Men.

Imagine a world where every movie is Magic Mike. Or a clone thereof. Imagine that if you went to the movies, you were likely to experience the Magic Mike experience. How long until you’re turned off from going to the movies?

Hey, you’re open minded. You’re comfortable with your sexuality. Keep in mind that Magic Mike is a pretty good film: 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. Imagine these movies were EVEN BETTER. Imagine that they were, by film standards, all time great films that hit 95%+. Every one of them is praised by critics as being masterworks – charming, funny, and solid examples of the craft. And every film was full of washboard abs and oversized codpieces. Every. Single. Film.

How long until going to the movies makes you feel a bit icky? Do you even bother owning a television? Are you enthused by sitting next to your girlfriend while she drools at the screen – EVERY trip to the movies? When you watch movies in a mixed crowd, is it an audience split between enthusiastic women hooting and hollering next to awkwardly silent men quietly nursing their beer?

Imagine that other films exist, but the movie press just ignored them and continued to plaster every cover of every Entertainment Weekly with massive mounds of Channing Tatum quality manmeat attached to hollywood bodies unobtainable by normal men. And most of the other movies happened to be movies aimed for the Nickelodeon crowd.

Imagine if, when you suggested that perhaps there should be a few movies that aren’t like Magic Mike, angry women flooded your mailbox with profanity, vile attacks and death threats so authentic and frightening you feel the need to notify the authorities. Imagine you got this treatment even if you asked for one male character in the next Magic Mike to dress sensibly and keep his clothes on the whole movie.

Imagine that even when the Avengers, a movie with massive crossover success appears and even outsells Magic Mike, the Hollywood studios ignored that success and kept making Magic Mike clones to the degree that they kept cannibalizing each others sales, while this entire other market just remained unexploited. Imagine that movie directors actually talked about how the movies DEPENDED on washboard abs and manmeat to be successful. “Our extensive focus groups have shown that men will tolerate this, but women WILL NOT BUY A TICKET without a codpiece that looks like it’s got a Kielbasa Sausage inside”. Because, the movie executives tell you with a straight face, women are incapable of enjoying film for any other reason.

I like sex. I like boobplate. I like Bayonetta. I like jiggle factor in my games. I have no problem with porn, as perhaps my prior writings have made clear. I pooh-pooh people who think that armor (male or female) should be realistic, because its far more important that characters be strongly identifiable and marketable. And also, because I adore the female form personally.

But right now, that’s what it looks like coming in from the other side. We have video game aisles that are still too narrow in their depictions across the board. We have comic book stores where daughters cannot find a magazine they feel like is aimed for them. The diversity and experimentation that we do have is buried away in Steam. Which is a real problem – as games get more expensive to make, we need to sell our games to broader, wider audiences. Joss Whedon gets to spend $200M making Avengers films because he puts female butts in seats for what are normally male-oriented flicks. Now that our AAA budgets are crossing the 9-digit mark, it’s high time that the industry started to think the same way, or the AAA game will soon head the way of the dodo.

Even our thirteen year olds realize this is bullshit.