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Roderick

Feminism

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I've read studies that show that teenage boys no longer make up the largest demographic in the community, I'm not sure if it's accurate or not. What I do know is that they are especially vocal! The more counter arguments we get, the better, IMO.

Agreed; even if teenage boys aren't the dominant demographic for videogames now, there's still a lot of marketing inertia toward them, and some are growing up to be the very worst kind of misogynist man-child pricks. The more intervention and the more alternate voices there are, the better.

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I love games, but when I don't feel comfortable playing almost any of them in the same room as my partner, there's a problem. This applies to pretty much any game, no matter how safe it may be at first glance.

Man, this reminds me of a huge flameout I recently had with the creators and community surrounding a tabletop RPG. The book has casual mentions of rape in it, which don't really serve any purpose, and I lamented the fact that this pointless inclusion means that there are people to whom I wouldn't feel comfortable showing the book. This was right after my partner had expressed an interest in seeing what this RPG thing is all about.

The sad part was how defensive this bunch of grognards immediately became. I was shouted down, insulted, and bathed in a sea of the most predictable, irrelevant and fallacious arguments you can imagine. My group dropped the game pretty quickly after that.

Also, I agree wholly with your main point. I want to support this series so that other people who haven't given the subject much thought can be informed, and surely there will be interesting new points that I haven't considered, even if it isn't all mind-blowing original stuff.

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Miffy's words.

Miffy's words.

Yeah!

Yeah!

Thank you.

It's not just the sexism itself, it's all the discussions and counter-discussions, the defensiveness and tired reactions to that and to all of it, the attitudes ranging from 'it's just a game' to 'it's just sexism' to 'yeah, sexism, I know', some of which we see even around here, that make it interesting and, in my eyes, still worthwhile to discuss. You could probably say that this forum, as far as game-forums go, is one of the least offensive to and hopefully most welcoming places for all sexes and genders and thus maybe one of the better places to discuss it. I don't know, I learned a lot here, due to you people and your great input.

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Man, this reminds me of a huge flameout I recently had with the creators and community surrounding a tabletop RPG. The book has casual mentions of rape in it, which don't really serve any purpose, and I lamented the fact that this pointless inclusion means that there are people to whom I wouldn't feel comfortable showing the book. This was right after my partner had expressed an interest in seeing what this RPG thing is all about.

No point in being coy. Which game, out of interest?

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No point in being coy. Which game, out of interest?

Sure, it was about the latest version of Hackmaster from Kenzer & Company.

edit: I had a few issues with the book, but this illustrates the gist of how they approach things:

0x7J0.png

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My only issue with Anita Sarkeesian is that she is very extreme in her views. Everything seems to count as disparaging towards women. Going through many videos on her website Feminist Frequency has just left me feel like she tends to nitpick the tiniest shows and media and glorify them rather than concentrate on bigger picture issues. Calling "Baby, It's Cold Outside" a song that "continues to promote rape culture" just makes me never want to listen to her ever, just because that's so over the top.

That all being said, no one in their right mind should attack or threaten her for having a Kickstarter for simply wanting to put her views and analyzations out in video form. Many people will find them interesting and it makes people (mainly silly boys), who disagree with her look like caveman thugs.

My coworker and sometimes boss who is very much a feminist and thinks a lot about women in video games puts it in better perspective for what I agree with: that there just aren't enough games targeting strong women who are main characters, not that ever targeting males with sexy women is overly harmful. Just lack of balance it seems really.

So in Anita's video I feel like her showing the sexy curvy fairies in Rayman Origins kind of shows how I would imagine it should be. Michel Ancel wanted some sexy fairies in that game in particular. However I think Ly in Rayman 2 and Jade in Beyond Good Evil are both strong female characters who are not really eye candy, so I think he balances it out much more by doing one or the other.

Anyway, rambling. Feminism is definitely a subject I'm ill equipped to handle though.

