People love the Mencken quote, though I am a fan of John Kenneth Galbraith:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

I’m not sure about your conclusion, though:

It seems to me that if wingnuts put a tenth of much effort as they do into resenting others into improving their own home and sex lives, they’d be too busy being happy and blissful to give a fuck what anyone else is doing.

This is true only if you assume they are not sadists. If they derive their pleasure from increasing the suffering of others, forcing a woman to give birth to a dead baby is positively orgasmic.

How about this? 

“I desperately wish I could have frequent, guilt-free sexual relations.  But I cannot.  So I insist that no one else be allowed them.”

In point of fact, during many periods of our history the average age at marriage was higher than it is now.  Our perceptions are dramatically skewed by the aberrant 1950s, which had the lowest average age at marriage in the history of what is not the US.She is right that they probably were not living with roommates in the past.  They were probably living at home with mom and dad well into their twenties, which was the rule in early 20th century when housing was in short supply and relatively expensive.

She is right that they probably were not living with roommates in the past.

Not to mention that there existed the institution of the rooming or boarding house, which was a lot cheaper than renting a whole apartment, and took care of the food preparation in those pre-microwave days with the latter….............

and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

I shouldn’t have been surprised but my jaw feel open. At both the blatant racism by comparing black people to animals (when will racists realize this is never a good thing to do publicly, even if rabbits are supposedly cuter than monkeys). He might as well said black women were having “litters”.

“I desperately wish I could have frequent, guilt-free sexual relations.  But I cannot.  So I insist that no one else be allowed them.” Comment #2: plaindave on 04/05 at 06:49 PM

Oh I think they can it just goes back that they don’t want anyone else to. God gave white men and white men only dominion over the earth so if anyone else is having a good time living life un-oppressed they’re no longer god’s wittle special snowflake.

Video games are a little more complicated than the broad stroke you and the linked hysteric mention though.  For instance, you yourself were just saying the other day that some woman should just dump a guy who won’t put down video games to call his girlfriend.  I get the feeling you and this woman are referencing the same type of gamer.  My point being video games are not harmless fun for everyone, I seem to see quite a lot of guys who focus on video games to the point it begins to harm their social relationships.  She may have more been referring to that type of gamer, just to be devil’s advocate.  Although I doubt it.

Furthermore, while I agree that conference was all about other people not suffering enough, i think it’s too simplistic to say people lounging around through their 20s playing video games are profoundly happy.  Most MMO gamers I know are profoundly depressed and their playtime spikes as their depression gets worse.  This is probably just projection, because this is exactly what happened to me, but you can’t game and indulge yourself for years on end and expect to feel fulfilled.  I’m not saying you should suffer, but like happiness and genuine self-esteem comes from challenging yourself in your job and to some degree your hobbies.  Mastering something difficult is profoundly rewarding in a way that video games just aren’t ever going to be for an adult.  Largely because children can master them, and they don’t really provide much of a genuine challenge to any reasonably formed adult.

I KNOW that’s not what those people at the conference were talking about, but I just wanted to push back against the idea that drifting through your 20s doing nothing but gaming is not necessarily a recipe for happiness.  Gaming is certainly a valid hobby, just wanted to add the caveat “for those who can keep their playtime under control.” Maybe that was an unspoken assumption?  And I know a lot of 20-something hipstery people that are doing really interesting, challenging, creative things right now, who aren’t married, religious or even employed! But they also happen to be the people I know that game the least.

Soy, you completely misread my comment, probably because you were distracted by the video game thing.  I don’t care what a man’s excuse is for “forgetting” to call a woman he promised to call.  “Forgetting” to call is performed by men under many guises, but the purpose is always to send the signal that she doesn’t matter. It’s an abusive act, and usually comes complete with other forms of emotional abuse.

I don’t care if a man plays video games until his eyes fall out, if it makes him happy.  What I care about is not abusing or manipulating people. 

My comments had nothing to do with adult men enjoying video games.  Please do not put words into my mouth.  I strongly—-strongly—-disagree with the notion that people are obliged to check certain boxes off to become adults.

