“Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics and depressives…Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.” - Camille Paglia
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I’m not a gamer, but I am aware of online gaming’s importance to the cultural zeitgeist. So it’s been fascinating to watch G4—once-hot, then not, then gone completely, now trying to resuscitate its brand under Comcast ownership—face plant their comeback.
Face plant, and face plant HARD, ignorantly and ignominiously into one of the most bizarre, self-destructive, tone-deaf, self-centered, anti-customer relaunches in any brand’s history. Suicide by starting pistol.
Seeking to recapture its old dominance, G4’s consistent yet incongruous messaging to its already collapsing viewership has been “We hate you.” It’s beyond perverse.
Things climaxed last week with a wildly unhinged rant from some ugly young woman with a cattle-like nose-ring and bad teeth who went full bunny-boiler at G4’s mostly male audience because they don’t find her “as bang-able” as the old G4 gals (like quirky & carefree Olivia Munn, for example, with her cheeky “Olivia’s Rack” vignettes) and all they really want is to “jerk off” at G4’s female hosts.
Cattle-gal’s whole five-minute diatribe is really a staggering and epic thing to watch, like a missile blowing up an airplane that crashes into a passenger train loaded with orphans which then derails to destroy a puppy sanctuary and ignites a four-alarm blaze that spreads to the nearby water purifying reservoir and poisons a retirement village of war hero veterans.
“Back in my day” this type of embarrassing amateur hour therapy session performance art would end somebody’s career in half a heartbeat. But I guess those days are past. In Law of Inversion Land, people’s mental illnesses are glorified (cattle-gal’s own biography says she has a personality disorder), not sympathized with and treated.
Still, The Thing of It Is…it’s not so much that cattle-gal is ugly. It’s that she’s got weak game. As I’ve dug into this debacle, I’ve discovered that most of the criticism against her has stemmed from the fact she often doesn’t know what she’s talking about, has a lack of knowledge about the games she’s covers, and displays repeated bias for and against certain consoles and companies. People are calling her on it, and she’s screeching about “-isms” instead, to play the victim card.
This, of course, has been the fallback knee-jerk PR strategy for any criticism of anyone who isn’t White and/or male for years now: Critics of your shit work aren’t valid, they’re sexist, racist, anti-gay, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, anti-________. Anti-Christian is cool, though, in fact desired, because Satan’s running The Show.
But fuck that. I’m not any of those -isms, and I’ll tell you True: What’s going on with G4 is another corporatist attempt to gaslight and bully an important independent male demographic that’s not yet succumbed to the broken-souled culture war demoralization roller coaster of hating themselves and falling into consumerist line like good little NPCs.
One key element of the globalist Great Reset corporate demoralization strategy in the fascist war to destroy America is to make young men feel guilty about being attracted to women. Insecure hypocrites like cattle-gal here make the perfect conduits. Not a lick of self-awareness, going out of their way to make themselves as unattractive as possible, then attacking men for not finding them attractive, when their androgynous fashion sense and self-expression failures accomplish that misanthropic goal all too well.
Of course this is a demented, deranged and demonic D.O.A. marketing and branding strategy. It’s the Gamer version of Ghostbusters 2016 or the last Charlie’s Angels or Terminator movies, or any of the other strangely obstructive, self-defeating fan insults from delusional bubble-life front-men and women (and it’s mostly been White women), who tell half their potential audience “This isn’t for you!” then cop a whiny persecuted victimized attitude when their product fails disastrously.
Which leaves G4 in full-blown damage control mode right now, with the weight of Comcast affiliate publications and their advertising-desperate minions farting out “You go grrrrrl!” stories and censoring anybody who pushes back. But it’s G4’s reputation that’s fully blown.
Like every Establishment platform losing the public debate, all G4 has is bullying and censorship. G4 has literally shut down their Subreddit, turned off comments for many of their videos, and gone on deletion sprees during their live streams. Maybe they could salvage something of their brand if they fired cattle-gal, but G4 shows no sign they’re even considering it, and it’s probably too late already anyway. All hands on deck is going to lead to everybody going down with the ship.
So, as we examine this post-mortem, let’s talk about ugly women for a second. This cattle-gal isn’t even particularly ugly, she just goes out of her way to LOOK off-putting, and then it’s her abrasive crazy that kicks her down the ugly stairs to that dingy basement with the likes of Lena Dunham and everybody who works at Lucasfilm. Her ugliness is more internal than external, and it’s the internal ugliness that damns her. And she is, believe me, quite damned.
Allow a digression. When I was a Theology scholarship guy at that creepy college in West Virginia, there was a homely nursing student in a few of my religion classes. She was a pious Christian girl with an almost perfectly round moon-face, mousy brown hair and bad skin, pocked with signs of acne outbreaks from earlier teen-hood.
She was simple and highly reserved but nice, yet as I got to know her better over the years, I began to realize she was also smart, slyly clever and profoundly generous and kind. She had a soft, gentle lilting voice that sounded like an angel’s. The more I got to know her, the more unique and singularly wonderful a person I realized she was, until she appeared luminous to me: beatific, angelic, a paragon of young womanhood. I totally fell in love with her.
So when I talk about cattle-gal being ugly af, it’s not so much that she genuinely is all that ugly…watch the video, you can see that she could probably be hot if she wanted (except for the cow-nose ring, mooooo). What makes cattle-gal ugly is that she’s got an ugly O.S.
Personally, FWIW during this never-ending American Apocalypse, I think all these people are possessed. Some demonic force has gotten hold of them, the repetitious patterns of these behaviors are all mirrored and the same: Narcissistic, self-righteous, scapegoating, refusing to take responsibility for their own actions and/or shortcomings, hating their customers, hating life. Low-vibration Demonology 101.
But maybe they’re not possessed. Maybe they’re just fucked up, maybe they just all run on the same bilious bile of high-octane hate. Maybe years of ugly media programming have turned them all into the same hideous clichéd clown. A circus of them. Because they are Legion.
In any case, the G4 missile-into-plane-into train wreck story will probably vanish fast, because G4 has immediately made itself a non-influencer-platform in the very space it was seeking to re-dominate.
R.I.P., G4: Rejected Insignificant Powerlessness. Like Mashable, Tech Crunch, Kotaku, Collider, and so on, it’s another digital publishing/video pop culture brand well-past its sell-by date that should’ve stayed shuttered. Or at least been willing to eat a hot dog.
I 've been working through your archive. The following is absolutely brilliant! The imagery is hysterical.
"Cattle-gal’s whole five-minute diatribe is really a staggering and epic thing to watch, like a missile blowing up an airplane that crashes into a passenger train loaded with orphans which then derails to destroy a puppy sanctuary and ignites a four-alarm blaze that spreads to the nearby water purifying reservoir and poisons a retirement village of war hero veterans."
Needless to say I really enjoy your writing and insights.