This thread popped up a few times the other day, and I thought this would be a good time to explore some stuff I’ve thought about before, because this flavor of angry, misguided man has some interesting patterns.
It's only been a few centuries since children in the most of the world were recognized as "children" and not "short adults". It’s only been around a century since child labor laws were enacted, and in the same span of time we got radio, television, and mass-produced toys. The idea of teenagers didn't really exist until after WW2, when people figured out it was a damn good way to sell records. Kids are biologically primed to absorb everything like a sponge, and there's long been a fuss over media and advertising as it relates to children as long as there has been media to advertise to kids. The late '60s and '70s were a golden age of child culture: Saturday morning cartoons, movies, toys- all ramped up advertising specifically for kids. That advertising was strongly regulated.
Then Star Wars happened, and toys tied into movies and shows exploded. The regulations were worked around and eventually loosened so that cartoons became adverts for toylines; not as in "every show suddenly had a toyline" but "shows were created specifically to sell toys". Now, where the weird Krofft shows and Hanna-Barbera cartoons were strong touchstones for people who grew up in the '70s (about half of early '90s band names reflected this), '80s kids had a constant stream of, essentially, consumerism wrapped in thin plot lines to share. Not to say that they were any more or less vapid than what came before, but the focus had shifted. Media targeted at kids went from "it's for kids, who cares what it is" to "it's for kids, who cares what it is as long as it sells". They didn’t kill half the autobots in the old Transformers movie just to be dramatic; they actually just needed new robot characters for kids to buy.
But here's the thing: every one of those cartoons was about child empowerment. Across the board, the one thing guaranteed to get in the guts of any child is the fantasy that they could be in control of something. Whether it's having friends or having your own giant mech or being a princess, it's universal. It wasn’t just TV. This was also the second wave of home video games. During the late NES/sega era, gaming magazines appeared. I had a paid subscription to Nintendo Power (even though I wouldn’t actually own an NES until I bought a used one the same year they stopped producing them), that was essentially an 80-page ad for Nintendo games. The consumer machine for gaming culture was cranked from the get-go. Just like toys, every show (and every knock-off show) wound up with a video game tie in at some point.
The '90s was really the catalyst for a lot of this. There were a few notable things that led to sort of an "umbrella nerd culture"- the comics boom, CCGs, convention growth, and so forth. But I want to point out one particular thing that quietly kicked off the nostalgia train: after Star Wars slowly disappeared in the mid '80s, Timothy Zahn wrote a trilogy of novels, and suddenly everyone remembered Star Wars again like they’d crawled out of hibernation and the hunger was MIGHTY. Long before the prequels were even a whisper a toyline was restarted, we had a book and video game tie-in, a secondary market surge for the old merch, and George Effing Lucas blessed us with a rerelease where Han was less cool. That was part of larger mid-to-late ‘90s wave of adult collectors. I recall it mostly starting in comics- DC’s “let’s kill off our icons” gimmick, the Image split, variant covers, 87 different X-books, millions of pouches, etc. Comic shops by then were also usually tabletop gaming shops and high-end model shops, which meant they were also social hubs for nerds, and I’m sure you’d be shocked to learn that most of the people who owned and ran them were dudes.
Personal story break:
Around 2004 or so I’d been buying a couple of volumes of Dark Horse reprints Lone Wolf & Cub a month. At some point I wound up very sick for a few weeks, and asked my mom to stop in and pick up that month’s books. So this 53 year old woman walked into the comic store and in her words, “The guys in there, all at once, just kind of stared. And then I told them what I was after and they were very friendly.” I want to be clear that most of these guys weren’t malicious, just awkward, and a lot of them were from that time when liking “nerd stuff” past age 9 got you punched a lot. A lot of people build up that social shell and never quite lose it. This also means they don’t always grow socially, but I’ll come back to that.
The other '90s marker was how ubiquitous video games had become, and how natural the progression of power-fantasy media for kids grew into an entire industry that literally put you in a driver's seat or behind a weapon or towering over a baby civilization. As far as players, games were huge, and huge for everyone as evidenced by the number of times my sister stole my Gameboy, although definitely still aimed at dudes. Because the creators and marketers were mostly dudes. And, importantly, this was THE CONSOLE WARS. PICK A SIDE MOTHERFUCKER, BLAST PROCESSING, EVERY COMMERCIAL IS SCREAMING.
This wasn’t just some weird hypercompetitive, "you've been drafted into a platform war, son" bullshit, it was the implication that it was up to you to save your game company, with your dollars. And ever since, that mentality has mutated from simple brand loyalty to direct communication with developers to actual influence. Now we’re in a place where AAA games are routinely marketed and sold before development’s even started, microtransactions are expected, and everything is tiered with various bells and whistles and priced to match. And it works. Because they'll buy it. They'll bitch about DLC and lootcrates and then buy them along with Ultimate GoTY Remastered edition anyway. The line between empowerment and entitlement can be razor thin. On the surface, this is fine. It’s still a choice. But all those decades of being sold things as kids, being resold those things as adults, being enticed to pick one platform or company over another; that’s a lifestyle. Once broadband opened up the avenue of Playing With Others, we suddenly realized were we in sea of people and no one had a guide for that. Not that everyone was lacking in social skills, but a few bad apples can make a big impact; if any internet rule has held up consistently, it’s that the loudest yeller will get the most attention.
On a brighter note, I think all of this nerd culture has saturated broadly enough to just be culture now. We get multiple superhero movies a year, and they're huge. No one has to be ashamed of their shelf full of PHBs and Monster Manuals. Over the 10 years I went to cons regularly, the amount of women attending skyrocketed. Hell, the age variance grew. People brought their kids. There’s a lot more attention, both inside and out of these industries directed toward solving toxicity. We’re almost 2 generations removed from those ‘80s kids (that’s me, btw. tail-end gen Xer). A lot of the all-angles type marketing has dropped off. Kids are a little savvier, maybe through necessity. It’ll be an excruciatingly slow change, but I see it working. That kind of toxic male behavior can’t survive- either it changes or gets suppressed.
One final word. Parallels can (and should) be drawn between this and how the hostile, angry white folks got quiet after the civil rights acts in the ‘60s. They didn’t just vanish. Some of them grew and changed and some of them just kept it on the downlow and nursed it until they thought it was safe to be open about it again. Racism has been a thing as long as people have been a thing, and so has misogyny and male-centric behavior. I don’t know how to fix that, but it won’t fix itself and now is a very opportune time to start thinking about it.
Last note, I swear- there are absolutely other factors with a hand in this- economics, changes in family structure, social media and the broader internet- but those aren’t my wheelhouse. Also it’s very late.
-MT
