Game for Change

Only one thing on the Mind

                There’s a phrase I hate.  There are actually several that I hate, but I’m thinking of one in particular right now.  Whether or not you believe the answer or not, when I say that men only have one thing on their minds, you know what I mean.  Everyone has the same answer.  Though it’s never spoken, just ask any American, possibly any Occidental, and see if they don’t immediately know what you’re implying.  And just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s sex.  Apparently men only ever have sex on the brain. 

I tend away from absolutes in general, but this one is particularly upsetting.  Demitri Martin, joking about racism, says that Mexicans are bad listeners.  He corrects himself as saying that Mexicans are good listeners, but realizes that’s racist too.  So he finishes with the right amount of Mexicans listen the right amount of time.  Saying that all men are always thinking of one thing, whether football, trucks, or Haydn, is going to be sexist (though I’d love for any other option to take sex’s place). 

My game is set up so that despite your activity, despite your hobbies or preferences, the conclusion is that, actually, the whole time you were just thinking about sex.  I wanted it to feel out of place and jarring.  We’d be talking about having breakfast in the afternoon and then sex would interrupt.  I decided to embrace this assignment's heavy-handed potential, but with a little bit of a satirical touch.  My favorite touch is the Woman option at the first of the game.  Though it wasn't my primary focus, it was worth touching on the common and very untrue stigma men have against women:  they are completely foreign and we can never understand them.  If both this and my primary statement are true, then men are sex beasts, and women are so impossible that discussion is deemed futile and ruled out completely – might as well just gawk at ‘em.

I found an amazing article from Cosmopolitan (May2007, Vol. 242 Issue 5) called “Inside a Guy’s Naughty Mind.”  They create their own experiment to prove what I’m trying to disprove.  One of their DJ’s allegedly recorded all his sexual thoughts during the day on a tape recorder - there's a booty call and the unnamed "hot bartender."  The whole account is so contrived that nothing about it makes me believe that it’s true.  A more legitimate study conducted at Ohio State University (posted in Journal of Sex Research in the article “Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability”) showed that, from a sample of 72 men, the amount of sexual thoughts in a day ranged from 1-388.  388?  Even the Cosmopolitan guy only had 27.  The median, however, was 18.6 (women were marked at 9.9).

Mostly, I wanted to show that not all men are entirely consumed by a single physical urge.  But then again, I just spent my whole afternoon and evening, plus additional preparation during the week, thinking about this assignment.