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A song where a woman doesn't want to sleep with a man, and has said no, so he keeps trying to get her drunk, and it's implied he might have spiked her drink, isn't extremely skeezy? I'm going to watch a bunch of videos from her site to see if I agree with you. I suspect not though. I think it's easy for a lot of people to confuse rape and rape culture with each other. This piece is really excellent:

In other words, rape culture refers neither to physical locations where rape is deemed likely to occur, does occur and/or has occurred, nor to the specific details of particular rapes: rather, it refers to a culture – that is, a set of values, beliefs, rituals, social codes, language, laws and art – which can be said to promote sexual violence, and particularly sexual violence against women as perpetrated by straight men. Note that this argument neither automatically nor universally implies the existence of a direct causal link between specific cultural artifacts and incidences of rape (though this is certainly possible); nor does it contend that every participant in that culture is or must be a rapist. What it does describe is a culture where rape is trivialized, where both the abuse and sexual objectification of women is normalised, and where, as a result, the sexual abuse of women is more likely to happen.

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I was actually of the opinion always that that Penny Arcade comic strip was pretty dumb (it's a shit comic in general), so I see the rape culture part in that case. The way Gabe and Tycho handled it was even more lame in all of that business. But on the Christmas song, I always read that particular lyric in question meaning more that the woman was given a strong drink instead of a spiked drink, or a date rape drug as Anita suggests, especially considering when it was written. There are just way worse things to concentrate on, like the Penny Arcade conflict described in your link (way beyond the stupid comic strip in question).

In the same video she goes over the Mariah Carrey Christmas song as being about every woman needing a man to complete their life and then showing a bunch of posters for romantic comedies promoting this seems like even more of a stretch to me. If anything most romantic comedies are just about people getting together and the end, not that their life is magically fulfilled until the end, male or female. Besides, people want to love and it significantly tends to improve your life when you're with someone (healthily of course). However for health reasons, I don't endorse listening to Mariah Carrey.

Then there's the thing about the siren seductress villian she gets all up in arms because it portrays women as manipulative. I feel like she can pick out a bunch of movies and shows with this trope, a lot of lazy shows especially, but does it really matter if a villian is portrayed this way? Doesn't seem like it's promoting women to seem manipulative to me. If anything almost any villian in any form seems to have some degree of manipulation at hand.

Then she goes over things like Married With Children and it's kind of like... well yeah, obviously. Who even likes that show anyway? Who is even influenced in life by that awful garbage? Seems like time would be better spent on criticizing things people actually enjoy and seeing where they could have improved.

My main concern with her is also she never focuses on good examples on the videos I've seen so far. Everything is so negative and there's always some grasping at straws in my opinion.

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Yeah I watched a few videos on her site and they were rather hit and miss for me. Some of them definitely made good points but some of them did seem like an overreach. The Christmas song video you've mentioned was one that had elements of both - I actually do consider Baby, It's Cold Outside super creepy, but the other example of All I Want for Christmas was totally bizarre to me. I didn't really see anything sexist in that song at all, and its lyrics fit with how I have felt about women in the past. People of both genders canwant to disregard other thoughts and needs for the sake of romance sometimes, that is much more of a fact of humanity than anything to do with a patriarchal society in my opinion. By contrast, her video about the Oscars and the Bechdel Test was very interesting in terms of her comments about how a female-centric story isn't necessarily a story with good female characters.

Still, a little more awareness of how feminism interacts with the games industry is unlikely to be a bad thing.

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Having watched a bunch of videos, that Christmas songs one is by far the weakest. I wouldn't describe her views as extreme though.

Edit: In some videos, I find her stretching a little, but often the criticism I think of is the thing she then talks about next.

"Baby it's cold outside" is super skeezy. The expression "slip someone a mickey" dates back to well before the song was written, and even if that line is interpreted as the best case of a man trying to get a woman really drunk so her resistance will break down and he can fuck her… that's still creepy. Manipulating people into doing things they don't want to is a non-trivial thing to do to others, and never just a bit of fun.

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Jesus Christ. "Baby it's Cold Outside" is a rape culture song? Really?

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I cannot interpret the Bob Marley/UB40/whoever song 'Girl, I want to make you sweat' as anything else than a song about a psychopath that seduces and then rapes a girl he is singlesidedly in love with.

