Oh Men!

Here's an article that is kind of interesting and would be more interesting if it didn't take an obviously complex situation and boil it down to "Oh men!"

In short, men play female avatars in video games largely because they, as the original study says, "prefer the aesthetics of the female form."  Or, as the writer of this article says, "it's all about butts."

Let's quickly do away with how stupid this is.  First of all, 77% of men in the study preferred to play a male character.  That doesn't reconcile well with the deciding axis being butts.  Secondly, are gay men who design clothes for women or do hair for women doing that because, despite being gay, they love the butts?  Also, look at men's faces when they see their toddler-daughters dressed in pretty dresses.  Do men find that adorable because they are all incestuous pedophiles?

But boiling men down to a single axis - and then placing all of them at the same end of that axis - is pretty much standard interpretation of maleness.  Men are forced into an extremely narrow social role.  So narrow in fact that there was a time of my life when I thought I was a "woman trapped in a man's body" because, apparently, being trans - a word I'd never even heard - was an easier thing for me to think than being a male who did not conform to what males were expected to be.

The analysis in this article can be as sloppy as it wants to be because we all know that men are nothing but sex machines that think about sex 100% of the time.  If any man tells you different he is a liar, it would seem.  I watched Fashion Television in high school for the "hot women" not because I've always loved fashion of course!

The cultural expectations of men are probably pretty okay for a few men, maybe even a majority, I don't know.  What I do know is that they are absolutely miserable for some of us.  Meanwhile "Men's Rights" organizations, rather than trying to talk about the real problems that men are having, are making fake rape complaints to discredit real rape complaints, presumably because they have extremely limited notions of what men can be.

And I hate men.  I mean, I basically only have male friends, but aside from these few exceptions who I have almost no contact with anyway I basically feel uncomfortable being the same room as men.  I'm extremely thankful for having daughters instead of sons because I can't imagine how I would raise or relate to a son.  I think I'd find a way to reinforce everything I hate about what he was "supposed to be" and then dislike him for parroting back what I modeled.

So I have horrible stereotypes of men and I'm mad at anyone else who thinks the same way.  That's super.