What gets me is finger-wagging from people who are quite satisfied in their lives. As a yuppie male, I get a fraction of a fraction of what a female would get in my shoes…but I still get the usual “You have your career, now where is your wife? Your house? When are you going to grow up?” And this from people who I know were living it up in my situation not a year before.  What the hell drives them? Maybe that millenial checklist mentality.

I just want to play on my pan pipes…

I think Hymowitz’ book and its motives are actually more sinister than shaming people for having fun and potentialy enjoying the casual sex that may come along with that fun, she’s chastising women (and men, to a lesser extent) for having the unmitigated gall to pursue their education, career goals and other goals related to personal fulfillment instead of just getting married right away and having kids.  It really is a disgusting sort of misogynstic anti-feminism that calls for us all to give up on our lofty pursuits and get back into our suburban kitchens all barefoot and pregnant.  I mean, how else will men actually be convinced to get married if we don’t drag them all down the aisle before they have the time to figure out that getting married before the age of 20 is a really bad idea for most people?

Has anybody else noticed that after every Renew America or AFA column by Fischer there is a note that says: (Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)?  I don’t know if anybody else has this warning, is he too nutty for wingnuts (even though they print it anyways)?

John, don’t underestimate the way that people’s doubts about the road not taken feed their desire to get others to conform and stop reminding them of alternatives.

Did anybody else pick up that Hymowitz thinks that video games have been around for decades?  Even 24/7 tv watching is a fairly recent invention with the introduction of cable.  She probably just meant “whatever young people were playing with decades ago”, but the anachronism is funny.

It’s also worth pointing out that Hymowitz’s argument is wrong on a factual level as well. Work hours for men have actually increased significantly since 1980 (for women, too). http://flash.lakeheadu.ca/~mshannon/Kuhn_Lozano_hours.pdf

So it’s kind of ironic that she wants to return to an imaginary past when people actually had more free time to screw around in the actual past. While it’s true that manufacturing hours were longer in the early 20th century, it’s important to remember that before 1920, most Americans lived on farms, where people could have all sorts of time, depending on the season. http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt

Also, for those who are participating in the writers’ strike against the Huffington Post, the link under the text, “scandalizing the religious fundamentalists with their freedoms” leads to a Huff Po story. Here is an alternate link to the same story: http://gothamist.com/2009/12/16/bike_riders_will_get_naked_to_save.php

This is way off-topic, but for those who haven’t heard, there’s a full blown strike against the Huffington Post on the part of the 26,000 member Newspaper Guild (part of the CWA), and others: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/newspaper-guild-calls-for-unpaid-huffington-post-writers-to-strike_b25858 Personally, I think all online writers (including Amanda) are hurt when a huge media organization refuses to pay thousands of writers any wages at all. It depresses the entire labor market for online writing. This is especially upsetting after the merger with AOL for over 100 million dollars. Not one cent of that money went toward paying contributors. Now that the Huffington Post is part of an enormous corporation, contributions should be compensated with more than “attention”. Plus, its difficult for contributors to justify selfless activism when they’re lining the coffers of AOL.

Someone who spends her working hours doing the dead-tree and cable news equivalent of Internet trolling really isn’t in a position to criticise how others spend their leisure time (or, more accurately, to criticise the fact that they have any leisure time at all).

If Hymowitz wants to despair about what I do with my free time, then it’s only fair for me (and others, I see) to discuss her lazy and politics-driven scholarship.

don’t underestimate the way that people’s doubts about the road not taken feed their desire to get others to conform and stop reminding them of alternatives.

O.M.G.  you have just blown my mind.

He might as well said black women were having “litters”.

Oh, they do say that. You should hear my father’s friends. Also, listen to Israelis talk about Palestinians sometime. Truly a learning experience.

curiouscliche: Thanks.  Didn’t know about the strike.  Will definitely be supporting it and spreading the word.  And you may have cured my Huffpo addiction.

I just love this notion that welfare recipients are a bunch of racketeers raking in all this cash by having babies.

Wait, I don’t love it. It makes me sick. Welfare does not make babies anywhere near profitable, people. Even Bender learned that lesson!

