Scratch-and-win masculinity
Why do men keep gambling in the casino of patriarchy?
Feeling lucky?
Betting has to be the funniest, yet saddest vice of man.
The gambling man epidemic is real. We are raised to spin wheels and measure strength in odds. The punching bag machine at the carnival, this highest number gets the girl. Children act dumb when their father’s credit card funds are converted to V-bucks. Electronic Arts failed the gambling litmus test in Brussels, the Star Wars game was the casino of the future and they turned thousands of kids into gamblers. As they grow, they learn to bet, wager, invest, parlay, take risks, and lose it all. This is how the men win: just keep playing the game.
“Ministers and princes, as irresponsible as they were omnipotent and unhampered by any troublesome international tribunals, were free to gamble any time they liked with their countries’ destinies, a smile on their lips and with an exquisitely polite flourish, as though they were making a move on a chessboard.”
The slot machine as therapist, oppressor, and only friend. With pitch-black pachinko fingers or sanitized screens to tap into hive-like rhythms, the older they get, the younger they feel, the richer they hope to become when they regress to play. The patriarchy is a collective, but lonely game.
When a man is a man, he gambles on the meaning of that word, and the price he must pay.
Jeremy Bentham speaks of deep play when referring to games “whose stakes are so high that no rational man would engage with it”.
The supposition that men are rational obfuscates the real dual games of Nietzsche’s caricature of man: women and danger. To define a game, is not possible, as Wittgenstein playfully reminds us. But when you’re engaged in deep play, you don’t see who is being played by whom. The most common response to trauma, as we all know, is to repeat it. When we lack alternatives, we stay in the game, give it another shot, in hopes of different outcomes. Textbook madness, permeating each and every institution. Until we find the will to change the wheels of time will bleed us dry. The house always wins, and man is not master of his own home. But send me money, if you can
I’m a gambler," he said, smiling.
His teeth were white plastic.
"I know I don’t much look it.
William Gibson & Michael Swanwick, "Dogfight"
My grandmother went through twenty years of fascism and finds comfort in her SEGA Master Drive, where she plays Columns every day. When the console breaks we buy her a new one we purchase online. Her friends, like most Southern Europeans, spend most of their retirement funds on their true grandchild: the scratch card. My mother describes to me the three stages of Mediterranean scratch card addiction amongst senior citizens:
First stage: The old retiree enters the cafe (or tasca) in mild-mannered steps, orders their coffee, and, casually, one of those scratch cards over there, please! They pay, finish their coffee, leave, and go home. At home, they scratch the card and lose. The house always wins, and the home always loses. The partner doesn’t know, but God is watching, and they go to church on Sundays, so luck is on their side, they think.
Second Stage: The elder, about to retire, struts inside the tavern in confident stride, orders a beer and “also another one of those scratch cards, like last time.” They chug the Mini in less than a breath and go sit by the unforgiving sun. They scratch the card and lose again. The bar always wins, the dome always loses. The partner is unhappy, and they don’t even know it yet. But the kids are watching, and they never go to church offline, so hope is on their side, at least.
Third Stage: In comes the impoverished worker of 55 years, in a hurry, it’s payday! “Gimme two!”. An instant loss and another one on top. Two words, two losses, two minutes in and out for this reverse heist; the bank always wins. The church always wins when their homes are scratched up. The House of mercy (Casa da Misericordia) runs the monopoly on lotteries in Portugal. It owns more property than there are persons experiencing homelessness in Portugal. They feed the poor but run the gamble. They tax the foolish at the expense of the hungry. The most philanthropic casino you’ve ever seen.
And why do we gamble? The immigrant mother of four with a dream and no vacation, the eight year old birthday boy opening digital crates in hopes of a legendary item, the bluffing husband who knows she can’t leave him, the swiper on tinder with nothing to lose but his drive? Hubris. Pure and patriarchal hubris: the astrology of the bro. Whereas many opt for the symbolism of the zodiac for hope, the rational and scientific fintech bro will instead find solace in the quantifiable rationality of the Wall Street graph, the line that goes up and down and determines his fate. I feel lucky today, the odds are on my side, he says, like a Taurus on a good day. Similarly, Huizinga compares the mentality of the stock broker to that of the gambler.
“The hazy border-line between play and seriousness is illustrated very tellingly by the use of the word “playing” or “gambling” for the machinations on the Stock Exchange. The gambler at the roulette table will readily concede that he is playing; the stockjobber will not. He will maintain that buying and selling on the off-chance of prices rising or falling is part of the serious business of life, at least of business life, and that it is an economic function of society. In both cases the operative factor is the hope of gain ; but whereas in the former the pure fortuitousness of the thing is generally admitted, in the latter the player deludes himself with the fancy that he can calculate the future trends of the market. At any rate the difference of mentality is exceedingly small.”
