When a Canadian woman travels in the
continental United States, is she abroad?
Yes. To travel in a foreign country is to travel abroad.
Every Christmas, the major
Vancouver papers review the newly released board-games. The article has a
traditional format: the assigned reporter gets several friends to sit through a
marathon game-playing session, devises a cute rating system, and then writes a
light-hearted review that gives picks and pans.
The Vancouver Sun's 1990
version closely followed the pattern: the author, Greg Potter, spent a weekend
playing 8 games with 7 friends, devised a cute rating system based on the
Simpsons (the best games were rated HOMER, the worst LISA and MAGGIE), and then
wrote a light-hearted review of his picks and pans.
For example, the GST game
(rating: LISA ) had instructions "almost as hard to understand as the GST
itself"; whereas Monty's Maze (rating: HOMER) - a game where players
gather ancient treasures - "melds Indiana Jones with Park Place and the
daring of Snakes and Ladders with the gathering strategies of Monopoly."
I'm pleased to relate that MooT - a game "involving Trivial Pursuit-type questions and calculated on a cribbage board" - also rated a HOMER.
Game makers, of course, love this
kind of stuff: free advertising to kick off the Christmas shopping season. I
love it, too, but, at the same time, I get tired of the standard, bland review
that MooT inevitably gets ("challenging language game played on
crib-board"), so I was excited when I learned that the Province had handed
the assignment to columnist Lynn Cockburn, the paper's version of Andrea
Dworkin. This will be interesting, I thought, no cutesy rating system's from
her.
And I was right.
For example, Cockburn (a great feminist name) found the
GST game "decidedly sexist, possibly racist"; whereas Monty's Maze
showed "such contempt for the cultures of other countries [that it]
deserves as little comment as possible."
And then there was MooT: a game
that "features Mensa-level questions, a crib-board method of scoring and a
built-in capacity for rendering its participants speechless... [Standard stuff.
Unfortunately, she continued] ... There is a category called SEXIST CARDS - and
part of the fun of this game is finding all the SEXIST CARDS and tearing them
up."
That wasn't free advertising -
that was libel! I got scared. I'd spent years creating my board-game - my baby
- and the past year carefully building a market for it, then, suddenly, out of
the blue, a widely read columnist, plays it once and publicly brands it sexist.
I had visions of angry feminists tossing MooT games onto bonfires, of outlets
refusing to sell it - i.e. I had an entrepreneurial panic attack.
Eventually, I
calmed down enough to let indignation replace fear: thousands of people had
played MooT, I fumed, yet, not one had ever said it was sexist - and, what's
worse, Cockburn didn't even bother to give any examples of the SEXIST CARDS!
So, I phoned her, calmly told her
who I was, and asked for some examples of SEXIST CARDS. This was several weeks
after she had written the review, so she couldn't think of any offhand
Eventually, after some prompting ("Was it the SPINSTER question? How about
the CONCUBINE one?"), she remembered the one that had set off her misogyny
alarm - it's the title of this column.
What annoyed her was that I had
deliberately alluded to a word that women found demeaning. I explained that it
was a joke, and that I was quite aware that the word was politically incorrect,
but had kept the question because it was both harmless and funny.
Cockburn's
response was that, joke or no joke, the question insulted women, and, for that
reason alone, should be removed from the game.
After she hung up, I recalled a similar incident. When I first began flogging MooT, I got a phone call from a retired Ontario businessman who had recently moved to White Rock. He had heard me play MooT on CKNW and the investor in him had been excited by its money-making possibilities. So we got together and schemed for awhile.
Unfortunately, our business
relationship turned out to be brief because one of the first demands he made
was that I remove all offensive questions - in this case, offensive questions
being those having to do with sex or religion ("Why risk annoying
consumers?"). I balked and we parted company.
Cockburn reminded me of this
fellow because she was making the same demand. Only her demand was politically
- rather than monetarily - inspired. Perhaps hers is a purer motive, but the
result is the same.
And the columnist and the
businessman weren't the only ones making that demand. For awhile, it seemed as
if everybody who played MooT had a question they wanted removed because they
found it either offensive or too difficult.
Now, I like criticism. In fact
testing questions on people was the best way to make sure that the questions
worked. But I realized early in the project that if I started removing all the
questions that annoyed people, I would end up with the board-game equivalent of
Sunbeam bread.
This edition's MooT questions are
some of the one's that over the years people have found offensive and asked me
to remove from the game. Try to figure out both the answer to the question and the
group that might feel offended.
1. When the talkshow host laughs
out loud at his own joke is he sniggering?
2. Is a disorderly mob of rabbis rabble?
3. Which feminist columnist
constantly scolds you: the shrew or the virago?<
4. When politicians raise their
forelegs and hop on their hind legs, which are they doing: prancing or
capering?
5. Which would a Mormon lesbian prefer: polyandry or polygyny?
Answers
1. No. Sniggering is half-suppressed laughter. (talk-show hosts)
2. Yes. Any disorderly mob is rabble. (Jewish people, the religious)
3. The shrew. Shrews scold, viragos are overbearing. (feminist columnists)
4. Prancing. To hop on the hind-legs is to prance, whereas to leap friskily is to caper. (horses)
5. Polygyny. Multiple male mates is polyandry, multiple female mates is polygyny. (heterosexual Mormons)
