Conservative women aren’t new. We’ve appeared in every generation, and until a meeting in the Chinese Room of the Mayflower Hotel we were even regular members, majority members, of the feminist movement. So “discovering” us is weird.
Video gaming men, however, are new. Millennial men in their mid-30’s are the first men to have been raised when online games were a typical pastime and who have now reached an age of adulthood when every previous excuse their parents and any other understanding/permissive elders might have given has expired. They aren’t growing out of it, and really if we were remiss in studying this cohort, it was in not studying them or sounding the alarm sooner. (Fact is, this is not the first data of it’s kind, but it is a big problem that it doesn’t get attention when such data comes out, which Melissa and I have lamented previously. And this one is original in that these men are getting older and the pattern is holding.)
Honestly, would you prefer that we go on ignoring the plight of men and analyzing every slight to women — what did the NYT have last week, how many words women get in movies? It can’t be both, “no one cares about men’s troubles” and “don’t be condescending by studying men in distress.”
