The high price of entertainment
Why I will no longer be reading Penny Arcade. (See also Offended Is the Worst Thing to Be, and posts linked therein.)
I've been uncomfortable with the content of Penny Arcade plenty of times before. There are lots of reasons it's taken me this long to finally reach a point where I'm no longer willing to read the strip. First, it's just generally hard to break long-standing habits. But second, and more important in this case, it's particularly hard to break habits where to do so is to admit complicity in past wrongs. It's hard to excise the words "retarded" or "lame" from your vocabulary of insults because to do so is to admit that you have perpetuated harm in the past by using those words. It's hard for me to stop reading PA because to do so is to admit to all the times in the past that I've looked the other way.
It's also hard to give up something that one has derived a lot of enjoyment from. I've been a fan and loyal reader of PA for many years, since long before I had any awareness of feminism or rape culture. But complacency is not an excuse for complicity. And one benefit of being as "sensitive" as I've become since learning to Give A Shit is that I find it increasingly easy to give up sources of entertainment that have problematic content--because I find myself less and less entertained by them in the first place. This isn't a sign of my diminishing sense of humor; it's a sign of heightened standards.
After 10 years+ of reading every strip, I will no longer be reading Penny Arcade, and the only chagrin I feel about that decision is that it took this long for me to reach my limit.
[Note: I am so not interested in defending my decision or arguing about the merits of PA or rape jokes. If you've read, at minimum, the two posts linked above, and you still want to leave a comment that is defensive of PA, its creators, your own decision to keep reading, or whatevs, do us both a favor and DON'T.]
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I've been uncomfortable with the content of Penny Arcade plenty of times before. There are lots of reasons it's taken me this long to finally reach a point where I'm no longer willing to read the strip. First, it's just generally hard to break long-standing habits. But second, and more important in this case, it's particularly hard to break habits where to do so is to admit complicity in past wrongs. It's hard to excise the words "retarded" or "lame" from your vocabulary of insults because to do so is to admit that you have perpetuated harm in the past by using those words. It's hard for me to stop reading PA because to do so is to admit to all the times in the past that I've looked the other way.
It's also hard to give up something that one has derived a lot of enjoyment from. I've been a fan and loyal reader of PA for many years, since long before I had any awareness of feminism or rape culture. But complacency is not an excuse for complicity. And one benefit of being as "sensitive" as I've become since learning to Give A Shit is that I find it increasingly easy to give up sources of entertainment that have problematic content--because I find myself less and less entertained by them in the first place. This isn't a sign of my diminishing sense of humor; it's a sign of heightened standards.
After 10 years+ of reading every strip, I will no longer be reading Penny Arcade, and the only chagrin I feel about that decision is that it took this long for me to reach my limit.
[Note: I am so not interested in defending my decision or arguing about the merits of PA or rape jokes. If you've read, at minimum, the two posts linked above, and you still want to leave a comment that is defensive of PA, its creators, your own decision to keep reading, or whatevs, do us both a favor and DON'T.]
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