Look, I know that many, many men and boys spend too much time gaming. There are also many, many men and boys who spend too much time watching television, playing golf, or obsessing over sports (and sometimes all of the above) — you name the diversion, and you’ll find people who indulge in excess. But it’s a category error to equate games and porn. To do so exaggerates the danger of games and minimizes the evil of porn. So if I stay up too late Saturday night playing Diablo 3 (and I probable will!), is that remotely comparable to downloading porn? Simply put, overuse of video games is destructive. Any use of porn is sinful. What’s next? An article proclaiming that women are ruined by adultery and Pinterest?

Thanks to bskillet , I came across an excellent blast by David French against another of those endless, annoying “ guys are wasting their lives on porn and video games ” articles, in which he noted:

Of course, men don’t attack women over their pastimes, typically; they may tease them, sometimes, but it is highly rare to hear men go on a tear at their wives or girlfriends about liking various womenly pastimes and hobbies.

But many women, on the other hand, have often disliked things men like to do without them, and I think these ‘Man up, and stop playing video games!’ diatribes are another manifestation of such age-old female tendencies. (Obviously, from a Christian perspective, porn is evil, and French is right to distinguish between porn and video games. But all too many non-gaming women seem to see the latter as being as evil as the former…)

Hunting and fishing are prime examples of male pastimes women attack; I suspect part of the reason that the animal rights movement has gotten as much traction as it has, is due to female opposition to hunting, less out of caring for ‘Bambi’s being slaughtered than out of annoyance with men for doing something with ‘the boys’, i.e. that doesn’t involve them – but ending up cloaked under the self-righteous, moralistic rubric of ‘animal rights’…

Sports is another, of course. Why do feminists attack football (esp. the Superbowl) so virulently, if not because (a) they do hate men’s sports, and (b) they know less radical women will sympathize with them, so it’s a way to influence them. Sadly, Christian women buy into the whole anti-male-sports thing as much as anyone else; I know a pastor’s wife who always gets on a rant if the subject of golf comes up; she hates it with a passion…

And there are many others, from poker, to racecar-driving, and more, all of which come in for much condemnation from the opposite sex.

Then there are male ‘vices’ which women are less interested in / not interested in, which are commonly attacked by many women purely because men like them. I put vices in quotation marks there, because I’m not referring to actual sins, like pornography, but habits and practices women consider vices. The biggest example is alcohol; women in North America are less inclined to imbibe as much as alcohol, and as a result, they often razz their boyfriends / husbands about their drinking, and in pietistic evangelical and other Christian circles, often try to manipulate them into quitting, threatening to not marry them unless they give it up. And most married North American men can forget about going out to the pub with their mates, all that often; many of them get shamed into largely quitting doing so; pubs and bars are typically dominated by young singles and divorcees / unmarried folks; sports bars still have enough married men, but you can bet their wives are largely unhappy they’re there.

Tobacco is another, to a lesser degree, because many women smoke cigarettes. But I’ve noticed, even amongst those that do, some have a visceral hatred of other forms of tobacco that are more common with men, like smoking cigars, or chewing tobacco, and moist snuff, and the like. Interestingly enough, through the 19th century up until the early 20th century, the most common form of partaking of tobacco in North America was chewing tobacco. But as Alex Jones noted in a video 7man linked here, in the ‘flapper era’, companies making cigarettes began especially targetting women, esp. the flappers, and now, cigarette smoking has largely replaced chewing tobacco, as the most common form of tobacco consumption, worldwide. And pipe-smoking has almost died out, while cigar-smoking has waned, compared with how widespread it was previously. And only a smattering of men still do dipping snuff or chewing tobacco, and lesser still, nasal snuff; most women today find such practices disgusting, if and when they hear of them, in my observation.

I’m not sure whether women’s habit of attacking men’s pastimes and ‘vices’ is just shit-testing, or jealousy over time and attention not spent on them, or a combo thereof. But it’s been around forever, and probably always will be.

To return to the topic of the shaming over video games, I think it’s part of the same dynamic at work, but with a difference, of course: the men in question aren’t actually with the women doing the bitching about them; they’re being scorned for foregoing dating such women in favour of other activities. But still, strikes me as part and parcel of the same age-old complaints; the unfortunate thing is, because of bitching about video games, or attacking football, etc., feminism gets much traction amongst ordinary women, even Christian women, because in bitching about such, they tap into the age-old anti-male-pastimes tendencies of many women.