A 9-year-old softball player in suburban Chicago has successfully muted a sexist arcade game after calling out Chuck E. Cheese, the game manufacturers and Major League Baseball.
Marie Marcum was attending a school fundraiser at Chuck E. Cheese when she stepped up to an MLB-licensed throwing game to show off her throwing skills.
But after missing one of the targets the
game taunted her by saying, “Hey, there’s always softball!”
Marcum, who’s been playing softball since she was four,
did not take the comment lightly.
“I was really mad,” she told ESPN. (?????)“It made me feel like they think softball is a bad sport and girls shouldn’t play softball(????). I just started throwing balls at the game as hard as I could. I thought it was rude.”
Marcum’s mother, Lisa, who teaches high school, heard her daughter’s frustrations and suggested she write a letter to Innovative Concepts in Entertainment (ICE), the game’s manufacturer.
“Here we are at Chuck E. Cheese, a place with so many impressionable little kids and
we’re saying you throw like a girl or hit like a girl or whatever,” said Lisa. “I thought
we had moved past that.”
Though MLB said it hadn’t yet received the letter, it released a statement on Wednesday: “MLB does not support the message conveyed in the game and we are reaching out to the company to share our concerns about it.”
The league added how much it appreciated Marcum’s passion for softball and that growing its youth softball program is as much a priority as youth baseball.
Also on Wednesday, the president of ICE, Joe Coppola, said the company manufactured the game in 2009 and 2010 through a licensing agreement with the MLB. He added that this was the first complaint the company has received.
“I completely understand where she is coming from,” Coppola said. “I get it. There is probably a greater sensitivity today than there was 10 or 15 years ago. It’s something we all need to pay attention to.”
Coppola said it would be easy to remove the audio clip from the game. In the meantime, Chuck E. Cheese has already muted the game in all its arcades.
“I’m just so proud of her,” Lisa said. “The one thing I hope she remembers from this is if there is something she feels strongly about in the future, she will remember that people want to hear her. If nothing else, this will encourage her to speak up.”
So the first thing I would like to address is that the first quote with the question marks insn't a typo because other reports have used the same interview, the girl actually says that she thinks they think Softball is a bad sport, and girls shouldn't play softball, which doesn't make the slightest sense at all. Especially since the Audio never used the word girl so that's a big leap.
Secondly, the fact the mother didn't try to sue the game manufacturer
for the name ICE is actually more surprising than the topic of this article, because the mom clearly sounds like the type of person who would do that.
Thirdly, the whole point of games "taunting" you now, 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, was to motivate you to keep trying, or earlier, to motivate you and to get you to put more quarters in the machine.
This belief that "throw like a girl" is somehow terrible is already an issue, but the thing is the
GAME NEVER SAID THAT, the game only said
"how about softball" after she missed. She got offended because she plays softball, because she's a little girl and not a professional baseball player. The fact the Mom helped the girl SPIN that into
"I though we moved past throw like a girl" when the machine NEVER said the word "girl" at all in any of the audio is just baffling.
Basically it's gotten to the point where people can just make shit up, the media,
who's supposed to be covering news, propping it up to be viral, and then the companies scrambling for an apology over something that doesn't mean anything. This isn't even a story, no one else even filed a complaint to the company, it was their
first complaint!
Can't even imagine this girl when she's 15-16. Or whether Chuck-E-Cheese will still be around since taunts are in like 45% of their arcade games, including the actual sit-down arcades. What's next? When she loses a racing game and it says "You're too slow" does that mean
sexist men think she's two slow because girls can't drive NASCAR?????
I mean that's the same leap they just used here so hey.
