Today Colin Campbell from IGN posted a rebuttal to Bill Bennett’s opinion piece on the “decline of man”.

I would encourage you to read both pieces. Then come back here and read my response to Colin.

The worst kind of critics are those who don’t understand what one is talking about. In this Colin and I agree. But we probably disagree on most everything else because I don’t believe that Colin understands the argument that he has responded to.

Bennett’s opinion piece does not place the blame on video games for the decline of men, or more accurately, mens’ seeming-inability to take responsibility and grow up. While he does include stats about video game playing, they are clearly intended to be an example or symptom of this trend and not causes, exactly like every previous statistic Bennett cited before he got to video games. The examples he cites reference college degrees, employment, how many men get married and/or stick around to be there for their children, religious devotion, and an article on gender role reversal by Hanna Rosin from The Atlantic.

Colin writes a poorly-considered and frankly petulant rebuttal that straw-mans Bennett’s entire thesis, presuming he is blaming video games and then mocking him for doing so without offering any real counterargument. And yet we would think it odd for Colin to come to the belief that Mr. Bennett blames universities for the decline of male responsibility. But that is exactly the sort of thing he assumes with video games, apparently just because they were mentioned in the article.

Contributing to this misunderstanding is perhaps a misconstrued idea of what Mr. Bennett means by the ‘decline of the other sex.’ He does not mean false notions of machismo or piety, nor does he refer to putting women back into the kitchen to make their husbands sandwiches and babies. Rather he refers to what makes man happiest; being productive, creative, and artistic at his chosen goal and disciplining himself to achieve those ends. After all, one will never create a video game if he never gets up off the couch and turns his console off. Rather, Mr. Bennett is talking about a balanced approach to life. One can enjoy video games and they can have their place in man’s life, but one must also discipline oneself enough to go out and–if it is their passion–make their own games. Men contribute productively to society by doing so, but so do they also when they are devoted to a family as much as to their own craft, refusing to let their children be raised by games and TV and other people but instead raising their children with the same values that made them productive and upstanding citizens without making the same mistakes as their own fathers did when raising them.

Mr. Bennett’s blame for this observed decline rests squarely on other things than mere video games, as should be clear to anyone familiar with how argumentative writing works; the thesis is summarized, then supporting evidence is laid out to support that thesis. Then, only at the end, is the thesis justified and fully explained. His last five paragraphs, starting with the question “So what’s wrong?” are devoted to the real causes. Please read them.