Republic of Folk

What I do with my own time is up to me. Not this idiot. He has a problem
with video games....

http://www.gamerevolution.com/news/cnn- ... games-8743

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CNN contributor William J. Bennett, the U.S. secretary of education from
1985 to 1988, has a mouthful to say about how men are falling behind in the
gender battle and how video games contribute:

"For the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious
and arguably more successful than men...

If you don't believe the numbers, just ask young women about men today. You
will find them talking about prolonged adolescence and men who refuse to
grow up... This decline in founding virtues -- work, marriage, and
religion -- has caught the eye of social commentators from all corners.

Man's response has been pathetic. Today, 18-to- 34-year-old men spend more
time playing video games a day than 12-to- 17-year-old boys. While women are
graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to
work, not getting married and not raising families. Women are beginning to
take the place of men in many ways. This has led some to ask: do we even
need men?

So what's wrong? Increasingly, the messages to boys about what it means to
be a man are confusing. The machismo of the street gang calls out with a
swagger. Video games, television and music offer dubious lessons to boys who
have been abandoned by their fathers.

...The Founding Fathers believed, and the evidence still shows, that
industriousness, marriage and religion are a very important basis for male
empowerment and achievement. We may need to say to a number of our
twenty-something men, Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself
together, get a challenging job and get married. It's time for men to man
up."

Apparently, to be a man in America, he has to work, get married to a woman,
and be religious. Well, I'm an agnostic gay man who works by playing and
writing about video games... so I guess I'm screwed. So is the rest of the
video game industry, as the vast majority in the industry are men. Also,
this just in: Women don't play video games. See? Facebook, Popcap, and
iPhone games really don't count?

Now, I get it. Even I know a few guys who I wish I could kick out of their
gaming chair and tell them to drop their video games for a sec and be
responsible for a change. It's all about balance, yes?

But if we really want to talk about masculinity, I could talk about how
video games are essentially a throwback for men, back to a time when
strength and courage meant something instead of their marginalization in the
modern workplace, which is why so many successful games are about historical
quests, warfare, epic heroism, and the frontier, be it in space, the Wild
West, or the apocalypse.

Instead, we just get another tiring editorial by an old man slamming young
men with his erect judgmental ignorant troll face.
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Nobody, non-issue. Thankfully in a few years him and his like will either be dead or dribbling incoherently in a nursing home. Don't give this hack any more attention than he deserves.

Controversial topic, but women, at least in the US, collectively spend significantly more money than they earn (as a total demographic). I need to find a citation for that.

Perhaps women are "collectively" more educated--an extremely dubious assumption, particularly given that there was no distinction whatsoever between liberal arts and science education given. But, it seems illogical to suggest that the demographic that collectively works much longer hours (and for whom retirement sometimes arrives in the form of permanent disability) ought to "man up" even more than they have. Traditional gender roles have usually placed men in much higher-risk professions than women.