Antigone, I don’t know if I’d characterize extended adolescence as just a byproduct of unfortunate circumstances, because I think marrying later is something even the well-off are doing because it’s simply smarter. Young marriage is rarely a good idea; if the person you’re dating at 20 is The One, they’ll be there when you’re 30.  Why rush it and take unnecessary risks?  The “video games” thing is a red herring, only chosen by conservatives because it’s a generational thing—-most of the audience for these rants came of age before video games were normalized for adults.  Some people read a lot or play a lot of poker, but these things aren’t referenced because the target audience does these as well, and can’t play the Kids These Days card. 

That said, I agree with you on homeless people.  I fail to see any value in telling people who have to sleep on the street not to drink themselves into a state that makes that possible.

I agree, and I hope I didn’t come across as beating you over the head.  I was just mostly saying that I’m hesitant to portray young people delaying marriage in terms of making excuses for them, like you might for a drug-addicted person choosing to self-medicate.  I think the choice to drink yourself to sleep is opposite of the choice to marry later in a very important way; the former is an unpleasant choice that is the best of all bad choices, and the latter is an objectively good choice. 

I think I mainly just want a more full-throated defense of pleasure for its own sake.  I know you, Antigone, are all for it, but on the left even there’s a tendency to discount the value of pleasure.  I recently saw a depressing thread on Feministe where a bunch of killjoys tried to shame Jill for suggesting—-gasp!—-that people might want to fuck more because fucking is fun.  Oh no, they insisted, a desire for more sex can’t be just a desire for more sex.  It must be about something else.  Perhaps they want to fuck more because they’re using it as cover to complain about “real” relationship issues?  And of course, you had the people who wanted to equate the average person’s desire for fulfilling sex with some kind of oppression of people who aren’t so interested in sex.  It was all very depressing.

Like I said, I know you weren’t going there, but I want to be clear.  If the conservative argument is that young people are hedonistic, I think the more compelling argument is, “What’s wrong with hedonism?” instead of, “No they aren’t.”

I got my Atari 2600 when I was 9 or 10. I’m 38 now. Video games have been around for a while, just sayin’.

Most MMO gamers I know are profoundly depressed and their playtime spikes as their depression gets worse.  This is probably just projection, because this is exactly what happened to me, but you can’t game and indulge yourself for years on end and expect to feel fulfilled.

Yeah, that’s all you. I’ve had no problem completing an MS and Ph.D while also raiding in WoW.

Start up a Mars Project (complete with college scholarships).  Expand the Peace Corps to work off college debt.

OMG this! Also, if the government paid for the Peace Corps medical clearance up front that would allow many more people to join.

Men would have been mowing lawns and changing the oil in their family sedans instead of playing video games and watching television.

Man, I’m exactly sort of the unproductive, drain-on-the-race gadabout Hymotiz is wagging her finger act - a week away from turning 36, unmarried, childless, renting an apartment from a roommate*, with absolutely no desire to change things - and all I can say is if I have to start playing video games to keep from ever mowing another yard, then point me to the joystick and lock the door. Undoubtedly, a key factor in my own “not growing up” is indeed my current total lack of yard work.

However, I am amazed - though I shouldn’t be, of course - that Hymowitz thinks one cannot mow grass and play video games. Most of my music-scene running buddies back in Athens have either got married, had at least one kid, or some combination of the two, most of them way in jobs that may or may not be tangibly related to what was once a aesthetic passion (i.e. former road musicians who now teach at kids’ band camps or do jingle recording as opposed to a musician who makes a good living managing a food supply storehouse) yet nevertheless keeps food on the table (though usually all adults involved work) and quite a few are financially responsible for the upkeep of their living quarters. It’s a little unsettling - and one of the many reasons I left Athens after 10 years - and not terribly unlike what happened when most of my high school peers married shortly after graduation, except there are fewer divorces.

It bothers me to see people just flat-out deny reality like that. I honestly can’t figure out how to even debate them anymore, so I just don’t bother. Bad, I know, but it’s daunting. How do you argue with someone who says the sun isn’t yellow, it’s a chicken?

* She’s awesome, too. She’s my age, unmarried and knows all about computers and cars and costuming and all sorts of stuff. Plus, she plays “World Of Warcraft” like most people eat, with occasional forays into “Portal” and “Left 4 Dead”. And she also has no desire to change any of it.

