Adventures in Middle-Aged Gaming: Dr. Phil Hates My Penis

The life of a middle-aged-gamer often involves a cursed experience some refer to as, the dinner party.  Now parties in and of themselves when you are younger are generally awesome; however, dinner parties with acquaintances, colleagues, or loosely connected relatives can sometimes be awful experiences.  There is usually an excess of forced laughter, preening, and just overall bullshit that I can’t stand.  And, once you get a decent home theatre set up at home, you become fairly resentful of the times that you have to leave said home.  But occasionally, the predictable nonsense is transcended by an epically hateful event such as I recently endured.

The night in question didn’t begin well.  The venue was a dinner party at an acquaintance’s who my wife and I know through some other colleagues.    We arrived to loud cackling and a woman practically yelling; “my husband knows what he’s got to do get some!” Which was followed by much more cackling.  I shot my wife a look and she whispered back, “I wanted to stay home and watch True Blood on HBO but noooo.”

As befitting the unspoken protocol, I looked for the husbands and made my way over to them.  Yes I was abandoning my wife to the three cacklers but frankly, at the time I thought it was for the best.  Older husbands in groups are usually a fairly boring but innocuous group.  We started talking about sports and we all took our turns sharing our opinions on various aspects of hockey and baseball.  Just to mix things up I asked if anyone was into video games.  And just as a smile or two appeared on the faces of a couple of the guys, the head cackler screeched at me from across the room.  “You mean you play those games?!”

“Um, yeah…I do.”  And I turned to the guys again to continue.

“I saw something on Dr. Phil about video games and men who ignore their wives and families.  Did you hear about that boy that died last year because of Xbox and some duty-war game?”

I was feeling reactive because the cackler had caught me off guard but still I feel that I held my temper well.  “Well, I’m not a particularly big fan of Dr. Phil, but I know of the case that you’re talking about and that boy north of Toronto died after a tragic accident.  Yes his father took his Xbox away, but neither the game, nor the system, killed that boy.”  And again, not wanting to get into anything with a vicious shrew at a social event I turned away and tried to change the subject.  But she was not going to let it go.

“That’s not true.”  She said.  “Dr. Phil said that games are escapes from real life and that they can ruin families and relationships.”  She then looked smugly at me like she had just produced proof of an afterlife.  “My husband bought one of those Dee-Esssess or whatever.  The ones that you carry with you?  He’s got his face stuck in that thing all the time.  It’s disrespectful!  Disrespectful to me, and to our relationship.”

Normally, I’m pretty comfortable with conflict.  But on this occasion I was starting to experience something odd.  Let’s just say that I was accutely aware of a shrinking in my nether regions.  Good God, this harpy had special penis-hating powers!  What I think I found most annoying was this woman’s tone.  Husbands and boyfriends everywhere probably know, “that tone” very well.  It’s the tone of voice, the tenor of mood, the inflection women use when they’re about to give us some serious shit about something.

And then it hit me.  The cackler didn’t have the penis-hate power…It was Dr. Phil!  I was suffering from Dr.Phil-laccid-dosis.  Others may know this syndrome as Oprah-Shrinks-Dadinky, or as it was known in the seventies, PhilDonaghue-castritis.  This is the manifestation of a shrinking of male genitalia in direct response to daytime talk-shows that focus primarily on hating men and our fun.

“You know that’s just not accurate.”  I said.  “Games don’t ruin relationships.  Relationships that are already at risk are susceptible to bad things happening.  Jesus Christ this pisses me off!”  I said.  “I bet if your husband was addicted to cooking shows or self-help  books you’d rave about how wonderful he was instead of trying to humiliate him in public?”  …And I felt a growing in my pants.

“You clearly have no insight as Dr. Phil says.”

“Of course I don’t!  I think anyone that blames video games for any of the world’s woes is inherently a douche bag that doesn’t deserve the time of day.  You know why some children perform poorly in school?  Not because they play video games, but more likely because their parents won’t play video games with them.”  And my pants started to tent slightly…

“What about that Grand Theft Auto?  I’ve read that even those in the media call it a murder-sim.”  She spat back at me.

“Look I’m not going to apologise for Rockstar Games.   They make mediocre games with great stories.  But you don’t care about that.  You care about preventing people from having access to cultural materials that are no different than movies or art.  No I don’t think a child should play Grand Theft Fucking Auto, nor do I think that a child should play Call of Duty 4.  But I as an adult should be allowed to enjoy my form of entertainment the same way you might want to enjoy movies like; The Godfather, or Apocalypse Now.”  Now I was needing to adjust slightly from the tension in my goolies.  Across the room I could see my wife staring up at the ceiling and shaking her head.

“Just because you’re rude and you use bad language doesn’t make you right.  Maybe if you played fewer video games, your gut wouldn’t stick out so much?” She sneered.

“And maybe if you gave your husband a blow job every now and then he’d put his DS down and pay attention to the other things you do with your mouth?”  And at that, my wife Mandy stood up, gestured at the front door with her head and started walking out.  She whispered a quiet thank-you to the hostess as she passed, and left.

“I guess we’re leaving.”  I said.  “Thanks for having us.  Let’s do this again sometime.”

After a short period of silence Mandy turned to me in the car; “honey, you know I agree with most of what you said, but do you have to bring oral sex into everything?”

“Yes honey…it’s  my way.”

I have the best wife in the world!

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