Phyllis Schlafly, anti-feminist activist and seared husk of fustian disgust, has finally found something she hates more than her own genitals. In an article posted yesterday on WorldNetDaily, she railed against video games with the kind of deliberate ignorance only possible in those who laugh un-ironically at Dennis the Menace comics.

Ms. Schlafly rehashes the thoroughly cliche and unsupported "argument" shouted from both sides of the aisle that video games train aggressive behavior and desensitization to violence. But she further, and specifically, disagrees with the thundering unanimity of judges who've ruled that video games are protected under the First Amendment to the same degree as literature.

And that just pissed me off.

Let's read a short quote together:

Legitimate free speech expresses violence in a rational context rather than displaying it graphically to evoke an immediate emotional reaction.

That's a lie. The movie Saw leaps immediately to mind as a graphical expression of irrational violence for the purposes of blah fucking blah. And while I wouldn't argue that Saw is anything resembling a good movie, there's little doubt it's legitimate speech covered by the First Amendment.

But what's completely goddamn ridiculous is that she's implying violence has a "rational context" to begin with, something I'd assume a person as committed to peace (dripping sarcasm) as Ms. Schlafly would be loath to admit. Innumerable pieces of art, like MacBeth and Full Metal Jacket, are dedicated to demonstrating and exploring the fact that violence often has no rational context.

But her ultimate and seismically unoriginal point is this: viewing naked people is (apparently) damaging, so we regulate porn. Video games, because they put the player in the position of committing violence, are also damaging. So we should regulate video games in the same way we regulate porn.

At first, I was all excited, cuz I thought she meant that, like porn, I should be able to download free video games with two mouse clicks. But then I remembered that since Ms. Schlafly's sex drive was obliterated in the same comet Armageddon that killed the dinosaurs, she's probably oblivious of the joys of Googling "double anal penetration."

Further illustrating her stoic lifelong celibacy, Ms. Schlafly intentionally ignores the deep differences between porn and video games. First of all, porn is a fucking genre, video games are a medium. You can have (and I encourage you to invest in) porn novels, porn comics, porn flicks, and porn video games.

Second, the test to determine if something is "porn," and not "art with boobs," is simple. Is it designed for the singular purpose of getting you horny? Then it's porn. But if it's designed to get you horny plus illustrate the alienation of the worker in capitalist society, it's art with boobs, and protected by the First Amendment.

Violent video games, on the other hand, have a multitude of purposes for their designs, all variations on "entertain the player," and fucking NONE of which is "make America's precious snowflakes shoot each other." If a game were specifically designed (through some crazy-ass subliminal message shit) for the singular purpose of making children unload 30-round banana clips into high-school cafeterias, I'd be right there with Ms. Schlafly, calling for its censorship, chuckling over the antics of Family Circus, and not getting any. But those games don't exist, because video games aren't designed to make killers, they're designed to be really fucking fun.

But I have to thank Ms. Schlafly, cuz a couple of her lines (taken out of context to make a point) got me thinking in a different direction, one involving fewer ad hominem attacks. Let's continue:

There is a distinct difference between sympathizing with the perpetrator of violence and being the perpetrator of violence...violent video games encourage role-playing, making the child the perpetrator of violence in a manner that no book or movie can.

Aside from Ms. Schlafly's asinine insinuation that children are the target audience for violent video games, I agree with both of these statements wholeheartedly. Playing video games has the potential to convey experiences (including violent ones) in a way that books and movies do not. And that's the the most obvious reason why video games deserve their protected status as art.

Millions of ninth-graders read Slaughterhouse Five each year. One of the strong themes of the novel is the ultimate stupidity of war, at times illustrated through graphic descriptions of horrible, violent situations.

And Saving Private Ryan conveys the horrors of war as clearly as any film could. The violence is depicted so realistically that I reacted physically the first time I saw it.

But it was good for me to read about the smell of burning corpses, and it was good for me to see Giovanni Ribisi bleeding his guts out. It was good, because it let me, in some imperfect way, understand the shit almost an entire generation of Americans went through.

And it was good for me to play Call of Duty. That game let me understand, in some imperfect way, the dirty, gut-churning desperation of running out of ammo during a German assault and the terror that leads someone, as a last resort, to bash human beings in the teeth with the butt of a Tommy gun.

Saying I experienced the same thing actual soldiers did in the trenches of WWII would be arrogant even for me. But I did peer through a muddy window into that world and learned something new about war, something that I couldn't have learned from a movie or a book.

The medium of video games opens a whole new dimension to art by demolishing the wall between a work of art and those who experience it. The subject of a book is a character in that book; the emotions and actions being explored are a product of the artist's mind.

Video games, in their highest form, are the inverse: the artist(s) create everything but the subject. The act of playing a video game is the act of exploring your own emotions and actions, given a context by those artists.

That alone may seem pretty obvious, but when you think about it, that's kind of an ideal that art's been working towards for a while, and one that hasn't been realized until now. And unlike Ms. Schlafly, I think that's something to celebrate.

Because video games cost an assload to make, and games are made to be really fucking fun and not to explore human nature and existential suffering and such bullshit, this new dimension will take a long time to be fully realized.

But some games (think Bioshock, Psychonauts, Portal) have managed to be incredibly fun while also dipping their toes into the high-art pool, and the aging gamer demographic is beginning to demand more and more artistically sophisticated gaming experiences.

Me, I'm just hoping for the day when Call of Duty 18: The Brothers' War will be taught next to The Red Badge of Courage.

And Phyllis Schlafly is a fucking idiot.