...I read stupid shit like that coming from Hymowitz and the first thing I think of is some ancient Greek busy body from 3,000-years ago complaining about “this generation of lazy and worthless kids and their crazy ideas about what they do with their free time!”

I’m just pissed that we’re all unfortunate enough to have to live through a ridiculous resurgence of this kind of crap.

I also have a practical question for gender traitors like Hymowitz (and Phyllis Schlafly, and “Dr.” Laura, and countless other Reichwing scolds and pecksniffs):  If women have a moral obligation to stay quiet, barefoot, pregnant, at home, and quiet — because that’s their one-and-only god-given destiny — why am I reading/hearing stuff from you? 

Didn’t that take time to write, time that was not hers to use because (in her cramped little worldview) it all belongs to the males in her life?  Doesn’t she have a husband somewhere who is suffering because she isn’t at home every minute of the day, doing some very important wifely tasks to keep the Holy American Family running smoothly and correctly?

Get your own house in order, Kay Hymowitz.  And if you have time to write crap that shows up in some media somewhere, that’s prima facie proof there’s some dusting and mopping, diaper changing and child raising, cooking and sexual favors that are not getting done…all of which you want to sentence other women to suffer though whether they want to or not…

A large part of this IME is not only the “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”, but that they’re happiness is being forcibly subsidized by the angry libertarian/conservatives’ supposed “hard earned tax dollars”.

The longer I go at this job without a vacation that doesn’t involve diapering adults or attending funerals, the more I consider leisure time an intrinsic good.

But video games are just the latest leisure medium to spark a moral panic. My Depression- and depression-surviving grandmother preached about the sins of card games and secular music, which is probably why she didn’t get along with my other grandmother who taught me bridge and piano. People were saying the same things about television when I was in high school, and we know that low-brow fiction, dancing, and games have been the subject of sermons since the middle ages. Historian Marilyn Yalom uses laws and sermons against chess to track its adoption across Europe in the middle ages. It also was considered addictive and potentially violent.

I’m reading the Diaries of Samuel Pepys from the 17th century, and it’s astounding to me how much time he’d spend at the theatre on plays he considered light entertainment.

We received a hand-me-down Pong dealio back when the original Battlestar Galactica was on, way back in ‘78 or ‘79.

The bugaboo then was kids wasting their time on that disco dancing.

I recently saw a depressing thread on Feministe where a bunch of killjoys tried to shame Jill for suggesting—-gasp!—-that people might want to fuck more because fucking is fun.  Oh no, they insisted, a desire for more sex can’t be just a desire for more sex.  It must be about something else.  Perhaps they want to fuck more because they’re using it as cover to complain about “real” relationship issues?  And of course, you had the people who wanted to equate the average person’s desire for fulfilling sex with some kind of oppression of people who aren’t so interested in sex.  It was all very depressing.

OT, but ohmygodwhathashappenedtoFeministe!? I still love Jill and everything she does. I think she’s amazing, but nearly everything else there has turned into such a morass of language policing and oppression olympics that I could almost believe it’s an intentional Poe site run by conservatives to mock the worst stereotypes of liberals, progressives, and feminists.

We have incentivized fornication…

His use of “fornication” says pretty much all you need to know about this guy. Also, I would bet dollars to handjobs that this guy is against incentivizing (or even teaching about) birth control and non-procreative sexuality.

Amanda is right in #25 about the suspicion of pleasure. Sometimes feminists do this too—which is ome of the cleaves between so called “pro-sex feminism” and some other forms of it. I think we are so guilt tripped about sex that it takes great effort to overcome the intuition that anyone who is pursuing mindless exual pleasure must be selfish and causing harm.

