Violating Taboos

The Washington Post discusses a study in which teenage boys who play games that include killing women become less sympathetic towards women who are portrayed to them as real-life victims of violence.
In the "Grand Theft Auto" series, one of the world’s top-selling video game franchises, players can have sex with women and then kill them....

[A] team of social scientists asked a group of Italian high school students to play one of three kinds of games: one that rewarded violence against women ("Grand Theft Auto"), one that promoted violence without degrading women (a portion of the "Half Life" series) or one that featured good, clean fun (a pinball or puzzle sequence).

After participants played their game for about 25 minutes, they answered questions about how they felt about on-screen characters. Did they identify with the mobster in "Grand Theft Auto?" Did they connect with the alien-battling scientist in "Half Life?"

The researchers then showed each student a photo of a bruised girl who, they said, had been beaten by a boy. They asked: On a scale of one to seven, how much sympathy do you have for her?

The male students who had just played "Grand Theft Auto" — and also related to the protagonist — felt least bad for her, the study found, with an empathy mean score of 3. Those who had played the other games, however, exhibited more compassion. And female students who played the same rounds of Grand Theft Auto had a mean empathy score of 5.3.
What researchers seem to be ignoring in this study is that there is a very strong Western taboo against violence targeting women. We have special laws to protect women against violence even though almost all violent crime is against men. We treat the relatively rare instances in which women are victims as especially bad, from a moral and legal perspective.

Ask the question another way: how much violence in video games do you suppose is targeted against men? My guess is that the answer is "far and away most of it," which the #2 position being held not by women but by monsters -- aliens and zombies and whatnot.

If you work against that taboo by encouraging young men to think of women as legitimate targets for violence, you can expect that some of the protection that women enjoy from violence is going to wane. Presumably these social scientists want you to know that video games like GTA are very bad because they allow young men to treat objects represented as women as legitimate targets for violence.

The dark irony is that these same people are, of course, the ones pushing for women in the infantry.

They're the ones who want co-ed boot camp, where young Marines and Soldiers will train in conducting physical violence not against virtual images of women but actual young women.

They're the ones who want to break sex down into "gender," and then tell you it's not real but just some sort of social construct. We should treat men and women exactly the same, unless it's a man who wants to be treated like a woman, in which case we should make special efforts to make sure he feels we receive him as feminine.

But yeah, tell me again how horrible the video games are. Tell me how sexist it is that they expose virtual women to violence, just like they do virtual men.

I'd be only too happy to endorse a taboo that protects virtual women from being depicted as objects for violence. I'd just like to see the same courtesy extended to actual women.

7 comments:

Eric Blair said...

I've seen some version or another of GTA that a friend had, and it was, well, the player is in the role of a thug. So yeah, everybody is a target in that game.

But nice catch with the cognitive dissonance of demanding nice treatment of women while at the same time expecting them to function as infantry.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

So a possible dip in empathy immediately after playing a video game, with no information as to how long that dip lasts or if it affects behavior in any way, is supposed to tell us what, exactly?

I'm guessing that seeing actual women that you know getting blown up in combat will have far more effect in desensitising young men - not to women, but to the enemy.

Grim said...

I'm guessing that seeing actual women that you know getting blown up in combat will have far more effect in desensitising young men - not to women, but to the enemy.

It may do that, if the taboo holds. For us, seeing women we known blown up is enraging because we have a strong taboo against violence directed at women. Members of Boko Haram, on the other hand, are only too glad to have the enemy killing their women instead of their men. They are positively delighted to train women to blow themselves up in the furtherance of their cause.

What keeps us from getting to that point is the underlying moral structure that people are busily dismantling. It's gone far enough that some younger members of our culture are amused by the idea of playing a character who can think of sleeping with a woman and then killing her over pocket change.

David Foster said...

AVI..."I'm guessing that seeing actual women that you know getting blown up in combat will have far more effect in desensitising young men - not to women, but to the enemy."

An interesting point. I do think most American/Western men will react with even more anger at seeing the violent killing of women who are members of their group (however, group may be defined) than at seeing the violent killing of men in their group....how much of this is inborn vs acculturated, I don't know.

An interesting example can be found in the memoirs of Austrian naval officer Captain von Trapp...yes, the real person who was the prototype for the Captain in 'The Sound of Music.' At the beginning of WWI, his attitude was strictly professional, he felt no personal animosity toward the enemy; on the contrary felt great sympathy for the Allied seamen it was his duty to drown. But after seeing the suffering of Austrian women and children as a result of the 'Hunger Blockade,' his attitude changed greatly.

I don't think Captain von Trapp committed any war crimes as a result of this personal sense of anger, but then he was a man in his mid-30s and by all accounts an extraordinarily decent individual. Younger and less-balanced people may seek revenge much more readily.

Review of the memoir:

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/43171.html

Valerie said...

"They are positively delighted to train women to blow themselves up in the furtherance of their cause. "

They aren't the first Muslim Brotherhood spin-off to do this. Al-Qaeda in Iraq used animals, children, dead babies, captive men under threat to their families, and people of limited mental ability as "suicide" bombers. Islamists have no problem murdering the innocent in the process of murdering their neighbors.

It's one of the reasons why the Iraqis were willing to side with the Americans to throw Al-Qaeda out.

Valerie

Grim said...

I was there, remember? :)

MikeD said...

Ask the question another way: how much violence in video games do you suppose is targeted against men? My guess is that the answer is "far and away most of it," which the #2 position being held not by women but by monsters -- aliens and zombies and whatnot.

A topic near and dear to my heart. I will tell you, one of the recurring complaints I see against most video games is how "all the antagonists these days are Nazis, zombies, or aliens" and how that just goes to show how uncreative the video game industry is. Well, like any whipped dog, the industry refuses to approach anything even resembling a controversial antagonist, because they will be accused of base racism if they try. And if a game developer attempts to use, say... the Russians as the bad guys, then you've alienated a pretty big part of your global market. Aliens are safe enemies, because it's not like there's an anti-alien defamation league. Zombies are normally a safe enemy to choose, because they're just like the rest of us, only dead. And Nazis are a safe target, because... well they're Nazis. Now pick another group to be enemies for a story in your head. Unless they are pasty white, speak with no discernible accent, and live in a fictional country (think SciFi world or fantasy kingdom), then chances are someone will make the accusation that you're a racist. And there's enough of the special-snowflakeism out there that your game is going to suffer economically because of it.

So does anyone really wonder why it is that game designers keep going back to the Nazi/Zombie/Alien trough?