Go Watch Your Musicals, Ladies

UPDATE: I'm bumping this up on June 15, 2012 because today Dr. Laura covered this topic again and asked for comments on Facebook (even though grown men are not supposed to use Facebook, right?) about how playing video games is turning men into pathetic worms. Or something like that. I haven't listened to her commentary on today's show yet. I'll likely have more to say about this soon, based on the comments left on Facebook. -K

UPDATE AGAIN 12/14/2017: Bumping this up again because she again told a caller to toss out her 16 year-old son's video game system (and remove the network entirely from his life). You know what guys that age are likely to do if you do that, given their newfound free time? Knock up girlfriends.



Dr. Laura is back from vacation and the first segment of today's show already got me going. If you click on my Dr. Laura tag you'll see that there's a lot I like about her and her show and I think she does a lot of good. But one of the areas in which I think she's off the mark is "video games". I've written about this before.

I think it was her second call of the day... a wife had called, dragging her husband along, telling Dr. Laura that they have disagreed since they got married (about a year and half ago, if I recall correctly) about the husband playing video games. Dr. Laura did NOT ask the wife if she knew about the guy's game playing when she married him.

Instead, she insisted that the guy needed to choose between the video games and his wife. She repeatedly said that he looks like a "boy", and "adolescent". She would not listen to anything he had to say, nor when his wife tried to interject something. She called it "childish", a "turn-off" and said it didn’t matter what his accomplishments were, that he needed to give up the games.

From there, she went to break and when she came back, she emphasized her point again. Finally, just before she took another call, she threw in a mention that women should not overlook it before marriage and then turn around and make an issue of it once married. (My guess is that she'd advise women not to marry these guys.) I wish she would have drilled the wife on that one. I think it is a rotten thing to do to marry someone and then make an issue out of your spouse's recreational activity.

As I wrote before, I don't play video games. I don't even play those games on social networking sites, or solitaire, or any of the other games found in desktop and handheld computers. But I still fail to see what the big deal is about this. Some people like watching movies. Some people like watching TV shows, including sports. Some people like playing video games. I fail to see why one is worse than the others. I get that Dr. Laura is not into them, but she's wrong on this one.

There are a lot of things, I’m sure, that the husband could cite about his wife's behavior that guys would find a turn-off, even though he married her knowing about them. Dr. Laura had kicked off the show talking about how she had taken time off to go sailing and how much fun it was. There are people who would find that to be silly or childish. But so what? They don't have to go sailing. And Dr. Laura doesn't need to play games, and neither does this guy's wife.

At least people are able to play video games together, and he's right there in the home so that his wife can approach him if she wants to. I hope that guy rewards his wife for dragging him into that trap by picking up a solitary hobby that takes him out of the house or into the garage and away from his wife… so that she begs him to go back to playing video games.

I personally know two grown men who are game designers, and they are mature and make a good living. It's honest work. And they target their games to adults - not with "adult" content, mind you, but they do not talk down to children. I hadn't even thought about them, though, when I started writing this. I was simply thinking about players.

Don't like your husband playing games? Go watch a musical, or scrapbook, or whatever.