These types of stories always hit particularly close to home for me - I’m in my 20s and I live like Fritz the Cat.  I work as a freelance artist and stand up comedian, live in a brick studio in a hipster neighborhood of Chicago, I’m unmarried and routinely hook up with a series delightfully androgynous, bespectacled women (most of them other comedians or artists) who drink and swear like wounded pirates, and I’m planning on smoking weed as soon as I finish typing this.  But unlike a lot of people, I knew, from the very moment I was cognizant of the possibility, that I NEVER wanted a wife and kids.  My family is absolutely behind my allergy to domesticity (homownerphobia?), and I seem to have inherited whatever gene also makes my mom absolutely impervious to being lonely - They are times I’m envious of space probes for getting to drift eternally through nothingness. 
On one level, I feel that people who disagree with the way I want to set up my life are perfectly free to go fuck themselves, but on another level I am not looking forward to a lifetime of deflecting accusations of immaturity and selfishness.  My only hope is to be successful enough creatively to make those traits seem justified, or at least an eventual glamorous and public slide into self-destruction.

...Re-reading that, I suppose it DOES sound absolutely monstrous from the point of view of traditional American values.  I suppose my natural inclination to that sort of life in a way actually IS an attack on their worldview and traditions.  But it’s me who wants to live that way, based on my own feelings and autonomy and self-knowledge, not the feminists who have prepared for me a childless purgatory of rejection letters and iPod-backed trips to the art supply store.

I feel lucky that this kind of life is even an option, and that the only headwind I face is a stream of editorials written by people whose opinions I don’t respect in the first place.  I feel lucky that there is enough space in society for people to follow their own versions of what their gut demands of them, and that we can cross paths and share knowledge and build something of real value in that space.  I feel lucky that attitudes have changed enough that family who would be expected to decry my choices as a selfish attack on the race are more concerned with my own happiness and fulfillment. 

And I feel lucky that any attack on my and my friends’ choices is made out of fear and envy - I wish I could say I sympathized with and understood their position, but my advice to the Hymowitzs of the world is to find a comfy spot on the couch and eat their way through a big bag of dicks.

More wingnuts totally ignore history.  In most eras of the western world at least, surveys of marriage records indicate that most women did not marry until their early 20s at the EARLIEST, and most men married closer to their 30s.

NEXT!

Frogsis, there are plenty of us around who wanted to breed - and did - to carry on whatever America that America will be.  Enjoy your life - and thank you much for your independent attitude.  I want my kids to be able to live they way that they are, and everybody who does that helps the world, IMHO.

I feel lucky that attitudes have changed enough that family who would be expected to decry my choices as a selfish attack on the race are more concerned with my own happiness and fulfillment. 

You’re right, you are lucky. There are still plenty of families out there that aren’t so understanding. In my experience - and I have no idea how accurate this is overall - most parents care far more about their own peace of mind and desire to create a “legacy” than their child’s happiness or well-being. Most parents seem to have kids for selfish reasons, with little regard for the fact that they’re creating an entire person that’s going to have his/her own desires, motivations, personality, etc.

Omigod what happened to Feministe, indeed.

Asked to have all of my comments removed—all of them, on the whole site—after not only being attacked by the language police while being run over by the oppression Olympics, and the moderator allowed a language policeman to threaten me, unobstructed.

I’ve never been through anything like it on a progressive blog—it was a Bizarro World mirror image to rightie wingnut internet bullying.

We have incentivized fornication

Fischer does know it’s supposed to feel good without social intervention, right?

Hey MikeEss, just remember it was those Greeks (Athenians) who killed Socrates.  I fear this may get a lot worse.

The states with the lowest divorce rates are those in which couples marry later—and yup, as you may have guessed, those are blue states.

The red states specialize in young marriage, teenage pregnancies and divorce—and are also the states with the most financial misery.

Apparently, misery loves company, and projection.

“Rut like rabbits”? Jeez, why not just quit beating about the bush and call ‘em “jungle bunnies” like my racist granddad used to?

Re: Hymowitz, it’s like she’s never seen Mad Men.  Or maybe she thinks the Drapers have/had a lovely happy life?  Also, it’s a very classist statement (obvious to the commenters here, but I thought I’d mention it anyway).  Some men, even in the mythical Past, weren’t out mowing lawns and changing oil, because they didn’t own houses or cars.  Or, because they didn’t have time to do this since they were working two jobs.  Et cetera.

Soylent, if you think a young kid can master WoW, you’re aren’t playing right.  Yes, a young kid can go far in the game, but that young kid will never “master” it in the way you are suggesting.  It takes a serious understanding of class mechanics and math to “master” the game (although, with no end-game, it’s not really mastering so much as being a great player).  Read Elitist Jerks threads some time if you want to understand what I’m talking about.  My god, I’ve gone on blogs to learn more about my toons and found graphs and analyses that would shame any math major.

