Castration Anxiety: Why Men Are Fixated With Pretty Girls Breaking Consoles

December 4th, 2009, 19:51 Posted By: wraggster




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/castratio...aking-consoles

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