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Thursday, November 24, 2011

This is an exercise in writing and social analysis. It's not good.
So I walked into the living room and on was an episode of 'the big bang theory.' The show depicted four mid-twenties male buddies in an apartment playing video games, and very much into it. In the midst of their adrenal euphoria, the front door opens to introduce a gaggle of four conventionally hot bombshells. The boys, concentrating solely on the galactic struggle at hand, fail to even notice the sudden change of scenery. A fifth woman, clearly a friend of the buds, exclaims that she's brought these women for the sexual delight of the buds. But the boys remain utterly oblivious to the beautiful women. So the beautiful women give each other a shrug of "iiuuoo", and turn away, shutting the door behind them, thus shutting close the boys' chance at some serious sex. Hearing the door close, one boy stops the game and says "I thought I heard something," but then figures it must have been nothing, and they continue on their merry gaming. The laugh track plays, and the credits roll. What a hilarious closing. These socially awkward boys were so caught up in their childish game that they missed their opportunity to have sex with beautiful women. They should have dropped their little game, high five each other, and promptly gone for the sex. This scene sends the message that the highest achievement a dude can make, or at least the highest level of pleasure that also awards serious social brownie points, is sex with a beautiful woman, often a stranger. So not only were boys behaving in a childish way, they were in effect stupid, missing the obviously most important thing they could do with themselves. The pursuit of sex is somehow now an intellectual pursuit: why wouldn't you want the highest good--sex--over anything else? While I think video games stifle creativity and talent, what these friends were doing was not simply playing videos games: they were being friends, working together as a team to achieve a goal, albeit a cheap and trivial goal. But the message was clear: men want/need sex, women have sex; if you pass up sex, there's something hilariously stupidly risible about you. In spit of this, there could be a positive message if viewed from an angle that the producers did not intend, that is, that people should not yield to societal expectations about what they should want and how they should act in the world, but should focus on the things that they connect with and develop themselves as persons.
Ok, this has been a very disorganized post, and I'm not sure I even agree with myself or know what I'm talking about. But I'm trying to work on my organization and writing skills, which somehow never improve. Critical thinking and writing are arts that should go together. Sometimes a person has one without the other, some people have neither.