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Roderick

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 I mean, I honestly think that a large contingent of the actual trolls (shit-stirrers who don't have much allegiance to the actual substance, if there is any, of the argument) are actually children/teenagers with no historical context or experience even talking about anything. 

 

I kinda assumed this from the get go. I'm sure there are some 20-30 somethings in the group, but I like to believe most people are a little more rational and empathic by that age. 

 

I think the only way to stop the problem of threats and harassment in the short term is to make everything real name only. Give everyone accountability, rather and letting children and cowards hide behind a wall of anonymity and make threats. Obviously that's not a simple task - and I'm one of those people that hates giving out personal info on the internet - but I don't see a short term solution to it.

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One thing I see crop up quite often when Tropes vs. Women comes up is the idea that Anita Sarkeesian is out to "ruin video games" or "destroy" them or "attack the medium." What I don't understand about this idea (because it never gets elaborated on by the people who make the claim) is why? Or, what would happen if she did?

 

Let's say Anita successfully destroys video games, and you wake up the next day and go to the store and pick up the new Assassin's Creed. What are people worried that game is going to look like? What do these people think the industry would even look like, post-Sarkeesian-destruction?

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They're fearful for a God of War IV where you don't use a woman's body as a tool to keep a heavy door open for you, instead you have to use a stick or weapon like Kratos is some kind of peasant who can't command human sacrifices for his progress through a level.

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They're fearful for a God of War IV where you don't use a woman's body as a tool to keep a heavy door open for you, instead you have to use a stick or weapon like Kratos is some kind of peasant who can't command human sacrifices for his progress through a level.

 

I was thinking that they might not want to have to hold L3 to have their character lay in the mud so a woman can walk across their back. To keep her shoes clean.

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I wish there were more mainstream press covering this, because of what Sean said on the podcast about "what if that ended up on CNN?" and the like. Everyone who I've been telling about this situation who is less tuned in and more removed from games was absolutely baffled by all of it. Unfortunately I think mainstream press used up all of their credibility to cover this stuff way back when FOX news was showing video clips of exploding vans and talking about 4chan.

 

It kind of reminds me of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. Most comic fans like myself only remember Wertham for the ridiculous claims he made to demonize comics, like that Batman was turning kids gay; which is really unfortunate, because almost everything else the guy did is really important (like being pivotal in tearing down the institution of racially segregated schools), including some of the completely valid criticisms he leveled at comics that now can't be taken seriously by association (eg: comics were incredibly racist at the time, comics still give girls unrealistic body images, and comics tend to teach that strength is power and that  the only solution to a problem is through violence).

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I kinda assumed this from the get go. I'm sure there are some 20-30 somethings in the group, but I like to believe most people are a little more rational and empathic by that age. 

 

I think the only way to stop the problem of threats and harassment in the short term is to make everything real name only. Give everyone accountability, rather and letting children and cowards hide behind a wall of anonymity and make threats. Obviously that's not a simple task - and I'm one of those people that hates giving out personal info on the internet - but I don't see a short term solution to it.

 

That doesn't actually work, it turns out - people are still shits on Facebook, real name right on top of their posts. There's still no accountability.

 

I think there's a combination here: kids who believe that people like Anita and Zoe are the latest iteration of Jack Thompson and haven't realised that gaming fucking won and this is what it looks like when you don't have to fight any more; and MRAs/associated manosphere jackasses who believe that women being able to choose who they have sex with is coercive, and because of this see feminism as an agent of the status quo attempting to entrench inequality.

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Someone tried to 3D render that horrible Spiderwoman variant cover and oh boy are the results... well, the stuff of nightmares:

 

BwRwGGVCQAApv0E.jpg

 

Seeing that led me to this really interesting Tumblr where the the main point is he posts completely unrealistic drawings of women and the people submit "redraws" where they try to adapt or modify the art to actually fit human physiology. The most fascinating part is that if the goal is to make these drawings look really sexy, most of the redraws are pretty much just as conventionally attractive but manage to not contort the body or misrepresent how a body is formed.

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Hrm, I don't know, that's kind of dumb. I appreciate the idea, but the work is done so poorly it exaggerates the problem. The head in particular is a clear tell that whoever made that doesn't understand perspective, and that's the worst bit. And I mean the rendering. I feel like these divert from the actual problem.

If the poses were easier on the anatomy, I don't know if that would actually fix anything.

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I saw a screenshotted exchange between a journo and some troll where the journo asked the troll if Roger Ebert's relationship with Martin Scorcese made him any worse equipped to fairly cover his work. The troll responded with something like, "did Ebert review any more than two or three of Scorcese's works?" to which the journo responded "yes, and he wrote a whole book about him too" which seemed to boggle the mind of the troll. I mean, I honestly think that a large contingent of the actual trolls (shit-stirrers who don't have much allegiance to the actual substance, if there is any, of the argument) are actually children/teenagers with no historical context or experience even talking about anything. That particular anecdote is more appropriate to the ethics thread, but I think it also illustrates just how out of touch some of the trolls are and how uninterested they are in engaging with facts and reason.