FWIW, I can always tell when I’m partied with a kid.  They might have decent gear and grammar, but generally they just can’t pull it together to play their character in the most optimal way.

I manage to retain my job as a court reporter working on transcripts involving difficult medical and patent discussions and still raid two to three nights a week on the regular.  I’ve met doctors and lawyers and any number of professional people in game, and when I meet someone in game who is working a shitty shift job for crap wages, I don’t begrudge them playing at all.

How is WoW or any MMO any different as a hobby than, say, scrapbooking or playing poker or golf or bowling?  Why is it that just because it’s in front of a computer it’s bad for you?

Frogisis, just try to hang onto that very healthy “go fuck themselves” attitude. You have nothing to apologize for and thus nothing you need to be concerned about deflecting. Assholes will be assholes, regardless of what you do, and you don’t owe them the time of day.

Yikes, this is why I only quest when I play.

speedbudget:IMO, if you want a REAL test of skill, FPSes are the way to go. Especially older ones, like DOOM (other advantage: practically GUARANTEED to run on any computer you can find). I’ve been playing for years, improving the whole time, but I’m still nowhere NEAR the skill level of the real masters.

The red states specialize in young marriage, teenage pregnancies and divorce—and are also the states with the most financial misery.

Apparently, misery loves company, and projection.

Yes, but they’re together in misery and projection, and that’s the important thing.  They get the warm fuzzy feeling of being comrades in unhappiness.

Ironic considering their attitude toward communism.

Personally, I don’t grok the argument that it’s only worthwhile if a kid can’t do it. The existence of games that I can play with my lovely nieces and nephews on relatively equal footing is a good thing. It’s because I don’t want to think very hard about the strategy behind games I only play a few times a year, and they’re generally great sports about both winning and losing. If we’re both learning and having fun while doing it, what’s the problem?

As a black woman, my head is spinning reading through the comments. I don’t want to threadjack, but on a future reproductive rights post, can we delve into the cognitive dissonance? Because it is truly insane that wingnuts can say that we “rut like rabbits” and “breed litters” on the one hand, and then put up anti-abortion billboards in predominantly black neighborhoods on the other. I sincerely hope that someone, somewhere is getting a PhD based upon figuring these lunatics out.

Did anybody else pick up that Hymowitz thinks that video games have been around for decades?

Technically, they have been.  Them being something for people of all income levels is newer, but even working class folks like my parents could manage a couple used games and a system a couple decades ago.

How is WoW or any MMO any different as a hobby than, say, scrapbooking or playing poker or golf or bowling?

I wonder that myself at times.  An MMO at least gets me interacting with other people, and Halo I can play alongside my husband.  On the other hand, my crochet habit is really hard to combine with socializing.

Re: Hymowitz, it’s like she’s never seen Mad Men.

Which is odd, given how she so often “grounds” her anti-fun arguments in popular media portrayals (Apatow’s body of work is her bete noire, and she’s not a great fan of Sex and the City, either).

@55

According to wingnuts, racism doesn’t exist. Except when liberals are the real racists. Which means that conservatives can say racist shit like that and it’s not racist because racism is dead. Except when liberals are trying to wipe out the black race via abortions.

...

Yeah, it’s going to take a PhD thesis to sort the wingnut position on this out.

Women’s median age at first marriage in the U.S. was 20 only between 1950 and 1970. From 1890 to 1950, it was 21-22. Before that, there’s no census data. But there is some evidence that among white women, median age at first marriage between 1850-1890 ranged from 21 to 23. (I can’t find any data on black women, which is frustrating.) And those are median ages—meaning that in half of first marriages, the woman was older than that.

So no, Kay Hymowitz, the fact is not that “before today” a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother. What you mean is that in the 1950s, it was relatively common for a 20-year-old woman to be a wife and mother.

