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"You could say it's not sexual [at that stage], and I'd buy that," Johnson tells me. "It's too primitive, too early to be sexual. But if you're a boy, you want the mother all to yourself when you're about three or four years old. The boy will say, 'I want to marry mommy,' and everybody laughs. And then he grows up and he doesn't marry mommy, but the feelings, in this theory, don't go away. We grow up and the feelings stay in some place inside of us."When we get to a certain age, Johnson explains, the idea of your father hugging and kissing your mother becomes alarming. That's when the urge to destroy Bowser or Ganon might come into the picture. "When we play a game in which some of these situations are symbolically created, we can have some of those old feelings safely. We can have those feelings and just get very excited about the game: 'Hey, I won!'"For more on gender, watch our doc 'The Women of the Men's Rights Movement':"The boy will say, 'I want to marry mommy,' and everybody laughs, but the feelings, in this theory, don't go away." —Allen Johnson
I tell Johnson that the damsel-in-distress trope has come under substantial fire in gaming culture for its depiction of women. "We may be reinforcing images of femininity that emphasize their vulnerability," he says, "and how they need strong men to protect them, and those kinds of things are open to criticism, I think."
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Zipes has never actually played Super Mario Bros., so I explain that there was essentially no story to the game other than a princess getting kidnapped by a monster, and a hero that needed to save her. Was there a rape subtext in this tale type?"Definitely," he says, before naming several other fairy tales with rape subtexts, such as Little Red Riding Hood. "We have not, in our civilizing periods, managed to deal with the unfair way we treat weaker people, in particular women, and we continue to develop notions about sex that put women at a certain disadvantage. As long as we have this problem we're going to have all types of versions and variants of this same type of tale."These games are traditionally aimed at boys, so what about the heroes such as Mario or Link, who set out to save the damsel? How do they fit into this perspective?"We still live in a patriarchal society," Zipes says. "We control the film industry—'we' being, basically, white males, at least in America and other places like Europe. We dominate in businesses, corporations, cultural views, and so on, and we want to see ourselves as heroes, as saving, as protective, and we want to also posit ourselves in a very positive way. We want to demonstrate that there's something good about us, and that we will defend our women, who 'can't defend themselves,' and we want to save our countries. So you get these dashing heroes who are able to do these amazing things."Perhaps there are uncomfortable psychological elements to these tales from classic video games that relate to the unconscious mind of, at least, young, straight men. And maybe these quintessential stories, evolved from fairy tales and myths and repeatedly depicted in games, tell of the historical sexual evils of men that echo back to prehistory.Either way, there might be more than just fetch quests and boss battles for you to ponder the next time you raise your Master Sword on your way to murder a king.Follow Jagger on Twitter."We continue to develop notions about sex that put women at a certain disadvantage." —Jack Zipes