The Obligatory Gender Post

Sometimes I feel like the internet is like sitting down to dinner at a dysfunctional family reunion. You head into the dining room, hoping to engage in some anecdote heavy discussion; perhaps starting off listening to some funny stories involving cats from your Aunt Linda. Moving on to a bit of gaming discussion with your cousin Tom, in which you discuss solutions for getting past those dratted mirelurks in Fallout 3. And then gradually moving up to the adult's table with some more topical conversation. Perhaps your great uncle Frank has a few theories on how the western world could coax China into implementing some more effective human rights laws, but right after Aunt Linda has finished her delightful story about the time her unimaginatively named cat Mr Fluffles chased a bit of lint around the house for an entire hour. Oh Mr Fluffles!

Pretty soon after you sit down though, your rose tinted glasses are promptly ripped from your face like a helicopter tail catching the end of your nose. You find yourself surrounded by a group of brain damaged chimpanzees, swinging from the ceiling, rutting on the serving trays and... no! Aunt Linda! That's not where the table spoon is supposed to go!

The funny anecdotes are replaced with feces. The intense gaming discussion is replaced with feces. The in-depth political theorizing is replaced with.... feces. And most of it's on your face, dripping down on to your clothes, unmanageable and impossible to sift through.

Feces.

And every time you exit you feel like you're the only person in the world with a level head or a nuanced perspective on things. You feel like other people are simply incapable seeing beyond their own biases and experiences to at least try and understand the big picture.

Why is it that people can't seem to get past their own feces?

The current brand of widespread, flingable shit that seems to crop up at the moment is the battle of the sexes. Brilliant. We're back to this are we? Correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that everyone in the world (except Saudi Arabia, they aren't cool enough) had a big meeting and it was agreed 100% that men and women are equal and have equal rights. We all signed a big bit of paper, we got pissed, had a few laughs, it was finished. No more sexism or sexism based inequality. That's how the world works.

Well it wasn't finished apparently. Not according to the likes of the now very famous Anita Sarkeesian, or this bloke, Shaun King of the "Black Lives Matter" group who I've only just heard of and decided to insert into a blog post. You're working your way up in the world Shaunny boy!

He recently put a claim up on Twitter stating that since around 99% of mass killers tend to be men, therefore "men are problematic". Whilst I can't really fault the number as such (I mean, men do tend to be mass killers more than women), I have to ask what his point was? I mean has gender usually been a massive focus when it comes to the study of these guys? What about mental illness (apparently the main thing that ties mass shooters together is that they tend to be depressed)? What about trauma or abuse during childhood? Surely these are better motivating factors to touch upon rather than whether they were born with a cock or not? Hell, does it even matter from a legal standpoint? I'm certain that when Aileen Wournos was murdering her way to girly killer fame that her victims probably weren't that concerned with her gender.

And even if gender was a focal point, what exactly is he proposing? Do we round up all the men on Earth (aside from a few breeding bulls who'll spend the rest of their lives restrained in a milking chamber) and shoot them off to Mars? Well that's not going to happen since men created space travel and therefore only men could arrange the flight, since all women know how to operate are sinks, and I just realized I'm never getting laid ever again.

Confusing posts aside, he's just one of a large group of so called "Social Justice Warriors" (SJWs, because the net loves abbreviations. Ain't nobody got time to pronounce shit yo!) who have been gaining a lot of hatred for both stupid and entirely valid reasons.

Here's the thing. I like social justice. Social justice is a good thing. I like it when racists are made to look ridiculous by a guy with a sousaphone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs4P1kKK-5k

I like it when homophobes get trolled by soup companies:

It's a good thing. It's the only thing that stops me from becoming a complete nihilist. Knowing that at least one other person out there realizes just how stupid and hateful these people are and that they should be mocked mercilessly until they're too ashamed to even utter a word about their prejudices in public. I love social justice. What I hate is when it's turned into stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E47-FMmMLy0

It's all fun and games until a group of men are led into a room at gun point and forced to recite lines stating what they'll never have to experience by virtue of their meat and two veg. What I find funny is that despite the fact that it's posted on Anita Sarkeesian's Channel "FeministFrequency", Anita didn't bother to present the video herself. I am forced to make the assumption then that because Anita believes that men can be influenced into committing violence against women from video games - and most men are gamers - that she refuses to be in the same room as a man unless they've been chemically castrated, or at the very least restrained so that they can't mount her when she isn't looking.

Let's face it, some of these groups have become poisonous. Unless you agree with everything they say 100% then you're a dirty, misogynist, racist who's been brainwashed by this bigoted, sexist, dick-centric society. They're just as black or white as the right-wing, religious fundamentalists that they claim to oppose. Nuance is not only a sin, it's utterly alien to them. Yes, I think sexism still exists. But I don't necessarily think that it's being purposely perpetuated by the gaming industry. If I thought that then.... Well, sorry to break it to you guys but the last time I played GTAV I gunned down approximately 50,000 men in the campaign missions. Based on that, I have to come to the conclusion that it's the men who are the "objects" being "acted upon". Down with the matriarchal gaming industry!

