I always hated Monotony… was never good at it, never cared enough to try to improve. Honestly, a board game about real estate in New Jersey?
After our wedding, my wife and I honeymooned at a resort on Kauai, and they had a selection of board games in our room. My wife, a very competitive lover of games, insisted we play Monopoly. Somehow, through some unbelievably good luck on my part, I managed to win the game, upon which I immediately “retired” and swore I’d never play the game again, gnash her teeth though she may. It was my one chance to go out on top, and I wasn’t gonna give it up.
Now she just kicks my ass at every other game we have (except maybe Halo), and that’s perfectly fine with me… just so long as I never have to play a game of Monopoly again.
On the plus side, I think I recognized how silly that box was around age 7 in the 70s, thus beginning my slide towards being a wimpy, er I mean progressive modern male…
Who’s to say it’s not Mother & Daughter’s turn to do the dishes that night? Perhaps they were a family who progressive for the times and rotated who did the chores and this just happened to capture Father and Junior’s game night? Maybe the next night it’s Father & Daughter roaming the grid in search of plastic death boats. Perhaps it’s Father & Mother gaming with glee whilst the children toil away in the background. Would we be decrying the child labor practices then? So much to discern and decide!
And only slightly more overtly sexist than the other battleship on BB today: The giant heroic battleship phallus ramming into an evil alien tentacle vagina during the climax of the Yamato trailer…
Of course what everyone is missing is just how brilliant the company was in realizing they could productize and market a game that had been played with pencil and paper for decades.
Actually, to be honest, when it comes to serious vacuuming beyond the scope of Roomba, I do that job too, with a smile. I don’t mind housework, as a rule. My wife and I had pretty different upbringings. Her mother, an early Baby Boomer, encouraged her daughters to focus on their studies rather than housework. To this day, my wife has never touched an ironing board, but she graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley. My Depression-born parents, however, placed as much (or more, come to think of it) emphasis on household chores and responsibility as on academic rigor. My college career was nothing to write home about, but it turns out I’m a sweepin’, moppin’, dishwashin’, launderin’ fool. My wife and I started out dividing up the household chores as evenly as we could, but when the kids came along and my wife became a stay-at-home mom for a few years, she took on more of the chores. But since she really doesn’t like them, whereas they don’t really bother me, I try to take more of them on on weekends or when my longish workdays permit.
Which reminds me: I need to wash the windows this weekend.
That illustration strikes me as more sexist than the jello pudding commercial. At least showing a woman worrying about domestic chores made sense in the context of the commercial. I can’t understand what possessed them to include doing the dishes on the cover of Battleship. I suppose it might have been a very poor attempt to be progressive. “We should have females on the cover, but they better be in the Kitchen!”