Walter Benjamin compares the experience of the gambler to that of the factory worker. While the production line lacks the touch of adventure, which is central to gambling, Benjamin concedes that gambling is still marked by a sense of “emptiness” deriving from an inability “to complete something inherent in the activity of a wage slave in a factory. The casino will pay you to keep gambling. The patriarchy will pay you to repress tears under the tyrannical grin of the smiling winner. The casino, like an old factory, has no windows and no clocks, it subverts temporality. Long-standing clients of patriarchal hubris are given loyalty cards in exchange for what they already gave away.
“The manipulation of the worker at the machine has no connection with the preceeding operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition. Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the labourer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.”
Writing on Las Vegas, Baudrillard identifies an implicit connection between the wide openness of the desert and that of gambling, both manifesting the sterility of speed and expenditure.
the intensity of gambling [is] reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange.
- Jean Baudrillard, “America”
The open space of the casino and desert are also a “privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.”
Yes, the house always wins.
Yes, the odds are stacked against me.
Yes, the dangers of deep-fried turkey-related fire incidents and real and deadly for the home, as the U.S. government never fails to remind me every year come Thanksgiving.
Dads on the grill be like
STAND BACK I GOT THIS
BUT, he smirks to himself, I’ve got a system! I’ve been counting cards, studying the markets, praying to Musk, blocking the haters, talking over the wife. The gambler’s fallacy is becoming the unofficial state religion. When guys think they know what they are doing, many dangers abound.
I know what I’m doing, trust me! She’s terrified, watching him gamble it all away: his past, his future, the car, the kids, his mind and pockets. And yet, he won’t fold, he raises the stakes. WATCH THIS! Double or nothing in this basement of thieves. The wife walks in crying “This has to stop!”. She gives him a sermon but he’s too focused on the cards, fighting back tears with his poker face intact. She threatens to leave him unless he gets off that table this very instant.
And here we have the issue at hand: in begging him to stop, she forgets she’s dealing with a gambling man, socialized through play. He was born to bet on dangerous playthings, no matter the odds. He looks her in the eyes with a gaze that spells “WATCH THIS!”, turns to the dealer and proclaims “hit me”, and boy will he get hit. He can’t help himself. Man‘s gotta eat, at all costs.
The way in which men plan their escape from the patriarchal system is by actively participating in it, gambling, trading and stealing their way out of their own commodification. This leads the many down moral paths that end up corrupting them and, as a result, makes their escape unlikely.
“Male heads of households who give a meager portion of their wages for the needs of their family can still have the illusion that they are providers. Nowadays women’s income can be the backup money that allows many patriarchal men to squander their paycheck on drugs, alcohol, gambling, or sexual adventures even as they lay claim to being the provider.”
If you want to break a man, you should delete all his saved files.
I spent my parents’ money on Habbo Hotel coins online, then packs of cards of Yu-Gi-Oh!, then drugs. And every time I hoped for the same change, but the house always wins at the expense of my change. The kids I work with do the same, but now it’s all on Fortnite. The NFT community, the Wall Street eunuchs, the doomscrolling gooner that has to keep going. Even war is a gamble.
The chicken of the shark tank must keep swimming, lest he drowns. Don’t stop! Keep going! You got this! Gooner bait is just motivational therapy. We gamble on the kids we have, the shit we let them study, the time we let them waste on what, the wheels they spin for karma. We gamble on the posts we share, the compliments we fish for food or shoes, and then come up with systems that rationalize our choices. The chess master’s burden is frying my liver, one sacrificial temple at a time. The house always wins but my body is losing. HR told me to treat people like investments, so I’m harassing the doubters behind their backs on LinkedIn. I roll the dice on who gets to hate me. When everyone does, I go downtown.
The club is for gamblers only. The hair, the shirt, the scent, the prey, the punching bag, the courage juice, the competition, the brawl in the puke outside. The house always wins, and it just kicked me out. Try again? Spin the wheel! There are clubs around the block!
Where are the sex workers? I’m down on my luck. The house always wins, but I was raised a winner too! I should go to church, but I never gamble on religion, only on heaven and hell. I gamble on attention, spinning bottles with a message, that reveals a certain tendency to trade in words for kisses. This, unfortunately, is how I win. When I get money, I will cum and everyone will cheer for me. And if not, I’ll try again.
Masculinity, like gambling, is a compulsion to repeat. A will to change? Spin wheels for change! The past is using us to repeat itself.
