There’s been a modest normalization of the penis in video games over the past couple years. The game Rust gave players varying-size penises that flopped in the wind. Conan Exiles allowed gamers to adjust the size of their penises and even teabag themselves. No Man’s Sky procedurally generated a bouquet of penises. And Genital Jousting took penises to a whole new level, allowing gamers for the first time to play as a penis and fight with other penis players!
But for all this progress, it’s still hard to get penises in mass-market games. The penis haters at the ESRB ratings board punish some penis games with an “Adults Only” rating, banning them from retail stores. Even Xbox has a no-penis policy. Conan Exiles had to remove the penis slider from the Xbox One version to appease the Microsoft suits.
Conversely, penises can be a huge boon to the sales of indie games not found in retail outlets. For what ever reason, every time an indie game has a penis, the gaming press lose their minds. Hundreds of articles will be devoted to any game willing to put penises in humorous situations. Some journalists see virtual penises as a socially just counterbalance to the video game industry’s obsession with boobs.The popularization of online marketplaces like Steam may have something to do with all these penises. Games on Steam are not at the mercy of the ESRB or prudish retailers. They only have to get around Steam’s relatively lax rules that ban pornography.
Some people aren’t taking penises very seriously, though. Kate Gray, a writer at the so-called socially progressive gaming RAG Waypoint, published an article where she appeared to not treat penises with the esteem and regality they deserve. While Gray (who I assume does not have a penis) is clearly pro-penis proliferation in video games (good), she at times treated all penises like some kind of joke (bad).
We should be able to joke about genitalia. We should sometimes take it seriously, too, and sometimes it’s neither the time nor the place for full-frontal flesh flutes, but also sometimes teabagging your own face is a good antidote to everything else in the world. It’s good to laugh.
SOMETIMES!!!??! My little Henry will be taken seriously at ALL times!
It’s really important that dicks can be silly, cute, and fun in games, because it challenges the atmosphere of toxic masculinity that pervades the industry and the community. Wangs in real life are so often a symbol of power and dominance, so when they’re depicted as these comical little wiggle-boys, it takes away some of their authority.
WTF.
The piece also paints a false equivalency between video-game boobs and video- game penises. Obviously penises are on a higher order of sexual offensiveness than boobs, right up there with vaginas themselves. You don’t see dicks in many HBO shows, because they still face a cultural stigma.
Gray’s piece also drew the ire of gay video game lecturer Todd Harper, who wrote a blog post defending the honor of penises everywhere.
I want to point out that both of these situations — tity (sic) as huge, face-concussing balloons and dicks as floppy, silly foolishness — serve the same social and rhetorical end: propping up cis straight male desire and identity as the norm. If anything, the way that we cartoonishly portray breasts in games should be all the more reason not to do the same thing with dicks.
The discourse around video games has become so woke, apparently, that writers must front-load articles on penises with a confluence of gender studies buzzwords.
How about vaginas? Vags are even rarer than penises in video games. They should be given equal exposure if we ever want a socially just society. And while we’re at it, where are the intersex sexual organs?
Society has a lot of maturing to do if this civil rights struggle around penises will ever be resolved.
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