SOC 0851 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Copycat Crime, Political Correctness, Heterosexism
10 Jun 2018
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• Masculinity and Video Games: Learning the Three Rs – the second most popular topic of
alar aout the edia’s effets o geder is the spread of iolee aross ay edia
outlets, and specifically within video games
o Violent video games, violent song lyrics, and violent movies have been blamed
for a wide variety of real-life acts of violence, from the school shootings like
those at Columbine High School in Colorado to copycat crimes like the murders
committed by Benjamin James Darras and Sarah Edmondson in Mississippi in
1995, supposedly inspired by the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers
o The use of violence as entertainment is nothing new to human societies
o Historical perspective – other societies and cultures have used spectacles of real
violence (gladiators in ancient Rome or lynching in the American South) as forms
of entertainment
o An abundance of research has been conducted that examines the connections
between the violence in video games and other media outlets and the behaviors
of the individuals who consume these types of media
▪ Men dominate the world of game consoles like Xbox and PlayStation,
where players are 75% male
▪ The players of sports and adventure games, from Madden NFL to Duke
Nukem are 95% male
▪ Many of the games are violent, misogynistic, heterosexist, and hostile
toward racial and ethnic others
▪ Grand Theft Auto – your character, or avatar, is a criminal, and your goals
are to sell drugs, build your criminal empire, and kill cops, while along the
way you can kill anyone else you want, and having sex with a prostitute in
your car increases your health; you can get back the money you paid
afterward by following the prostitute out of the car and killing her
▪ Many adventure games in general reflect a world of hyper masculine
male characters and ultra-feminine female characters
▪ Women are highly sexualized and always heterosexual
▪ People of color in video games are generally portrayed as part of the
criminal underworld
o For many of the young, white, male college students who play video games, the
games did not actually contribute to any increase in real-life violence (Study by
Kimmel)
▪ The video games reinforce three Rs of the parallel education received by
these men through the predominant, guy land media
• Relaxation – escape from the weight of adult demands and of the
rules of soial deoru also ko as politial orretess
• Revenge – agaist those ho hae usurped hat you thought
as yours; ay of these hite, ale ollege studets feel they
are victims of a world that places the needs and interests of
women and people of color above their own; the revenge
experienced through video games takes the form of stereotypical
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