C Diddy
Starter
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/22/DDGH1DR0DP1.DTL&hw=sex+in+my+violence&sn=001&sc=1000
Thank God. I mean, thank God there was a screechy and pointless uproar over the fact that violence-addled teenagers can, via a free downloadable patch, watch badly animated semi-explicit soft-core sex scenes interspersed throughout the No. 1 best-selling video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Cuz you know, there you are, eyes bloodshot and fingers sore and synapses raw and butt prematurely widening, cranking along on your 117th hour of the insanely popular GTASA, and you're bustin' heads and makin' drug deals and swipin' cars and gangbangin' and stuff is blowin' up all around.
And there's tons of guns and bazookas and knives and disposable chicks and viciously corrupt cops and piles of blatant racism and drive-by shootings and pipe beatings and low-rider cars with massive silly chrome rims, and you can veritably feel the imminent heroin overdoses and taste the toxic prison food these thug characters will soon enjoy, and it's just all manner of bitchin' video-game glory of sufficient quality to numb your teenage soul to the point where you become so callous and lost and malicious, you're ready to join the Young Republicans when WHOA, what the hell is this?
Suddenly that downloadable patch you installed last night kicks in and there's, like, a lame and badly animated sex scene, right there, right between the graphic bloody part where you bazooka'd the police helicopter and the part where the gangbanger gets his lame *** beaten with a large handgun, and suddenly you're like, what the hell? Who stuck this lame, badly animated sex in here? Where'd my soul-numbing ultraviolent racism go? I am outraged.
You are outraged. You are livid. You immediately show this lame and badly animated sex scene to your slightly catatonic mom, who takes one look and nothing registers for a minute and she just sort of stares at you as if to say, "Yes, what?" At which point you point out that it's, like, badly animated soft-core porn! In your favoritest violent video game, fer chrissakes! And she says, "Oh." Oh!
And now she is also outraged, I mean how dare they show this stuff to you, you precious innocent thing, and what the heck is the world coming to when you can't leave your jaded, sexually misinformed American teenager alone for half an hour with his wholesome ultraviolent video game without some naughty geek programmer slithering in and showing him badly animated characters screwing in a van?
And so your mom takes the game and shows it to your alcoholic overworked stepdad and he looks at the sex scenes for a minute and sorta shrugs, right before your mom shoots him a look and he's like, Oh right! Yeah! Sex is bad! And now he's outraged and so, too, is your older half-sister, but you're not really sure about her because she's always a little baked on your mom's stash, but at this moment, that's really neither here nor there.
So then. With everyone's outrage intact, you spend the next four days carefully typing out a short letter (it's been a while since you had to write actual words) to the game's publisher and to the parent company and to some senators and maybe to the Family Council for Icky Media Ickiness (or whatever it's called), and you say, "HEY, goddammit, what the hell is this lame badly animated SEX doing interspersed in between my ULTRAVIOLENCE?!! Where is the JUSTICE, DUDE??!!" (You like to use lots of ALL CAPS and superfluous punctuation to emphasize the fact that your high school English classes were, like, a total waste of taxpayer money.)
After all, up to this point, you've only seen about 17,000 porn ads on the Internet and spent 167 hours riffing through your stepdad's stash of Hustlers and watched your friend's DVD copy of "Weapons of *** Destruction IV" like, 20 times. You're still a baby! Why, you still don't even get most of the jokes in "Wedding Crashers"! You're not even old enough to be sent off to die for no reason in Iraq!
Shouldn't someone be outraged over the fact that 17-year-old virgin geeks who play endless hours of ultraviolent video games might somehow be tainted to their very cores by two minutes of badly animated sex, despite how you are, as a typical American teen, so regularly co-opted, so viciously pummeled by crass product placement and violence on the news and wicked misinformation about everything from marijuana to abstinence to cafeteria food, well, it pretty much makes the tepid and completely unarousing sex on GTASA look like outtakes from "Shrek III: Now We're Just Whoring It"? You're darned right someone should!
And sure enough, the Powers That Be hear your pleas and respond in force -- because what reactionary family watchdog group or PR-hungry politician doesn't love a good who-will-save-the-children plea? -- and it goes so far that the noxious Parents Television Council actually hooks up with none other than eye-on-the-prize Sen. Hillary Clinton to combat this new and vile force of video-game corruption, which is just depressing on a whole 'nuther level.
Success! Your team of sanctimonious deluded firebrands has caused the game's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to lose millions in sales at gun- happy, sexually frigid Wal-Mart by forcing Take-Two to relabel its cash cow as "Adults Only," and you have also forced Rockstar Games, who developed GTASA, to recode its pride and joy sans any hidden badly animated sex whatsoever (but still packed to the Monte Carlo's roof with all the sexist violent juicy thug-life goodness you can swallow). Yay!
Meanwhile, just down America's street, countless thousands of young U.S. soldiers are hobbling home from Iraq and Afghanistan, wounded and disabled and limbless and traumatized, eyes deadened to the world and permanently scarred to their cores and in interviews and documentaries and various news stories you often hear many of them say this one weirdly similar thing.
They say: "Wow man, yeah, it sure was amazing over there, totally surreal, killin' all those people with rapid-fire machine guns and firing rounds of mortar shells into buildings that might've been, for all we knew, hospitals or schools, and using night-vision goggles to invade decimated towns to hunt down crazed guerrillas and riding in those tanks and blowing the crap out of those Iraqi villages and hearing those women scream and watching those bodies burn."
This is what they say: "Oh man, you know what it reminded me of? You know what it was like over there, what with all the killing and the violence and the guns? It was just like, well, it was just like a video game."
