Sitting Down in Support of My Right To Aimlessly Do Nothing

Today I came across this post about parents and kids gaming together. It seemed sort of an elaborate retort to some kid who had the sort of brief, obscene dismissal common to obnoxious teen gamers, but that’s probably because it made a mom angry, never a wise thing to do.

A lot of the gamers I know game with their kids. Or they share an interest in gaming with their kids but play different games. As with anything, quality varies, but sometimes they seem to have genuinely close family relationships that would have seemed weird back when I was growing up and it was fashionable for kids to loathe and despise their evil establishment pig parents, and unless your family was extremely religious or something, you wouldn’t be caught dead enjoying the same activities.

So does this mean this has turned into a parenting blog now? Not on your life, I’m into bunnies, not babies. This is a gender and games blog and I think there’s something genderiffic going on here, because I have gamed with countless fathers, some of whom seem to spend every waking minute at the keyboard, and several mothers. And although I’ve never seen a father called to task for bad parenting no matter how much he plays, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a mother’s parenting skills disrespected solely on the basis that she games, or lets her kid game.

That’s because mommies are supposed to be busy cleaning the house, building their career, driving the SUV full of kids to soccer games, preparing fresh organic healthy meals for their families, working out and getting botoxed and waxed and facialed – although these last few activities count as “leisure,” as do shopping for clothes and food. Mommies are NOT supposed to be sitting around being unproductive having fun. That’s what daddies do.

I suppose there’s a larger rant in here, about feminism, and the “second shift” (women doing most of the housework in addition to working full time), and how the feminism I grew up with stressed the importance of a woman’s right to choose whether to be career oriented or domestic while now the only socially acceptable choice seems to be to have a successful career AND kids (as well as a sparkling clean house and defined abs). Oh yeah, and a husband too, although that’s sort of optional, especially since according to prevailing wisdom, men are all a bunch of pleasure oriented slackers who refuse to grow up.

I read an angry feministic editorial about this recently, about how TV and movies (and RL even) were full of underachieving dorky guys having relationships with smart gorgeous hypercompetent women.

Of course, the editorializer didn’t take into account that this is a counterstereotype that was built somewhere in the 80's to neutralize the effect of too many sitcoms featuring smart, competent husbands and airheaded wives who could barely cross the street without help. Or that comedy generally requires someone to make a fool of themselves. It doesn’t work too well if all the characters are paragons of morality and wisdom, role models for us all to emulate. And if feminism (or at least the cultural determinist branch) officially decreed that from now on, the guy in the couple has to be the dumb one with the woman filling the role that used to be described as “straight man,” then endless comedies about perfect overachieving women and lazy slacker guys is what we’re going to get.

And either some people are hardcore cultural determinists and take all these media stereotypes to heart, or some guys would rather sit around playing games than scrubbing floors. Probably the latter. And though probably a lot of men AND women would rather sit around playing games than scrubbing floors, people tend to give men a lot more leeway in doing unproductive pleasurable things than women. The closest we’re supposed to get to leisure involves beauty treatment, shopping and other vain diversions which are really more about looking good for men than our own selfish pleasure.

And consider that a lot of the time, female gamers don’t even get to sit around having selfish pleasure. I’m not talking about the annoying fact that I see more women spending their gaming time helping their guy achieve greatness than being helped to reach the upper echelons of uberness themselves. I’m talking about the fact that much of their gaming time consists of fending off griefers, misogynists and teenage boys convinced that people will think they are more manly if they are obnoxious enough to chase away all the females. Oh yeah, and perverts, like these guys. Which is why I’m sometimes very glad there are gaming moms around, because a lot of them are far better at calling teenage boys on the carpet for their rude behavior than I am, due to experience. And also because – at least the one in the article I quoted as well as many I have personally known – gaming moms are teaching their younguns how to interact, how to be polite, how to be friendly with others while avoiding being prey for the predators. I daresay a good portion of the gaming community would be easier to deal with if they’d had a similar level of parental involvement.

I think this situation contributes to some of the gender-related climate of hostility towards video games. Now, I’m by no means arguing that there are no lazy women. In fact, I am fervently doing my part to be a role model for lazy young women to emulate. I’d be walking my talk, if I didn’t have to get up (fortunately I can do it much more effectively sitting in a chair).

But I’ve never seen a female player back out of an instance complaining that she has to log out due to “husband agro.” “Wife agro” is, however, a well established cliche. Guys are always joking about how their wives hate the games, but hearing a woman complain about her man objecting to her hobby slash addiction is rare, and weird. Everybody knows that the man is supposed to be the lazy game-addicted slug while the woman spends her time in frantic pursuit of perfection. Case in point: the recent heap of media abuse visited upon Britney Spears for daring to get on a stage looking better than only 98% of the rest of female humanity. Can’t say that I’ve seen that much spleen directed at any male rock stars who are have committed the crime of looking older than they did a few years ago, although looking at David Lee Roth in his current state while envisioning the way he looked in 1984 is enough to turn my stomach.

And in fact, I recently learned the easiest escape from harassment yet. “Got to go, I’m getting nagged.” The harasser always assumes this means I am male and am being nagged by a female. In their worlds, women perform nagging yet are never subjected to it.

Small wonder, then, that women are sometimes perceived as the enemy of slack, leisure and community in the virtual world, and the “video games: good or bad” debate frequently polarizes along gender lines.

So, female readers, I urge you to spend more time sitting around. If you’ve got a male hanging around, get him to vaccum and make you a sandwich. If you’ve got a child hanging around, make it do the housework while you grind out a few quests. Maybe it will grow to loathe and despise housework so much that it will end up inventing housework robots, the next phase in our long march to liberty, equality, fraternity/sorority and all that good stuff.

I’d say we need to fight for our right to be equally lazy and immature, but fighting’s a lot of work. It might involve sweat, or physical pain, and who needs that? Maybe “Sit Down In Support of Your Right To Aimlessly Do Nothing” – that sounds a little bit more appealing.

And I daresay virtual worlds would be a far better place if there were more lazy women -- including moms who would rather do something other than drive the SUV to the soccer game -- inhabiting them.