I was reading a game review tucked in with some other game discussions and found more serpents under the rocks. In discussing a character who in the game is a Bluebeard style serial killer, the allegations of patriarchal pathology reared their ugly head.
Now the game itself is of no interest to me, and I could care less about the reviewer's interest in the game. What I am interested in is the problematic politics that informs reviewers and players interests in games, and undoubtedly feeds designers. This little gem from liberal Berkeley professor Judith Butler came out of this gamer's reflections:
"any assignment of sex or gender is irreducibly a kind of violence, an oppressive act. As she writes in Bodies That Matter:
…'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve materialization through a forcible reiteration of norms. (Butler 1-2)"
Reading her bio, she is informed by such luminaries as sexy Sigmund Freud (oddly enough), and Derrida of the meaningless words. In essence, her most notable contribution from modern feminism to academia and the world, is that gender is something that is culturally learned through practice and has absolutely no natural connection to sex. Taking her notion to it's logical conclusion, one would have to wonder how all those cave men so long ago who presumably at some point had no codified "culture" to speak of, could possibly have learned that somehow male and female were complimentary sexually, and that maybe, just maybe, there was not only a correlation between the sexual behavior of male and female, bu that by nature, they did certain things and behaved certain ways not because of a "gendered" cultural construct but because they were naturally one thing and not another... for that matter, why do animals of all kinds somehow behave as if sex and sexual behavior are naturally linked? I wonder how many of Butler's academic peers ever lived on a farm...
but then the elitist snobbery of academia tends to have a pretty blinkered view of such earthy folk, but I digress.
So what we are taught by Butler, is that rather than teach our children that there are some things that are natural and beneficial behaviors due to the natural composition of our bodies, we should instead leave them with no guidance whatsoever. Now she is specifically referring to sexual behavior and understanding, but why should we separate that exclusively? How is it not oppressive violence for liberal ideologues to force compliance with their regulatory norms on others? Furthermore, if some of our behavior as a species actually does come out of what we naturally are, then is it not only violence to truth and reason to deny that there are behaviors that should be normatively encouraged, but violence of a kind that is oppressive to the species in general? It really is a matter of showing whether there is better reason to think that nature provides clues as to how we ought to behave or if we are somehow entirely transcendent of nature. That question is problematic for either the materialist or for the neo-gnostic, but not at all so for the substance dualist. I'm not sure exactly where Butler resides, but seeing that she is a fan of Derrida, I can bet comfortably that she is in the irrational camp of blithe relativism. And yet sadly, the camp that thinks that it can make up truth at convenience is the camp with no truth in it but by coincidence.
I fear that while she and her followers make accusations of the guilt of violence, they themselves are guilty of abusive neglect, encouraging a society to refrain from guiding children to understand what is natural and wholesome through normative behaviors. Just as we ought to encourage normative behaviors with what we eat by training our natural appetites to the right kind of foods, in the right amounts, at the right times, is it not rational to encourage normative sexual behavior based on the recognition that the appetite for sex is rooted also in nature? I would also question whether Butler and her disciples are not also the violent and oppressive party considering the aggressive action to force cultural regulation on society. Her brand of thinking is exactly the kind of thinking that has metastasized into all intersectional political social justice movements, for the benefit of a few and the hinderance of many.
I have a problem with promoting this kind of thinking in serious life, and I certainly have a problem with this kind of bullying in the games I play.
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