Angry Brides: A Mind-Boggling Video Game About Domestic Violence

Here's a peculiar internet phenomenon that leaves me unable to discern ironic offensiveness from earnest idiocy from cultural paradox: Angry Brides, a Facebook game in which you play an angry Indian wife who bludgeons her husband with frying pans and shoes.

Totally sexist, right? But the company that made it, Indian dating site Shaadi, has discovered a loop hole for offensiveness: "creating awareness."

Angry Brides: A Mind-Boggling Video Game About Domestic Violence

Shaadi says Angry Brides "creates awareness" about dowry-related abuse, which is when a groom's family abuses a bride to blackmail her family into paying additional dowry money post-nuptials. India recorded 8400 dowry-related deaths in 2010, plus "90,000 cases of torture and cruelty toward women by their husbands or family."

To express contempt for dowries, Shaadi encourages Facebook users to bludgeon their virtual husbands with virtual household objects. Here I am selecting a shoe to throw at my pilot husband. Every time I hit him, I earned money for my "anti-dowry fund," which is basically just a scoreboard, because it's not like Shaadi is giving money to charity or anything.

And so we return to the central conundrum: Does Shaadi's purported positive intent justify the ludicrously mixed message of combating domestic violence with more domestic violence? Or is everyone just a capitalist pig, and Angry Birds knock-offs are dumb, the end. [Angry Brides, Reuters, Kotaku, Uproxx]