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Cara Ellison over at RPS is starting up a regular column exploring sex in video games. Seemed like a great opportunity to start a thread here. The first game she's tackling is Ute, which is pretty fascinating both thematically and mechanically. This is interesting to me on a few levels. As my daughter reached college age, I discovered a rather amazing secret conversation that happens within some families. The older women are concerned about her sex life (including aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmothers). They want her to have one. They wanted her to have more of a chance to learn and have fun than they did. I say secret, because this is sooo counter to what young women are usually taught. And secret because almost all of these conversations happened between my wife and the other female relatives. They felt uncomfortable directly telling our daughter that it was okay to be promiscuous, so long as you were as safe as possible. My wife had similar conversations with other parents, who secretly want their kids to have fulfilling sex lives, but don't know how or want to communicate that. They feel an obligation to tow the standard midwest American line that sex is bad, dangerous and should be reserved for marriage, even though they don't believe it. Mechanically, the flip in agency regarding initiation of sex is interesting as it mirrors real life (women really are the ones in charge of when sex happens), but it's often the opposite in popular media, unless a woman's reticence is being used for comedic affect. Fascinating stuff.