Choice lyrics: Girl, I want to make you sweat,

Sweat 'til you can't sweat no more,

And if you cry,

I'm gonna push it some more

Every time it's on the radio, singing these lyrics in incredibly happy ways, it weirds me out. Fortunately, I hate the horrible bullshit reggae that is UB40, and don't care for Bob Marley, so I don't mind nailing them to the wall.

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"Baby it's cold outside" is super skeezy. The expression "slip someone a mickey" dates back to well before the song was written, and even if that line is interpreted as the best case of a man trying to get a woman really drunk so her resistance will break down and he can fuck her… that's still creepy. Manipulating people into doing things they don't want to is a non-trivial thing to do to others, and never just a bit of fun.

I guess that's the thing, I always interpreted the song as the woman being coy rather than not wanting to be outright be with the man. I mean, I could very well be wrong but it didn't seem that extreme. *shrug*

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It's not having an opinion GONE MAD!!!!, it's not a song about rape; it is a song that reflects an element of rape culture, which is that oblique references to reducing a woman's ability to resist advances are considered funny or harmless. It's not such a stretch to say that. Let us end this derail.

Then she goes over things like Married With Children and it's kind of like... well yeah, obviously. Who even likes that show anyway? Who is even influenced in life by that awful garbage? Seems like time would be better spent on criticizing things people actually enjoy and seeing where they could have improved.

My dad likes that show. :(

He would always watch it when it came on while we were having dinner, and it always made me uncomfortable but thought surely my dad knew better than I, a kid, because he was my hero. Shit like that being normalized made me not realize a lot of things that were wrong with the world until many years later.

He still likes it.

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It's not having an opinion GONE MAD

Who said it was?
it's not a song about rape;it is a song that reflects an element of rape culture, which is that oblique references to reducing a woman's ability to resist advances are considered funny or harmless. It's not such a stretch to say that. Let us end this derail.

Well, I'm not sure I agree, and it sounds like somewhat of a stretch to me, but okay, derail averted.

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I didn't see the other thread so I posted in this one. Sorry to have accidentally reopened a can of something if I did!

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Sure, it was about the latest version of Hackmaster from Kenzer & Company.

edit: I had a few issues with the book, but this illustrates the gist of how they approach things:

0x7J0.png

64% of all illegitimate births as a result of rape. And if I'm reading this correctly, 84% of all half-hobgoblins and 94% of all half-orcs?

what the-

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64% of all illegitimate births as a result of rape. And if I'm reading this correctly, 84% of all half-hobgoblins and 94% of all half-orcs?

what the-

wow, how does half-hobgoblin and half-orc society even function in any way

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wow, how does half-hobgoblin and half-orc society even function in any way

Osmosis.

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wow, how does half-hobgoblin and half-orc society even function in any way

Perhaps they have barely any extra-marital births, and the proportions therefore all represent infinitesimal numbers.

Or perhaps that chart is incredibly creepy, after all.

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64% of all illegitimate births as a result of rape. And if I'm reading this correctly, 84% of all half-hobgoblins and 94% of all half-orcs?

what the-

If your mom wasn't raped, she was a whore, she was an adulterer, or she abandoned you. Most of the defense I saw about this when I brought it up was that it served the gritty "realism" (or verisimilitude, a word loved by rape-apologist grognards everywhere) of the setting. Meanwhile, I don't see how this is realistic. What about plain old unplanned pregnancy, and why is it weighted like that?

If your gaming group wants to get into the intricacies of how half-orcs are made, then they can use their imaginations. I could even imagine it being an interesting and safe thing to explore for the right group (I can also imagine what it would be like to be an astronaut). But, it shouldn't be staring you in the face in a chart that everyone is probably going to see when making a character.

It's insensitive at the very least, and further, it has a creepy undercurrent that suggests an unhealthy attitude toward women.

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What the fuck is a Gnome Titan? Isn't that an oxymoron?

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What the fuck is a Gnome Titan? Isn't that an oxymoron?

Hackmaster started out as a joke game, based on a nerd comic strip, so it has a lot of goofy shit. The first edition was essentially a parody of D&D... which makes the creepy shit stand out even more.

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Oh if it's a joke then gnome titan makes more sense.

I have no comment on anything else in this thread. Jus' readin'.

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