And as we all know, the 1950s were a GREAT time to be a woman. Marriage and kids by age 20 made everybody perfectly happy! If you were a black woman it was particularly awesome! 1950s America is totally a model society for all! [/sarcasm]

Another important point about people like Frogsis: unless/until they completely change their habits and belief systems they make really shitty parents (at least in any setup that allocates one or two parents per kid or set of related kids). So people who try to force the hedonists and non-pairing types to have kids when they don’t want to is just making sure there will be a lot of unhappy and abused kids. (Heck, I’m in a stable relationship with a house and two offspring now and hope that I am doing an OK job at parenting, but if this situation had arrived when I was in my early 20s I would have been an abusive, insensitive, self-involved disaster as a parent.)

Looking at the above I worry that it comes off as denigrating toward people who don’t want kids and/or don’t want longterm couplings (now or in the future). It’s not intended to be. Rather a comment alongthe lines of not taking people who are really good at sculpture and insisting they spend their lives copy-editing.

Because it is truly insane that wingnuts can say that we “rut like rabbits” and “breed litters” on the one hand, and then put up anti-abortion billboards in predominantly black neighborhoods on the other. I sincerely hope that someone, somewhere is getting a PhD based upon figuring these lunatics out.

I’m assuming that the racism still holds true but that the “concern” over abortions among the african-american population is completely fake. They’re trying to smear pro-choicers (who they believe are predominantly white) as the real racists, visiting a holocaust upon the black community by conspiring with Planned Parenthood to convince them to abort all their babies. As my sainted mother once explained to me, this is why you only see PP in poor, black communities. It’s never openly mentioned that this is all part and parcel of the anti-choice belief that women, and especially black women, are too stupid to make decisions on their own and can be shepherded into or out of abortion clinics with proper advertising slogan.

The second part of their plot, I think, is to simply grasp at any possible converts to the anti-choice side. What they are looking for is a shield (and this also is rooted in racism). Similarly to how all the anti-gay organizations employ a black preacher. Itmay win them some adherents in the black community, but his main function is to be the Friendly Black Voice of Truth (TM) for their white audience. It’s just another extension of the Magical Negro or Sassy Black Woman, in that they believe that words of wisdom from such a character sound “truer” than similar sentiments expressed in “white speech” from a white person.

CBrachy:  I don’t want to sound like I’m denigrating the kids playing.  One of the great things about WoW is that you can enjoy the game whether you’re a l33t raider or just want to top out professions.  I played mainly as a power quester my first three years.  WoW is so long lasting and great because you can easily play with your kids (I have fun playing with my boyfriend’s son.  I heal, he tanks) or go for the difficult stuff and max out your character.  It just burns me that Soylent was making some kind of point about WoW being “just a kid’s game” when it really depends HOW you want to play.

That said, I totally agree.  What is wrong with something being just for kids?  Remember tag and red rover and flashlight tag?  Have you ever had as much fun exercising as an adult as you did when you were a kid?

Jayn:  I met my boyfriend in WoW.  Best relationship of my whole life, and I love nothing more than to sit beside him, headphones on, raiding like champs.  We are dorks.  We love it.

Because it is truly insane that wingnuts can say that we “rut like rabbits” and “breed litters” on the one hand, and then put up anti-abortion billboards in predominantly black neighborhoods on the other. I sincerely hope that someone, somewhere is getting a PhD based upon figuring these lunatics out.

I think they basically want forced celibacy, followed by a young marriage to produce the “right” amount of kids.  You can’t have too many because then society will have to support them the same way they support most white children.  But you can’t have too few because then they might get out of poverty (because every black person is in poverty in the wingnuts’ minds), and then they wouldn’t have a large poor class available to them that are willing to do hard labor for pennies just to survive.  They want all black people to be poor enough to take advantage of, but so poor that they actually have to help them.

I always chuckle (or tear my hair out, depending on my mood) at the things anti-choicers criticize Planned Parenthood for.  When we operate in poor neighborhoods, they say we are preying on Black people.  When we operate in middle class neighborhoods, we are accused of trying to create a place where White people can get their services without having to be in the presence of the lowerclass, or that we’re trying to “make a profit.”  Is there a location we could be in without being accused of classist evil? (obvious answer: no)

I know someone already said this above, but it’s continually annoying that some people cannot grasp the concept of people who are “adults” AND gamers - in their sense of those words.  I and my husband are, obviously, married, and we have a child, and, at this precise moment in time, I am not employed for money and - guess what! - we play computer games.  Quite a lot of them.  In the evenings mostly, when no one is going to be gardening and doing whatever-the-fuck to a car anyway.  It’s not just the 20 year olds without responsibility who like to play WoW.

