Banging Your Head Off The Closet

Some of you may have guessed from yesterday’s posts there was a storm a-brewing with us over one reaction to the new world on offer. One that was hackneyed but you could confidentally bet your children for scientific experiments on was going to come up.

We were amazed that Mrswoo5 wasn’t instantly lynched and hauled off to the Death Camp Of Tolerance for showing signs of thoughtcriminal activity in that first sentence, but luckily it was missed.

Horrorfan1980s noted the truism that in most people’s games they add any missing pair-ups they want anyway – whatever way they may swing – or the game adds them in as it goes along as part of the mechanic.

CWaddell was sure of one couple pre-made in Twinbrook.

If there was any justice, they’d all be asexual and celibate in that place!

It wouldn’t be a question about the game thread without Twallan’s mods coming up, would it?

Thank you Mariefoxprice83!

Seeing the NRaas Signal in the skies above Gotham City, Twallan swooped in to clarify.

His work done, he drove off in the NRaasmobile back to the NRassCave, where a steaming hot Kraft dinner and milk fresh from the bag would be awaiting him for his dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner, dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner…

With that out of the way, there now came the possibility of discussing the whys and wherefores behind EA putting any automatically in the game, and thankfully it was Lady Emillye to kick it off and thus giving it at least a chance of some sort of mature discussion.

But sure enough, the attention whores and drama queens arrived.

Jay6754 is of course the bumnugget we caught out trolling his own thread in order to bump it in the CAW section (here’s the remedial version of it!). As for LetterM2013 aka Innuendo19, etc – how long have you got?

Better to be a closet case than a basket case like you, sunbeam!

This was the cue for Vlaxitov to once more lose the wool.

Then Halle_M pointed out what was probably on the back of many minds, that the original poster had simply been walking a ghost.

Cue the least convincing ‘surprised’ routine since Mr Bean found Christmas cards on his doormat.

Yeah, like you never knew.

Disappointing however to see Innuendo19’s old cheerleader, NotSoLucky, returning to duties in jumping into threads he’s being a fruitloop on and keeping the contention going.

Sure enough, guess who started finding fault.

What would you prefer then? Chums, perhaps?

It all started to go downhill very quickly from this point.

And can we have a bit of completely faked emotion for the cameras please?

Be warned, what is about to follow now is serious.

Ask yourselves, all of you whiners about EA still not doing enough: why the hell should EA – a global business – even bother to pander in their game to the lifestyle choice of a micro-minority that are illegal in much of the world?

Whoa, we’ve said it – the loathe that must not be named!

For all the noise the gay lobby makes shouting down the merest dissent to them, for all the legislation passed and public handwringing by the political elite, the fact remains that in practice much of the world remains as resolutely homophobic as it ever was – the world which EA wants to be allowed to sell in.

EA are not a political lobby group. They are a games manufacturer. They have been forced many times before to alter their products in order not to cause large scale offence (eg. swastikas from games centred on World War 2). Why should Sims 3 be any different in ensuring it didn’t offend the global zeitgeist?

In the vast majority of the world, gay relationships, gay marriage, and gay adoption are not allowed – not even the good old U.S. of A has managed to put through a one-size fits all set of gay-friendly legislation in all of its states (it remains Pic-n-Mix, and President Obama is currently having himself a king sized headache trying to get that changed). In the UK they’re still struggling with it. In France there was an impromptu 90 000 anti-change demonstration in Paris on the issue two weeks ago despite laws banning demonstrations that could be deemed as anti-gay in the capital. Not one arrest resulted: the gendarmerie knew well enough to do so was to invite matters escalating further once they’d ‘martyrs’ to their cause. Meanwhile in Japan, who have been ‘meh!’ on all manner of gender bending since 1880, gay relationships, gay marriage, and gay adoption still have bugger all recognition under the law and there’s not a government there dumb enough to try putting the required legislation through.

Let’s take it even further. In a still sizeable chunk of the world, homosexual activity can get you jailed – if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, it’s a legalised lynching that can involve everything from physical castration to a long drop whilst wearing a hemp tie. Look no further than Iraq and Afghanistan – still 100% gay intolerant even after a certain little invasion. Much of the Second and Third World merely pays lip service to tolerance under pressure from First World states themselves under pressure from lobby groups that see ‘developing’ nations as soft targets for enforcing tolerance regardless of the practicalities of enforcing it – some adopting a half-way house approach by allowing it for females but not males under the pretext of stopping the spread of AIDS (a major problem in the Third World).

With that in mind, it can be argued that EA have gone over and above what could be reasonably expected of a global business selling a product worldwide to do. Especially – and here comes the home truths bit – to pacify a mere 2% of the population at best lucky enough to have on-tap access to flak generating media outlets other special interest groups can only dream of.

Before any of the usual suspects start, here’s the coffee to smell. That ‘one in ten’ was a Kinsey myth: academia has been chock with that sort of attention whoring ever since Einstein proved it was possible for a boffin to have a lucrutive  sideline as a media pimp. A decade since gay marriages first became legal in the USA (after much banging on about refusal being ‘discriminatory against one in ten of the population’ ), it’s supposed 31,537,461 gays (one in ten of the population, right?) have only managed a mere 75 000 marriages between them – and some of those are new marriages after gay divorces. That’s statistics straight from not some right-wing family values Tea Party kooks, but from the pressure group Marriage Equality USA. Even allowing for the decline in heterosexual marriage as an indicator of public attitudes to marriage in general, that’s pretty damning that the alleged number of gays is nowhere near the figures that were ever claimed. Cor blimey, knock us down wif a feather you could, guv’nor!

Decades ago, students at university would beg friends not to let others know they were gay for fear of ostracism. Nowadays, it’s more likely to be the case being asked to keep quiet for fear of the campus gay rights activists never giving them a second’s peace. What was once merely the right to sexual preference without penalties has managed to transmogrify into a self-perpetuating pseudo-cult on a permanent warpath over ‘oppression’ it sees at every turn – and woe betide the queer-traitors (the class-traitors of the 21st Century it seems) refusing to take their place in solidarity behind the careerist ‘vanguard’, or – worst of all – ‘sell out’: just ask Tom Robinson about that one!

We’re not so concerned with the likes of the Heinz 57 variety of alias of Innuendo19, almost a caricature of the worst stereotype of the male homosexual as ceaseless drama queening immature attention whore this side of a Kenneth Williams biopic. But when people who ought to bloody well know better like Tea_And_Blues start throwing the studied rattle out of the pram from a sense of perpetual unquenchable entitlement, or – dare we suggest (dare! dare!) – because they know they’ll get away with the ‘you homophobe!’ cheap shot at any dissentors unchecked, it’s time to start asking them at what point are they going to accept that tolerance cuts both ways and that on this point EA deserve only applause – not criticism – for what they have done in the face of the rest of the world’s de facto intolerance.

If that sounds harsh or unsympathetic, the very sort of Polynesian style worlds Tea_And_Blues so loves creating are the very ones that in the real world the locals still go around stringing gays up from the coconut trees when the sun goes down – forget the romanticised view propagated in the west of the fa’afafine, the reality is far different and far more brutal. Consider that folks before accusing EA of being ‘evasive’ or ‘not doing enough’.

Only by dealing with the world first as it is, and not as you would like it to be, can you hope to move it in that direction – one step at a time.