5 Gamer Comments That Give Straight White Guys a Bad Name
A year ago I said that being a straight male is sexuality's lowest difficulty setting, and the word "duh" is still complaining about being connected with such an obvious statement. Award-winning author John Scalzi expanded the idea to talk about being a straight white male in order to foster intelligent discussion. Then he posted it to a gaming site, which did the exact opposite. Because if anything has a clear perspective on straight white men, it's bestselling video games.
Where "well adjusted" only refers to the sights on their machine guns.
The reaction was like a chemist dropping sodium in water: Every frothing bit of the violent reaction only proved the smart people more right. The comment section was the all-you-can-eat undercooked-chicken buffet of intelligent debate: attracting assholes to spew torrents of shit. It was a gallery of every possible way a straight white male could be a dick about it without starring in porn.
"I use the word 'exotic' when talking about real people!"
Sexy Hot Babes Have It Easier!
I think super sexy hot chick is actually the easiest difficulty, just get everything handed to you. And what if you're an ugly straight white guy?
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Easiest difficulty is definitely super fine lady of any race.
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Girls essentially have the godmode of life. As long as they can find a vulnerable beta man then they can exploit him to their hearts content as he desperately tries to get her to like him.
If someone says you're privileged and you start talking about who you'd like to have sex with, you've misinterpreted their statement as a compliment. Or an offer. When someone thinks women have it easier because he wants to have sex with them, he is desperately overestimating the value of that fact.
"I've already offered my penis, what more could they possibly want?"
When the first and only way someone defines women is whether he'd allow their face on his genitals, that information becomes purely theoretical. He might as well talk about how he'd screw dark matter. Except that requires intelligence and would advance humanity.
"My sex drive will power flight to Alpha Centauri."
They don't understand that constantly offering to dispense pregnancy lotion does not lube the way to a finer world. The framework of utopia is not constructed from erect penises. "People want to bang you = easy life" is the worst sexual equation since David Carradine's work with knot theory.
How come the Male Flirt emote requires money to use, while the Female's doesn't AND has a proccing Shame Debuff attached to it? Clearly imbalanced, and that's just the SMALLEST of our issues.
Most gamers have healthy sex lives, but anyone who thinks sex is a one-way transaction where one person does all the work is extrapolating from their single-handed experience. These guys are whining that it's hard for them to have consensual sex with other people. Every day many women have to worry about the exact reverse of that. And last time I checked, senators weren't passing laws to prevent men from controlling their own testicles.
"My new mandatory masturbation counseling legislation will protect this vulnerable hand from chafing and freedom!"
These offers of anonymous sex don't derail the discussion -- they tie themselves to the train tracks and jam the point-train home with how accurately it hits the target. If you can't have a discussion about gender without declaring whether you'd rub your genitals on the other party, you can't have a discussion about gender. You are the problem being discussed.
Everything-ism Is Over!
if is article had been written even 10 years ago I'm not sure I would have been so strongly against it. But weve made a lot of cultural progress in the western world, and that's only going to continue. And as that progress continues, articles such as this are only going to become more and more pointless.
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We've progressed in a society today where your sexual orientation either doesn't matter, or openly embraced.
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Which I feel may have been true in the past, but not today.
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Lets start this off ALL fucking over again. We. Are. All. People. We. Are. All. Equal. Certain people will have inherit advantages, but, those advantages really rely ENTIRELY on where in the world you are born. Whatever skin color or whatever sexual orientation you choose, guess what, you're just like everyone else, and there's nothing really separating you from them.
If someone's reaction to an equality problem is "not this shit again," it's currently unequal in their favor, whether they understand that or not. Usually "not" when they're dumb enough to say "I can't see a problem whose entire definition is that it affects people other than me. So it's over!"
"We've discussed it and agreed that period pain isn't a problem."
Things are better than they've ever been in human history, but the bulk of that history was living in caves, hitting differently colored men until they died, and women slightly less. People don't score points for doing better than that unless they're Australopithecus. Right now gay people can't marry in 39 states, in some parts of the world women are being murdered for dowries, and if you can't see any white bias in the world it's because you can't see the white stick you use to tap against it. Even if inequalities were nearly solved, which makes this sentence more hypothetical than suggesting that unicorns fly using graviton propulsion, constantly asking "Are we there yet, can we stop now?" reveals someone as a whining child who's only accidentally being dragged forward by the car of progress. And hating it.
