Josh Hawley Tries So Durn Hard

Josh Hawley says more men today are watching porn and playing video games because their masculinity has been criticized. pic.twitter.com/R0eXdRSYNT

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 1, 2021

More women are also watching porn and playing video games because these things are increasingly available due to technological advancements like getting wifi on your phone. It isn't deep. Porn is literally ancient. People play games for fun. It's the point. People do things they find fun. It's not a male thing. It's not a retreat from the cold cruel world. It's not the sturm und drang of opprobrium from the eternal and infernal female. It's just extremely convenient. And kind of fun.

Now, what manly men are supposed to do is become successful and find a good wife to occupy their definitely not porn and video game lifestyles. I guess. As if husbands time out of mind haven't fucked off to play pool or bowl or hang out at titty bars or catch a skin flick or whatever.  It passes the time. It's not some new obsession. It's really pretty trad--just the delivery medium has changed. Not all men are into these things, some always are. But that isn't a male-exclusive thing. (And it can be empowering, to women, but also sometimes doesn't feel that way.) Surprise--we're people. 

Pokemon No?

Now, I am a little old for being down with this newfangled Pokemon Go app thingie that the youngs have been on about.  Frankly, you can just call me Unfrozen Cavegirl Tech-user, because I use phones for making calls. That's it. I don't play games. I'm not much of a "gamer" as such, which is so weird when my dad was a Colecovision early adopter and my brother is kind of a YouTube retrogaming historian. I dunno. I liked Tetris, although I don't know that I want to see a movie trilogy based on it. And I feel like Pokémon is just peculiarly naïve. It's not "I just used this thing on my phone to hook up a ride with a stranger" kind of naïve. It's not "this guy on my phone says my computer might be broken and I should give him root access" kind of naïve. It's just...

I need a higher standard of entertainment to effort ratio than "I walk because my phone says I might get points." Otherwise, I accept my points in drinks, pieces of candy, backrubs, the sexing, and doing politics shit on the internet for yoinks and the vague feeling it helps, all of which use so little effort and never leave any of my data compromised (or very little, given my understanding that I am, at best, a semi-anonymous smartypants operating on these here interwebs) and yet give excellent entertainment "bang" for my input "buck".

Also, the problem with an IRL/VR interface like this is it's like an invitation to play in traffic--dopey people walking where they have no business, possibly having the app on when driving, and all the usual Darwin-Games events. I don't like the idea of people letting this kind of thing lead them to be guided into a particular region--are you really groovy with going anywhere the little man in the phone tells you? What if you were being maneuvered into the kill-zone for Skynet because the rise of the machines was upon us? You are op-secing very badly, my friend. And if everyone was jumping off bridges would you? And I don't care if there's a Charmander on my lawn--stay off my lawn!