Choke Chain

I saw a photo of some posters for the Sims3 area at E3 (a game expo) yesterday. There is one big poster with: Play with bad girls (in large text) and above it another poster reads: choke chain optional.

Not OK.

The posters are about Pets but it's still not OK. It upset me so much I had bad EA dreams.

I think of myself as a sixties kid but I was born in 1953 so all that LeaveItToBeaver OzzieandHarriet value system was the aspirational story of my only child of a single parent existence. Identifying as a sixties kid was a way of rejecting all of that, which I did. So I am supportive of the cause of gay marriage but not actually supportive of the institution of marriage. It may sound like a contradiction but they are really two different things. I support the legitimacy of the commitment people make to one another when they get married, Straight or Gay. And. I don't need, or want the state to be the arbiter of that legitimacy. Nor the church but I understand why some people want the church.

When I play the Sims2 I really seem like a fifties kid. I play a lot of families and every family has a dog, or a cat, or both. I work to keep everybody happy. However when I play Romance Sims, who want to fall in love with everyone they meet, I let that happen.

The sixties were full of contradiction. Hippie girls were suppose to be all about free love. And feminists weren't suppose to condone objectification. In some ways women were claiming their own sexuality. In some ways women were tossed into an abyss of confusion.

In my adult life I worked in kitchens and hung out with musicians, two groups of people who know how to make everything into the most salacious double ententre. I have a high tolerance for the nonsense of how we all are when it comes to sex.

Maybe it's because the news is full of endless discussion of tweets and cheats but I am sick of the way women are represented, resented, tokenized, demeaned. Enough already.

Choke chains are not an option.