Husband Abuse by Wife, Male Abuse Victims, and the “Hey Baby” Game

Mod­ern, angry women now have an out­let of their own through a vio­lent, anti-male video game that pro­motes the misandry that has become so preva­lent in mod­ern, West­ern culture:

Ever had one of those seem­ingly end­less days? All you want to do is to get home… You’re the last one out of the office. Its get­ting dark outside…

You walk down the streets and real­ize the street­lights are burnt out.

There’s no one around. You hear a foot­step behind you. The light flick­ers. You turn and he says, “I wanna lick you all over.….”

And then you remem­ber, you’re pack­ing a 3′ long .80 cal­iber machine gun that’s locked and loaded.

Ladies, are you sick and tired of cat­call­ing, hol­ler­ing, obnox­ious one-liners and creepy street encoun­ters? Tired of chang­ing your route home to avoid uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions? IT’S PAYBACK TIME, BOYS.….

When I was a waiter in high school in a Pon­derosa Steak­house in south­ern Illi­nois, we wore the required uni­form: tan, khaki pants and a button-down, solid-color, long-sleeve shirt. In the sum­mer, we could switch to shorts and roll the sleeves up. I had firm, mus­cu­lar legs because I was on the ten­nis team as well.

I once walked to a table of middle-aged women to clear some of their dishes, and I over­heard their con­ver­sa­tion as I was walk­ing away: “Look at the legs on him!” I thought it was a bit weird because I was six­teen, but I smiled at the compliment.

And that’s why I can never under­stand why some women are so offended when men com­pli­ment them in pub­lic. As Lau­rie Penny writes:

As a morose-looking sort of per­son, I reg­u­larly get instructed to smile by strange men in the street, and with­out wish­ing to crit­i­cise men’s indis­putable right to pass pub­lic judge­ment on absolutely any woman’s appear­ance and demeanour, too much of that sort of thing can make even the gen­tlest soul long to exe­cute the leer­ing scum­bags with a great big gun.

Penny’s tone and colum­nist pho­to­graph present her as a mem­ber of a cer­tain sub­set of fem­i­nist who takes every­thing much too seri­ously by look­ing for sex­ism every­where. Maybe I have lived here in Israel for long enough to get used to peo­ple offer­ing both crit­i­cism and praise to com­plete strangers in pub­lic, so I see noth­ing wrong with a man telling a women (or vice versa) — accu­rately — that peo­ple are more attrac­tive when they smile. Here, peo­ple will stop a mother with a stroller to rec­om­mend a dif­fer­ent brand and tell a super­mar­ket cus­tomer that a dif­fer­ent orange juice is bet­ter. A waiter will tell a cus­tomer that she is too skinny and that she should order some­thing larger than a salad. It’s a part of life in a com­mu­nal, tribal cul­ture.

Of course, rude, dis­gust­ing com­ments are another story. Any man who walks up to a woman and says that he wants to “lick her all over” deserves to be slapped or kneed in the groin.

But I fear that the premise behind the Hey Baby video game — and its pop­u­lar­ity, since it is cur­rently sold out — is indica­tive of an under­ly­ing cur­rent of anger among West­ern women. And that is just as dan­ger­ous to soci­ety as the guns are in this vir­tual one. “Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer” was praised for depict­ing a kick-ass hero­ine who defeats the mon­sters instead of being killed by them (as well as for just being a ter­rific show) as in all of the prior decade’s slasher films. And then came anti-male T-shirts and an edu­ca­tional sys­tem that began dis­crim­i­nat­ing against boys. But killing men in a video game is one step closer to real­ity — espe­cially since Penny described the game as “cathartic.”

Of course, I have the same feel­ings toward anti-woman video games like Grand Theft Auto in which play­ers can have sex with pros­ti­tutes and then kill them rather than pay. The pop­u­lar­ity of that genre is also evi­dence that mod­ern men are angry at women as well. (A clear major­ity of primary-school stu­dents in a British study believe that it is accept­able to hit one’s wife if din­ner is not ready on time, accord­ing to a BBC report.) Both sexes are increas­ing furi­ous at the other after the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism have revamped soci­ety in ways that no one could have predicted.

(Hat tip: Glenn Sacks)