Except the child will grow out of it.
We've reached the point where it's publicly admitted that discrimination is bad. That's brilliant! That was not always the case! Most of human history had horseshit like skin color, royalty, or divinity used to OK treating people as property. But admitting that it's obviously bad means working to end it, not shouting "Done!" and expecting a cookie for your heroic understanding. Ignoring blatant societal problems based on color, gender, and sexuality is only workable for Smurfs.
My Life Sucks, So There's No Bias
Where's all this money I'm supposed to have for being a white guy? When do people act nicer to me just because of the color of my skin?
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Judging by the lives of the black women I know, yes, my life is categorically worse.
Many of the negative comments were not arguing against privilege, but genuinely upset that they weren't getting more of it. "I'm not currently covered in supermodels," they note, "therefore there is no such thing as bias in society."
"The Red Cross should declare my crotch an urgent action area."
There are people who genuinely believe that because their lives are not perfect, nothing else in society is worthy of attention. That's a level of social consciousness below several types of chimpanzee. Except when chimpanzees fling their shit, at least they're fertilizing plants.
And they usually have better grammar.
They're playing in the comment section of a website about video games: That's three levels of virtual world created only to entertain them. That's a more inceptive fantasy than Neo having a wet dream. There are royal infants who aren't so thoroughly pampered. Owning a console doesn't mean you don't have problems. But it does mean you don't currently have the problems of starving to death, dying of thirst, or being murdered in a conflict you had nothing to do with. Many people cannot say that! And not just because they haven't registered for an account.
In any discussion of inequality, the comments will inevitably summon the magical genie of horrible unfairness. Whatever problem you mention, wow, that happened to him, too! And he's a straight white male! This comment thread had their king. This struggling survivor slid here from a parallel world where straight white men are hunted just for the color of their skin. Or as it's known on Minori-World, "cracker leather."
"Life is so unfair, I only have $2,000 worth of technology to complain with!"
Between black cops harassing him for being white, roving packs of gays physically attacking his friends, and his respected cop-then-lawyer-turned-professor and totally black (and at this point presumably from Canada, you wouldn't know him) friend secretly admitting that non-white races were inferior, he somehow found the time to write Ayn Rand fan fiction in the comments. It was more than twice as long as the article. When your main output is whining essays seen by two people in video game comment threads, it might not be reverse-racist bias that's holding you back in life.
PRO TIP: If you have ever complained about a "mod," you have managed to screw up luxury.
He heroically manages all this despite suffering from the chronic Internet commenter malady of Extremely Vague Syndrome. Serious enough to make it impossible to do anything! Not quite serious enough for diagnosis, or to prevent him from commenting on a single video game site article for several hours every day for over two weeks! Where his comments are clearly ego masturbation, and equally clearly written in the refractory periods between regular masturbation.
I love this kind of commenter. Specifically, I love how they haven't realized that video game comment threads are the septic tank of the Internet: not just full of shit, but specifically built to hold that shit safely away from everything else. But maybe I'm being too hard on him. Maybe he really has endured hard times, working to make a better life, while ...
Did you know that blacks average lower on IQ tests, while Jews score higher, with whites and asians roughly the same?
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I don't believe people have any problems with sexuality, but my opinions on transgender are so repellent I can't even say them on the internet.
I'm beginning to believe he might actually be as disabled as he claims he is. But only because any just god would make sure this asshole has a sucky life.
Never Mind Other People, You Hurt MY FEELINGS!
FROM ARTICLE: "You'll never have to wonder if this guy you're really into is, at the end of your date, going to push you down and hold you in place and give you hell for a few minutes so that he can get off."
COMMENT: No, but I will have to wonder if the girl sitting across from me is, in fact, envisioning me in her head as a rapist.
