Excerpt of Escape, entitlement, and empowerment: young men and the "four Ps"
By Michael Kimmel
Sometimes, it seems to me that an entire generation of young men (16-26) are lost to what might be called the siren song of the "Three Ps": Pot, Pornography, and Playstation (video games). For an increasing number of young men, a fourth "P" is enjoying a renaissance: Poker, this time often played on-line. ..... Much of the recent writing about the "boy crisis" has focused on the influence of pornography and video games in particular on young men. By no means has all that focus been negative, though most thoughtful observers of contemporary society are deeply troubled by the tremendous amount of time that so many young men spend absorbed in the dubious "pleasures of the Ps."
Kimmel points out something every adult knows: young men tend to become hostile and defensive when queried about the amount of time they devote to online gaming.
Why are these guys so angry and defensive? In part because they feel a little guilty that they are spending so much time doing something they know is purposeless...
But it goes deeper than that. Guys' defensiveness also has to do with the rage that's both covert and overt in much of what passes for entertainment in Guyland. Because, as it turns out, the fantasy world of media is both an escape from reality and an escape to reality - the reality that many of these guys would secretly like to inhabit. Video games, in particular, provide a way for guys to feel empowered. In their daily lives guys often feel that they don't measure up to the standards of the Guy Code - always be in control, never show weakness, neediness, vulnerability - and so they create ideal versions of themselves in fantasy. The thinking is simple: if somebody messes with your avatar, you blow him away. It's a fantasy world of Manichean good and evil, a world in which violence is restorative and actions have no consequences whatsoever.
The more young men feel alienated from "real life" and its myriad attendant responsibilities, the more they long to soothe themselves with fantasies of revenge and restoration. The more time they spend in that fantasy world, however, the more strange and bleak and unfair reality may seem - and this drives still more video game use, often accompanied by pot or porn or other anesthetizing tools.
Men's Rights Activists, I've noted, tend to fall into two groups: older, usually divorced heterosexual men who feel victimized by family courts, and younger men still in the Guyland phase, convinced, as Kimmel writes, that they have been disenfranchised and exploited by the women who have all the power. The older men offer the younger men cautionary tales about grasping wives, ungrateful children, and biased judges; the younger men grow even angrier and more cynical as they realize the stunning disconnect between what porn and video games promise and the world the way it really is.
"Guyland mystique" is this: The mistaken sense of having been disenfranchised (by women who now insist on being seen as equals) breeds a longing for revenge, a longing that is made manifest in video games and porn movies which feature narratives in which men are restored to their proper, dominant role. In video games and pornography, young men get a vision of what it might be like to exercise raw, unrestrained, restorative power. And in a world where so many young men feel so uncertain about their role, a world in which they are so confined by the contradictory and impossible demands of the Guy Code, video games and porn offer an alternative moral and sexual universe infinitely easier to understand than the one which these lads actually inhabit.