It also doesn't help that those who oppose this movement of "SJWs" occasionally have been known to put about as much thought into their claims:

Hey Jim Sterling! No, I don't know why you're on there. You must have said something sensible. Though whilst I can't say anything in regards to most of the others on this list I do love the little paragraph explaining the mission statement of this gallery of internet, bizarro Hitlers.

"Hey guys, I'm really sick of all these SJW meanies trying to shame us. Let's a make a list of these guys in an attempt to shame them! That'll pull people on to our side for sure!"

Classic.

Look, remember that little meeting I was talking about earlier? The one that Saudi Arabia wasn't invited to (I mean I remember sending it but it must've gotten lost in the mail or something)? Let's consider this one of those:

Men and women are similar, but also very different. They can experience similar problems, but sometimes for drastically different reasons. The way they think and see the world can be very similar but also very different. Biologically we're similar, but also very different. Men are often stronger physically, but women are often more sensitive and nurturing. Women in video games (and by extension, pop culture) can sometimes be portrayed as housewives or damsels in distress, but men can be portrayed as roided up, two dimensional bullet dispensers with little or no personality. It's almost as if we're all human beings and that we all experience injustice in one way or another, and to turn it into a game of top trumps between either side is ridiculous and counterproductive.

Can we all sign off on that? Good. Let's go get pissed and have a laugh.

Leave the feces at home.

Christmas: You'll Bloody Well Enjoy it!

From what I can tell it's kind of the standard end-of-year complaint that Christmas seems to rear it's ugly, pseudo-religious head earlier and earlier every year. This year in particular the complaint seems to be more common than usual, and I can certainly understand. Did anyone honestly notice Halloween? Didn't it just go by in a flash? I mean I'll admit I don't do much myself at that time of year other than the standard of packing hallucinogens into mini Mars Bars and watching the ensuing chaos from the roof of my house ("It's a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages", I loudly proclaim as they stuff me into a police van), but SOMETHING usually occurs. It's the only time of year when people hand sweets out to children from their front doors instead of nervously from the open door of a still running car outside a primary school, and yet it's gone.

So who killed Halloween? It was Christmas what did it! Must've been. He's the only one with a motive. Christmas is the time of year when happiness and joy is forced on you like an angry ex-boyfriend, but only after it has gradually and efficiently sucked the life and soul out of you for weeks before eventually forcing you to socialize with the very people you put yourself through this hell for in the first place. People pack themselves into shops and supermarkets like maggots in a festering wound, only the thin blue line of the law stopping most of them from gouging each other's eyes out for that last pack of chipolatas wrapped in bacon. Meanwhile a man on the radio sings about how he wishes it could be Christmas every day as you stand at the self-service, silently lamenting that it isn't, as of yet, possible to punch sound waves.

Christmas certainly does have the motive because Halloween was the one time of year that asked us to embrace our darkness rather than hide it behind the gritted, toothy smile of a medicated crocodile. It told us to drench ourselves in blood, twist ourselves into abominable forms, turn our children into monsters and then set them loose on the streets, and it told us to carve mangled faces into pumpkins to tell the evil spirits to fuck off because you know what? We're scarier than you! We've killed more of us in immensely heinous ways than any of you "ethereal" pussies ever have or ever will! What have you done exactly? You knocked over a lamp. Ooooh! Scary! Here's a laughing fruit you cunts!

Halloween was a time where we could make reference to our own deranged psyches in a fun and cathartic fashion. Ghosts, goblins, demons, witches, vampires, zombies; they were always ourselves reflected in a funhouse mirror. Halloween made it safe to be a monster for a night. But Christmas can't have that. No, it wants you to bottle it all up and let it seethe under a rictus grin and a jolly carol. I guarantee you more people have killed and been killed on Christmas than Halloween. I'm not even going to look that up because I'm so certain I'm correct in that baseless assumption.

The ironic thing though; Christmas has always been scarier than Halloween. Think about it; the stressful management of finances, the prospect of a sudden and serious family meltdown at the dinner table, the same songs playing over and over and over again in a display of aural insanity....

And at the end of it all, a heavy set, alcoholic mountain man sneaks into your house in the dead of night, creeps into your room and leaves little "gifts". The kicker to all this though; he's been watching you. The whole time. All year. Studying your behavior to determine whether you've been "naughty"... or "nice."


And we did it all for a God Zombie.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

  

The Beginning....

Greetings bored surfers, and welcome to Factually Glenn-Accurate; the blog that rambles (or will) for endless paragraphs to no one in particular.

I've found lately that I have simply too much to say and too little time to spray paint it on walls around the town where I live. I've also been told that sitting on my roof, yelling insults through a megaphone constitutes a breach of the peace so blogging was the natural way to go.

Everything on this blog is 100% Glenn-Accurate. Meaning it is accurate only to the wailing hell-pit that is my mind and not necessarily corresponding to reality. I have a keyboard covered in letters before me. I am not restrained by reality's laws and, much like the Sun, will not allow them to get in the way of what's interesting (I will not, however, be posting photos of Charlotte Church's fat rolls. They are mine to see and I refuse to share).

And with this I must take my leave. I am late for a meeting on the Moon with the Chocolate King and must catch the next Rocket Giraffe lest I be punished with thousands of hungry squirrels in my mattress.

Proceed into the abyss....