Falling on Deaf Ears

This Tuesday, like so many other geeks around the world, I picked up my copy of Halo 3 for the X-Box 360. The X-Box 360 was my present to myself this past winter after a string of persona victories, and a large part of why I purchased the new gaming system was for the eventual release of Halo 3. I did not buy it at midnight and take Tuesday off of work so that I could play it all night (unlike some people) but I did play for about 3 hours on Wednesday night.

As I was playing online, I realized just how old I am. We heard the voices of younger players and started complaining about having 12 year olds on our team, only to hear the defiant response that they were 13 and not 12. But more so than the age difference, I found myself bothered by the immature and inappropriate language of all the teenagers and other adolescents I knew existed on the other end of the network. I'm not talking about profanity - I don't even notice that unless someone is so incapable of expressing themselves in a coherent manner that all they use to vocalize are curse words.

What bothered me was the use of words like "rape", "queer", "fag" and others without so much as a seconds' thought or hesitation. When I did my student teaching my cooperating teacher made a big deal out of conditioning students out of using words like "fag" and "gay" as commonplace insults, and I guess it had an impact on me. I had never really paid attention to it before, but ever since then I have also tried to discourage such language. Since returning to higher education and spending a great deal of time talking about issues of social justice, I guess I don't know how to turn that kind of thing off any more. I have friends who are gay, and other friends who spend a lot of time working for gay rights issues, so in spending so much time with them I am not able to ignore it any more because I know what it means to them that so many people use those terms interchangeably with any other insult without a second thought. I know I can't really change any one's opinions or behaviors, but it's gotten a lot harder to just let it go unchallenged because I know it's just a lack of ever having thought about it on their part.

But what really got to me was how casually the term "rape" was thrown around. Talking about another player killing them, or recounting one of their own kills, any particularly brutal or surprising kill was described as "Getting raped" or "raping" the other player. I actually called another player out about it, telling him it wasn't cool, but I'm sure he just ignored me.

This semester I started co-advising a group on campus that works with sexual assault prevention and education, and the big reason I got involved is because I want to work to change the attitudes and beliefs of men on campus about what is appropriate and what isn't in relationships and in their daily conversations and interactions with gender issues. I know that most of it can be chalked up to immaturity and "not knowing any better", but after a short while those just become excuses. If males are never challenged about it, they'll never have to think about it, and they can go on the rest of their lives being oblivious to the fact that they are helping to perpetuate and support a culture that allows rape and sexual assault to be topics that are accepted rather than a source of outrage.

I know I'm not going to make a difference calling some 14 year old kid out on X-Box Live. I know that I may be treading the fine line between doing the right thing and becoming that annoying uber-PC activist type. But once you start thinking about it, and thinking about what the language actually implies and how it's nonchalant usage almost normalizes it, I would hope that it provokes at least some sort of uneasiness and cause to reflect.