As my friend whom I’ll call Sam says, “I’ve dated women with everything from an A-cup to a D"

Every day or so I spend on the internet, I come across one of the five to six hundred iterations of this article, on what women can stop doing to attract men.  It's always written from the perspective of someone whose sole claim to authority on the subject is that they are a guy, which mystifies me: can there really be women who have no male friends or acquaintances that would bloviate rapturously on what they believe would most please a man?  In any case, all these articles boil down to a variation on the sentiment, "It's important that you be well-groomed, but I want you to stop spending time on grooming so that we can have more time to do things I like, such as touching a boob."  There is some kind of disconnect in these men's brains between cause (grooming) and effect (groomed) that probably also makes them Libertarians. 

Anyway, if men would like to take my big-ass gametes as qualification to tell them what all women think, and if they would like to stop doing something which completely fails to impress me, they could stop pretending to give a shit about sports.  I know, some women may claim to enjoy sports or like the company of men who do, but because they disagree with me, they're unrepresentative.  I suspicion that all the women who say they like sports don't really but are just pretending in order to attract men.  I am myself constitutionally incapable of enjoying sports and generally distrust the motives of anyone who does, but that shouldn't affect how totally right I am about this. 

Men, I think, only profess to like sports because if they don't other men will relentlessly hound them with accusations of homosexuality.  In men, I judge liking a thing which is inherently unlikeable to impress men to be understandable, and pitiable in a sympathetic way.  In women, I judge liking that unlikeable thing to impress men to be a contemptible betrayal of one's authentic self.  This double standard is my stake in the ground, now let's pretend it's the Daily Show and go to the part of the tape where I contradict myself utterly. 

So, video games.  I am strongly attracted to video games because for the past twenty years they've had the exciting, disreputable sheen of The Next New Media, with regularly-scheduled moral panics providing a rebellious charge to liking them.  And, if I'm honest, because the boys I always liked always like gaming--the weird boys, the boys with the D&D books and the graph paper and anime porn.  Though they could stop with the anime porn, frankly.

Now, I am fucking shit at video games.  I have terrible reaction time and I am emotionally devastated if I can't beat a level on the third or fourth try.  I can't play against people because I get upset if they win too much and worried about what they think of me if I win too much, and if I have any difficulty at all I'll be fighting the urge to wander off and never finish. 

It's clear to me that games, even more than films or books (but maybe not as much as music), serve as mile markers in the lives of the people who love them, bound up in memories of where and who they were when they played Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock or Chuckie Egg.  Nostalgia is such a powerful force in the industry because gaming is so experiential: when you play something that touches you, you're really stitching it into your life in the strongest way possible without actually parachuting into the jungle and fighting Russians while feeding on tree frogs.  And my favorite thing is to hear people articulating their memories, to know what they love and why it animates them.  But ideally without reference to the infield fly rule.