It seems to me that if wingnuts put a tenth of much effort as they do into resenting others into improving their own home and sex lives, they’d be too busy being happy and blissful to give a fuck what anyone else is doing.

I got around to watching the Colbert Report’s take down of that anti-feminist lawyer, so I have to disagree with this.  Like that freakish, creepy loser, some people are simply hateful and ugly (more so inside than out).  No amount of effort is going to endear sensible people to them, and most human happiness comes from companionship, whether platonic or romantic.  The only people who will give wingnuts the time of day are other wingnuts, making hatefulness a necessary element to their having any companionship at all.

His use of “fornication” says pretty much all you need to know about this guy.

Yup. Even the use of “incentivized” is bad enough.

@Gracchus @11:40
That’s odd, given that both the Apatow written and directed movies could be construed as (and have been by Amanda, I think, or at least commenters here) feature-length demands for hedonistic 20 somethings to stop their evil, fun ways and have babies.

Heh, I found out that my aunt and uncle (a hospital RN and a self-employed dentist) play FPS games with their adult children. They also run marathons.

One of the annoying things about the rhetoric around video games and leisure time is that I don’t feel a need to draw a hard line between video games and games as if they are a unique evil. Electronic games evolved from their tabletop ancestors. I suspect a fair chunk of my grandmother’s dislike of card games may have come from experiences with family members and poker, which was the stereotypical weekly “escape from the wife” thing for at least a few generations.

Marriage has traditionally been limited by the man’s “prospects”, that is, anticipated income. That’s why the marriage age was high and marriage relatively uncommon in the 19th century. A man was expected to figure out how to make a living before marrying and having children. Now women have to balance the prospects thing and the pregnancy thing, since they have to make a living too, along with everything else.

The 1950s were anomalous because of massive government intervention in job creation and raising wages. In the 1930s, young people lived at home, because no one could afford his or her own place, and they fucked just like rabbits. (There are other ways to fuck, but most heterosexual couples go for the tried and true.) If nothing else, it was inexpensive fun. The simple fact is that money constrains marriage. When times are good and looking better, people get more serious about getting married and raising children. When times are not so good and looking worse, not so much.

(It’s interesting that in traditional marriage, which is largely as a financial matter rather than a matter of the heart, sex comes first. Love and affection, if they develop, come later. In human history the freedom of romantic love has been much desired, but rarely as common as it is now.)

——

curiouscliche: I looked at that Kunh Luzano paper, and I have to disagree. Work hours have been declining for most Americans, and they have been since the 60s. Kuhn and Luzano rather carefully slice the data to get their result, but their generalizations don’t gibe with the larger time use studies conducted over the years. They also seem to miss the driving cause. Yes, well paid workers have been working longer hours, but the obvious cause is that they are exempt employees, so they have zero marginal labor cost to their employers. Non-exempt employees, who are less well paid, are paid by the hour and subject to overtime rules, so they have real and even rising marginal costs. If you want more on this, I wrote up a post at Daily Kos back in 2007: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/09/06/381387/-The-New-Leisure-Class

I’m 22 and married and all my husband and I do is play video games and watch TV and go out to eat and sometimes go to the beach. What’s this oil change and lawn mowing and baby-having bullshit?

At 40 (and my wife 41) we play video games regularly. Also watch cartoons. I have to be grown up at my day job (and my volunteer job as a firefighter/EMT), why would I want to do that in my off-hours?

And in another bunch of anecdata, a few years ago I was playing with a pick-up group in City of Heroes and mentioned that, if a call came in, I might have to run off suddenly and explained why. The majority of the group understood because, in one of those weird flukes of nature, it turned out that the group players consisted of myself; 1 teenager; an emergency room doctor and her husband the cop; a US Coast Guard pilot; and a nurse who’d returned to civie life after a stint in the US military.