Like a lot of people, I find it hard to separate robots that exist from their all pervasive fantasy-world counterparts.
The virtue of Mr. Gabler's essay is that it gives energetic and eloquent voice to a pervasive ideological fantasy.
Juxtaposed with the body is not the mind, as one might expect, but the soul, which is enslaved to the subtle tyranny of all-pervasive male fantasies, anatomised in a passionate sequence entitled "the stereotype".
(If you need convincing that spying on women in the bathroom is a pervasive male power fantasy, Google "women's restroom camera" and call me when you find a link that isn't porn, if you don't die of old age first).
The fantasy is pervasive: she suggests that GamerGaters, old-school cultural gatekeepers, ludologist hard-liners, and people on the subway are all alike in their implicit desire to imagine games as an otherworld, a playground separate from wider cultural forces.
Most of her projects, however, are in Europe, where, she said, "the wilderness fantasy is less pervasive" than in the United States.
If we are clinically inclined, a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder might better meet the case (I quote from the D.S.M .: "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy".
In the clinical diagnostic manual, the many criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include a "pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy".
"Several told me, independently of one another," Purdum writes, "that they had consulted the definition of 'narcissistic personality disorder' in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — 'a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy' — and thought it fit her perfectly".
Dombek, whose essays have appeared in n+1 and the Paris Review, begins with the DSM, which defines Narcissistic Personality Disorder as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy".
