Hypermasculinity In Pop Culture

Gaming has become a huge part of modern day pop culture. Games have improved so much as technology has advanced. One can now easily immerse themselves into a new world full of action and adventure while accompanying one’s favorite characters. Because of this the gaming community has grown immensely over years, bringing along a new form of communication with them. However, along with these great aspects, the gaming industry has managed to bring it throughout the community. Because of the way gaming companies have continuously portrayed their characters in their games, one can assume that they are trying to push a certain way of thinking onto their consumers. Video game companies are trying to reinforce gender stereotypes onto their characters, …show more content…
Hypermasculinity is the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior and sexism within the gaming community. This encourages the overt privileging of masculinity over femininity and discourages women from engaging in gendered discourse within the community. However, with his in mind, it also brings to light issues with a hostile response to the female gender. A good example of this would come from an event that occurred in August of 2010. Penny Arcade, a webcomic focused on video games and video game culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik, posted a comic strip involving a character who said he was "raped by dickwolves" as a setup for a punchline about the unusual morality of MMORPG quests. Of course people who read the comic didn’t take to kindly to the joke and spoke up, saying that casually using rape as a joke isn’t funny. This lead to the creators creating a follow-up strip, where it shows them sarcastically advising their readers to not let the strip turn them into rapists. Whether or not it was their intention to, the creators’ response to the issue in the end encouraged the rape culture by deliberately misinterpreting why people might take issue. It also didn’t help when Penny Arcade decided to sell "Penny Arcade Dickwolves" T-shirts and pennants at PAX East, a gaming convention popular among the community. This created huge controversy and some Penny Arcade supporters even had the audacity to create “Team Rape”, a group twitter account made to harass anti-rape activists. Numerous threats were made against women who complained about the "Dickwolves" comics and merchandise. The fiasco eventually came to an end when the “Dickwolves” merchandise was removed from the PA store and the creators of the comic apologized, saying that despite being known for creating