This guy is equating the fear of being raped with the fear of someone else maybe silently experiencing that fear. It's impossible for him to be a rapist, because he's so far up his own ass that his dick is safely sheathed in his belly button. If your presence causes people to fear sexual assault, your hurt feelings are not the problem in that situation. And if your reaction is anger, you are not helping! Just stop what you're doing. Everything that you're doing, including breathing.
... aaaand many white people have to avoid doing anything that appears even remotely racist or hateful. We all have our crosses to bear. Our ancestors sucked in a lot of ways.
This guy thinks the only reason he shouldn't be racist is because his great-grandparents used up his share, and now he's upset at not getting a full turn. Unless you're Desmond Miles, your ancestors' behavior is not the reason you're being an asshole to people.
Slightly more proactive than commenting on Internet articles.
What the everliving f*ck is the point of this "article"? To make me feel guilty for being a white male?
The article describes the institutionalized unfairness of societal, sexual, and financial barriers facing billions of people, and he's reimagined their lives as a subtle psychological ploy to disrupt his good mood. It's not an attack. Hell, it's practically congratulations for winning the "getting shit on less by life" lottery, and he's upset. He'd interpret a surprise birthday cake as an arson attack.
And his solution to the cake-division problem is locking everyone else outside, then screaming that knocking on a door is rude.
When you view the existence of everyone else as a problem automatically attacking you, you're internalizing the wrong parts of video games. These idiots want to ban the mention of problems that make them feel bad. Your hurt feelings are not global problems unless you're Haruhi Suzumiya. And if you have the time and technology to find out who that is right now, you're already among the luckiest people on the planet. Not everyone can use a global supercomputer network to waste time with fictional Japanese schoolgirls. That is the epitome of technological wealth and leisure. It's only one step short of a holodeck, and exactly how the first generation of owners will use it.
You poor dear, Rule 34 will be nothing when they get their hands on you.
No one is asking you to think you're terrible. We're just asking you to think.
White Males Are the Only Minority Left!
Like any video game, the biggest boss is at the end. And like most modern gaming bosses, its size is only matched by its stupidity.
Yeah, we have it pretty easy with the whole being the bottom of the totem pole right? Everyone hates us, nobody will help us, and we still get the job done. Welcome the highest difficulty
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I hope the author realizes that being white in america, in 2012, is almost a curse.
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People systematically discriminate against white men, making their lives harder
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Do females face sexism? Yes, but on the same stroke guess what? Males face sexism the exact same way - just like your doing right now. Do Minorities face discrimination? Sure, but again just like your doing and just like I've experienced being white - we face discrimination just as much, if not even more so because of the current thought stream that's going on in this article.
Claiming that white males are the only minority left is how you insult everyone else in the world while embarrassing yourself. Anyone who plays modern video games and still thinks straight white men don't get enough attention is a threat to the entire species, because that level of insecurity could destabilize the Earth's orbit.
Apparently, being a straight white male is actually the hardest difficulty because of political correctness. People can't mock anyone else, so they mock the poor straight white man! Listen: If the people victimizing you are affected by political correctness, you have never been victimized.
Political correctness only stops the kind of people who use a thesaurus to get away with being snide. "Political correctness gone mad!" is how you announce to the world that you have no real problems but don't appreciate the fact and should be harvested for organs as soon as possible. Because people will notice that your stupid loud ass has gone missing, but they'll breathe a sigh of relief instead of calling the police.
Especially when you're a racist dick.
It's not that the game is easier for Straight White males, it's just that Straight White Males play the game to an elite level.
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You know what the real advantage to being a white guy is? You got no excuses.
I'm 100 percent straight white male, dropping to 83 percent when I see Benedict Cumberbatch, and I know I'm one of the luckiest people on Earth. The only way the white race could truly be better than others is if we held a massive White Power rally over a leaking nuclear dumping ground so that one generation later the surviving average would indeed be way higher.
If your life is hard, you have my sympathy and support. If you think it's because you're a straight white male, I guarantee it's because you're an asshole.
Luke has a website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.
For more gaming insanity, check out The 5 Most Disastrously Copied Video Games. For further insanity, behold The 5 Most Ridiculously Sexist Superhero Costumes and Mathematical Proof That the Media Is Sexist and Bad at Math.
