think that with the emotions men feel for the women in our lives that we want them to suffer in any way? The way feminists describe us, as terminally evil and terrible creatures, it is painful to hear. It’s painful for men to be characterized as something we are not and then to have this same thing shouted at us anytime we try to speak up and make a point or describe the world that we see around us. It’s just our perspective. We all get one.
Your only accomplishment as social warriors out to battle injustice and get more goodies and more of a hold on things that only someone with too much time would be concerned about is to diminish the honest concern that truly loving men have. These powder-puff male feminists who parrot everything the most attractive feminist around them says—how could they know what respect is? They either don’t believe a word of it, have never really thought about it, or really don’t care. The ones who actually listen, you hurt.
There are great women out there. Truly phenomenal people. They didn’t get that way by worrying about the breast size of animated television characters. I imagine their responses and laugh.
Now step back and look at the young men you are attacking. They’re adolescents for the most part. They’re unwanted by their schools, uncertain of their futures, unsupported in their culture, and unloved by this modern brigade of radical feminists telling them they will grow up to be rapists and criminals and monsters. And when they retreat into a fantasy land, you chase them into it to harp on them some more and complain about the decorations. Are they perfect? Are they even entirely right? Of course not, but is this the fight you want to pick? This is the best example of misogyny you’ve got?
Settle the fuck down, get a job, volunteer, take a class where you learn a skill that doesn’t involve emotionally assaulting the closest living target, stop using the word “battle” to describe anything you do other than taking a big shit, and make an actual contribution or just plain shut the fuck up. Or maybe just play!
Bonus question: What are you social justice warriors going to do when you have a real problem? Call it terrible and wait for it to make an empty threat? Think about it.
