Not so long ago, a girl smashed her boyfriend’s Xbox 360 to the internet’s delight. Now, another girl has shown up to do the same to a PS3 (seen here). So why can’t men get enough? Castration anxiety.
https://gizmodo.com/girl-smashes-her-boyfriends-xbox-360-clearly-in-a-grea-5411245
Quite simply, castration anxiety is a theory proposed by Freud in which a boy sees a girl’s genitalia (or lack of penis) as a symbol of punishment, as if she’s been castrated.
In this particular instance, I’d argue that the console becomes the phallus in a symbolic castration. Man plays video games. Woman does not. And when the video-game-less female destroys the male’s video games, that’s akin to a woman removing a man’s manhood. It just so happens that, in this metaphor, man has both a literal phallus and a gaming phallus. Really, an analog like a guy tossing his girlfriend’s makeup collection out the window could work just as well.
But why the fixation? Why can’t we look away? Like a thought scab that our brains can’t help but pick, male philosophers and writers have been obsessed with castration probably since the the beginning of time itself. A notable example would be Ernest Hemingway, as outlined by the famous literary criticism Freud, Fetishism and Hemingway’s Phallic Women. For instance, in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes (through character), “Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk.”
It just so happens, the ladies of YouTube aren’t generally as eloquent, but they do tend to show more cleave. [Ripten via Kotaku]
https://kotaku.com/crazy-girlfriend-vs-ps3-fake-or-not-fake-5418571
