Reee should just get it over with and add Cyberpunk 2077 to their 'banned games' list and anything by CDPR or THQ to their 'banned developers' list.
Anything less is cowardice. The ideologues are trying to play power games at this point, but there's 0% chance they are engaging in good faith with these developers. Say what you really mean, REEEE.
But cowards never say what they really mean.
They are like a group of children who discovered that a beneficial tool of learning and inspection could be tilted just so in the sunlight to burn the insects at their feet. Or a group of children stranded on a deserted tropical island during a wartime evacuation. Man, that would make a good anime...
From a macrosocial perspective, I believe that we are witnessing a mass regression to infancy in the absence of an existential threat. Becoming an adult is difficult. Becoming an adult male, specifically, is the
most difficult as it comes with the significant burden of responsibility. Males are traditionally protectors, producers and providers -- all forms of self-sacrifice for the good of the tribe. Protecting means dying on a battlefield, fighting fires, taking a proverbial bullet so that others may live. Producing means slaving away in a coal mine or tilling the fields. Providing means accepting the responsibility of venturing out into the world to confront and overcome risk in order to put food on the table
for the women and children. The archetypes built into our stories portray the great difficulty of being a good man; of being a
leader; of doing what is right, not necessarily popular. Women and children have none of these expectations and our entire social system is structured around this. Men are disposable, but for good reason.
In the modern context, we have lived in a prolonged period of peace since the end of World War 2, thus the need for masculine protection has diminished. We have developed technological means of automating and improving the safety of hazardous occupations as well as various forms of birth control, thus the need for masculine production has diminished. We have secured our sustenance and implemented social welfare programs so that the poorest among us do not starve to death, thus the need for masculine provision has diminished. We live in a world that needs traditional masculinity less than ever, but our social systems have not yet adjusted and the supply of males has remained constant and near parity with females*. The question then becomes: what do we do with these extra males in the new social economy that is not frequently culling large proportions of them via war? With newfound peace and prosperity, human (male) resources that were previously allocated to defending ourselves are redirected into developing and implementing technology to sustain ourselves, i.e. the most desirable occupations of the peaceful ebb of history. This
should be a wholly positive thing -- husbands and sons no longer dying on battlefields and instead working to benefit all of society -- but our animal brains have not adapted. While men are ostensibly enjoying the sacrifices of their forefathers, women are still doing the same things they were doing during wartime: producing and raising children. This breeds envy as, in the absence of the responsibility of protection and the relative occupational safety provided by modern technology, production and provision can be thoroughly satisfying endeavors.
The envy could be managed if we sought to understand our evolutionary history and ensure that gender roles with respect to the cycle of war and peace and evolving technology are studied objectively, but they aren't. Academic feminism has been allowed to propagate the idea of Patriarchy theory, which asserts that divisions along gender lines are a result of top-down masculine oppression rather than survival mechanisms that evolved to enable the most efficient operation of the tribe. But it's a lie, and not just any lie -- it is a lie in pursuit of political goals, promulgated by those who cannot compete in the female social hierarchy that is based on reproductive value. Patriarchy theory acknowledges none of the aforementioned technological and diplomatic advances that have provided the conditions that enable us to even consider allowing women to venture out of the home and into the workplace to confront risk. Moreover, it diminishes the value of femininity. Motherhood is beautiful; perhaps the most beautiful aspect of our human existence as men will literally lay down their lives to protect it. Yet it, and womanhood in general, are now portrayed as burdens because we have lost sight of the greater reciprocal masculine burdens that are not temporally constant. We aren't managing the envy; we are
embracing it, and we have allowed an ideology -- a pseudo-religion -- to develop that asserts that women are intrinsically victims of masculine oppression while acknowledging none of the benefits and concessions (i.e. privileges) that they receive.
However, I think we collectively and subconsciously know this in the deep recesses of our animal brains in spite of all of the public displays of cognitive dissonance and doublespeak. We intrinsically
know that it is difficult to "man up", but there is no social incentive to say so, so we don't. Thanks to the false knowledge of Patriarchy theory that is rapidly propagating through the academy and media, i.e. the institutions that influence the way people think, we instead denigrate masculinity; we label it toxic and disincentivise traditionally masculine behaviours because we can absorb the cost, at least in the short-term thanks to the enormous capital generated by our ancestors. But at the same time, we tell women that the best way to be women is to be men -- to supplant men as the producers and providers. It is a thoroughly confused ideology that is producing thoroughly confused people. It has distorted the social and sexual economies and completely disincentivised the challenging transition from boyhood to manhood. If there is no benefit to "manning up", why do it? Why accept the risk of responsibility if there is no potential reward? Why not avoid it altogether and forever remain in infancy or, even better, undergo a different transition: a transition to womanhood and an acquisition of all of the unacknowledged social concessions that come with it. In this way, society sheds itself of the excess males but in doing so overcorrects and diminishes masculinity altogether. The absence of an existential threat itself becomes an endostential threat -- when the threat does not come from without, it comes from within. Thus, WAR IS PEACE.
In my estimation, the absurd behaviours and obsessions with sexuality, gender and ideological purity that we observe at Ree are symptomatic of this mass regression to infancy. I call them Peter Pansexuals.
*Am I treading along the same lines of logic that led Sally Miller Gearhart to proclaim that, in the future, the proportion of men should be reduced to less than 10% of the population?