wraggster
December 4th, 2009, 18:51
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvX8GHJLQIU&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/v/NvX8GHJLQIU
Not so long ago, a girl smashed her boyfriend's Xbox 360 to the internet's delight. Now, another girl has shown up to do the same to a PS3 (seen here). So why can't men get enough? Castration anxiety.
Quite simply, castration anxiety is a theory proposed by Freud in which a boy sees a girl's genitalia (or lack of penis) as a symbol of punishment, as if she's been castrated.
In this particular instance, I'd argue that the console becomes the phallus in a symbolic castration. Man plays video games. Woman does not. And when the video-game-less female destroys the male's video games, that's akin to a woman removing a man's manhood. It just so happens that, in this metaphor, man has both a literal phallus and a gaming phallus. Really, an analog like a guy tossing his girlfriend's makeup collection out the window could work just as well.
But why the fixation? Why can't we look away? Like a thought scab that our brains can't help but pick, male philosophers and writers have been obsessed with castration probably since the the beginning of time itself. A notable example would be Ernest Hemingway, as outlined by the famous literary criticism Freud, Fetishism and Hemingway's Phallic Women. For instance, in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes (through character), "Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk."
It just so happens, the ladies of YouTube aren't generally as eloquent, but they do tend to show more cleave.
http://gizmodo.com/5419096/castration-anxiety-why-men-are-fixated-with-pretty-girls-breaking-consoles
http://www.youtube.com/v/NvX8GHJLQIU
Not so long ago, a girl smashed her boyfriend's Xbox 360 to the internet's delight. Now, another girl has shown up to do the same to a PS3 (seen here). So why can't men get enough? Castration anxiety.
Quite simply, castration anxiety is a theory proposed by Freud in which a boy sees a girl's genitalia (or lack of penis) as a symbol of punishment, as if she's been castrated.
In this particular instance, I'd argue that the console becomes the phallus in a symbolic castration. Man plays video games. Woman does not. And when the video-game-less female destroys the male's video games, that's akin to a woman removing a man's manhood. It just so happens that, in this metaphor, man has both a literal phallus and a gaming phallus. Really, an analog like a guy tossing his girlfriend's makeup collection out the window could work just as well.
But why the fixation? Why can't we look away? Like a thought scab that our brains can't help but pick, male philosophers and writers have been obsessed with castration probably since the the beginning of time itself. A notable example would be Ernest Hemingway, as outlined by the famous literary criticism Freud, Fetishism and Hemingway's Phallic Women. For instance, in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes (through character), "Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk."
It just so happens, the ladies of YouTube aren't generally as eloquent, but they do tend to show more cleave.
http://gizmodo.com/5419096/castration-anxiety-why-men-are-fixated-with-pretty-girls-breaking-consoles