Wii Fit Sensationalism

Not a morning person, I reserve all my fluff reading for the first few hours of my awake status. This morning I kept coming across a particular story that stank of high-sensationalism and tabloid excess.

Amanda Flowers, a resident of Manchester, is claiming an injury that resulted from a Wii Fit injury has turned her into a sex addict. My first thought was wondering if I was reading a Warren Ellis comic--checked again, no.

What was Warren Ellis-like about this was how others were reporting and framing it. Nymphomania, sex addict, et cetera were all terms being used and thrown about as so much candy on Halloween.

Falling off her Wii Balance Board, Flowers apparently injured a nerve that caused what her doctor calls persistent sexual arousal syndrome. If one reads carefully, this syndrome is not related to nymphomania or sexual addiction, being something wholly different.

At the same time, the Daily Star (which should be read with a grain of salt at the best of times--the title is "Nintendo Wii Made Me Nympho!"), who seems to be among the first to report this, left the article on this quotation from Flowers, "Single Amanda, 24, from Harpurhey, Manchester, said: 'With no cure I just have to try to control my passion by breathing deeply. Hopefully one day I'll find a superstud who can satisfy me.'" Many other news sites are linking to this particular article, so it is easy to see how they followed the trend that was started.

What intrigues me here is not the obvious play-up of the sexually unsatisfiable woman who can only reach a 'superstud's' levels of horniness through an accident (newsflash: women get horny too), but instead the lack of actual focus on the Wii Balance Board. Performing any physical activity incorrectly can cause injury to one's self, therefore the headlines' focus on Wii Fit without any subsequent follow-up seems like cashing in on cultural cachet more than anything. Yet the story has moved well beyond the Daily Star.

The entire situation seems very odd, and some of the details do not seem to match up. If Flowers has persistent sexual arousal syndrome, I imagine having a superstud to satisfy her when she is aroused would be the least of her concerns--I for one enjoy traveling long distances on something other than my feet at times.