To which you may now reply, "Huh." Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays on SFGate.com and in Datebook. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
Absolutely Great piece.
Thank God. I mean, thank God there was a screechy and pointless uproar over the fact that violence-addled teenagers can, via a free downloadable patch, watch badly animated semi-explicit soft-core sex scenes interspersed throughout the No. 1 best-selling video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Cuz you know, there you are, eyes bloodshot and fingers sore and synapses raw and butt prematurely widening, cranking along on your 117th hour of the insanely popular GTASA, and you're bustin' heads and makin' drug deals and swipin' cars and gangbangin' and stuff is blowin' up all around.
And there's tons of guns and bazookas and knives and disposable chicks and viciously corrupt cops and piles of blatant racism and drive-by shootings and pipe beatings and low-rider cars with massive silly chrome rims, and you can veritably feel the imminent heroin overdoses and taste the toxic prison food these thug characters will soon enjoy, and it's just all manner of bitchin' video-game glory of sufficient quality to numb your teenage soul to the point where you become so callous and lost and malicious, you're ready to join the Young Republicans when WHOA, what the hell is this?
Suddenly that downloadable patch you installed last night kicks in and there's, like, a lame and badly animated sex scene, right there, right between the graphic bloody part where you bazooka'd the police helicopter and the part where the gangbanger gets his lame *** beaten with a large handgun, and suddenly you're like, what the hell? Who stuck this lame, badly animated sex in here? Where'd my soul-numbing ultraviolent racism go? I am outraged.
You are outraged. You are livid. You immediately show this lame and badly animated sex scene to your slightly catatonic mom, who takes one look and nothing registers for a minute and she just sort of stares at you as if to say, "Yes, what?" At which point you point out that it's, like, badly animated soft-core porn! In your favoritest violent video game, fer chrissakes! And she says, "Oh." Oh!
And now she is also outraged, I mean how dare they show this stuff to you, you precious innocent thing, and what the heck is the world coming to when you can't leave your jaded, sexually misinformed American teenager alone for half an hour with his wholesome ultraviolent video game without some naughty geek programmer slithering in and showing him badly animated characters screwing in a van?
And so your mom takes the game and shows it to your alcoholic overworked stepdad and he looks at the sex scenes for a minute and sorta shrugs, right before your mom shoots him a look and he's like, Oh right! Yeah! Sex is bad! And now he's outraged and so, too, is your older half-sister, but you're not really sure about her because she's always a little baked on your mom's stash, but at this moment, that's really neither here nor there.
So then. With everyone's outrage intact, you spend the next four days carefully typing out a short letter (it's been a while since you had to write actual words) to the game's publisher and to the parent company and to some senators and maybe to the Family Council for Icky Media Ickiness (or whatever it's called), and you say, "HEY, goddammit, what the hell is this lame badly animated SEX doing interspersed in between my ULTRAVIOLENCE?!! Where is the JUSTICE, DUDE??!!" (You like to use lots of ALL CAPS and superfluous punctuation to emphasize the fact that your high school English classes were, like, a total waste of taxpayer money.)
After all, up to this point, you've only seen about 17,000 porn ads on the Internet and spent 167 hours riffing through your stepdad's stash of Hustlers and watched your friend's DVD copy of "Weapons of *** Destruction IV" like, 20 times. You're still a baby! Why, you still don't even get most of the jokes in "Wedding Crashers"! You're not even old enough to be sent off to die for no reason in Iraq!
Shouldn't someone be outraged over the fact that 17-year-old virgin geeks who play endless hours of ultraviolent video games might somehow be tainted to their very cores by two minutes of badly animated sex, despite how you are, as a typical American teen, so regularly co-opted, so viciously pummeled by crass product placement and violence on the news and wicked misinformation about everything from marijuana to abstinence to cafeteria food, well, it pretty much makes the tepid and completely unarousing sex on GTASA look like outtakes from "Shrek III: Now We're Just Whoring It"? You're darned right someone should!
And sure enough, the Powers That Be hear your pleas and respond in force -- because what reactionary family watchdog group or PR-hungry politician doesn't love a good who-will-save-the-children plea? -- and it goes so far that the noxious Parents Television Council actually hooks up with none other than eye-on-the-prize Sen. Hillary Clinton to combat this new and vile force of video-game corruption, which is just depressing on a whole 'nuther level.
Success! Your team of sanctimonious deluded firebrands has caused the game's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to lose millions in sales at gun- happy, sexually frigid Wal-Mart by forcing Take-Two to relabel its cash cow as "Adults Only," and you have also forced Rockstar Games, who developed GTASA, to recode its pride and joy sans any hidden badly animated sex whatsoever (but still packed to the Monte Carlo's roof with all the sexist violent juicy thug-life goodness you can swallow). Yay!
Meanwhile, just down America's street, countless thousands of young U.S. soldiers are hobbling home from Iraq and Afghanistan, wounded and disabled and limbless and traumatized, eyes deadened to the world and permanently scarred to their cores and in interviews and documentaries and various news stories you often hear many of them say this one weirdly similar thing.
They say: "Wow man, yeah, it sure was amazing over there, totally surreal, killin' all those people with rapid-fire machine guns and firing rounds of mortar shells into buildings that might've been, for all we knew, hospitals or schools, and using night-vision goggles to invade decimated towns to hunt down crazed guerrillas and riding in those tanks and blowing the crap out of those Iraqi villages and hearing those women scream and watching those bodies burn."
This is what they say: "Oh man, you know what it reminded me of? You know what it was like over there, what with all the killing and the violence and the guns? It was just like, well, it was just like a video game."
To which you may now reply, "Huh." Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays on SFGate.com and in Datebook. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
Absolutely Great piece.