 

This is really true.  I screenshotted this exchange I saw from Jeff Gerstmann's twitter feed that's kinda the same thing.  Two of these people are haranging Neil Cicierga after he mocks the whole "scandal", and one of them tries to invoke Jeff Gerstmann's name as some sort of evidence for the idea that bribery is commonplace in game reviews, and Jeff jumps in to burst this guy's bubble:

 

GExopSe.png

 

I just find that exchange amazing, from invoking Gerstmann just to have Gerstmann himself jump in and shoot it down, only to then post the Keighley Doritos image as surefire evidence of review bribery without any clue of who Keighley is or what he does.  It's like there's some other motivating factor behind being upset about "journalistic ethics" that has nothing to do with actual journalistic ethics.

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Hrm, I don't know, that's kind of dumb. I appreciate the idea, but the work is done so poorly it exaggerates the problem. The head in particular is a clear tell that whoever made that doesn't understand perspective, and that's the worst bit. And I mean the rendering. I feel like these divert from the actual problem.

If the poses were easier on the anatomy, I don't know if that would actually fix anything.

 

Oh, I didn't mean to say that he/she actually successfully rendered that pose, just that an attempt was humorous. I was using it more as a lead-in to that other site, which I think is far more interesting.

 

I think there's a direct link between objectification of women and not drawing/rendering them in a realistic fashion. That's not to say that if drawn anatomically all of those pictures would be a boon to women, but I think that if people drawing these things actually took a minute to think of the subjects of their drawings as actual human women they might not say "let's just show all of the arms and legs of a woman at once in this crazy pose just so show maximum skin". That might lead to something more progressive, where if you're not breaking the laws of nature to reveal maximum skin you might say "well maybe she could also be more clothed because that last idea was pretty ridiculous".

 

That may just be me being hopeful, but it's all I've got since I really have no greater insight into or experience with most art.

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So I'm finding myself grossed out by another web community I'm in, as they're sickeningly aligned against Sarkeesian. It's the same kinda crap people have talked about here already, like claiming the threats aren't real, that she's bad at having critical analysis, etc. But they never provide any counter-examples or evidence of what they claim.

 

The only thing that gives me comfort is that it's the 'usual suspects' for me, in that the people speaking about it tend to be contrarian on every topic. It's not even like some high brow trolling, just a serious personality defect.

 

Though one of them said, as 'evidence' that Sarkeesian is lying about the threats, she was followed home once by a guy. ... that's it btw. It was that, and an unspoken "therefore, Sarkeesian is lying."

 

God I'm so frustrated with people.

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She was once followed home by a guy... who would have been threatening had she noticed him because WHAT NON-THREATENING PERSON FOLLOWS A WOMAN WITHOUT HER KNOWING

 

fuuuuuu

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One thought I've been mulling over is the repeated idea (including in this thread) that a lot of this is driven by teen boys, which is a statement that makes me uncomfortable.  It feels a lot like trying to shift responsibility onto a demographic that is different than our own (a thank you to Tegan for sending me down this line of thought a few days ago after she pointed out me doing something like this in another thread).  We know where some of this comes from, the guys running the Patreon aren't kids (nor the people giving them money).  The people behind the FYC aren't kids (and claim to have senior women leaders who have been completely silent about their project jumping into the dogpile on a female developer).  We know that the ex-bf ain't a kid.  We know that the people who own and run things like 4chan, reddit and Twitter are grown ass adults who profit from the cultures they allow to thrive on their services.  Some of the people who are regular commenters on places like Joystiq or Kotaku aren't kids, because I've been watching some of those people post for 8+ years.  I know that the absolute worst, shitty, hateful misogynists I interacted with on the Bioware forums aren't kids, because some of those guys posted videos of themselves demoing BW stuff at cons.  JonTron isn't a kid. 

 

It's kind of how like some people don't see sexism because they are willfully blind to it.  We've got a ton of examples of how it isn't kids driving this behavior, and yet the refrain that it's teens continues (that Slate piece was all about addressing a child, not someone who might be a social peer).  I think for some, it's easier to try and shift responsibility for a lot of this to someone else rather than looking in the mirror and knowing that the people causing this bullshit are in fact an awful lot like us in terms of age, job, background, everything. 

 

Obviously not everyone thinks this, but it pops up often enough that it's worth addressing directly. 

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I want to make my position clear. I really don't think that anything is "driven" by teen boys. I just think that a lot of the signal boosting/echo chamber stuff that's happening on the other side is due to those kinds of trolls with no actual stakes in the very real discussion that's happening. I think that the message of "gaming is under attack" is most resonant to people with literally nothing else that they care about, namely young people. I think this is also why when you look at that anti-Anita Patreon, there aren't actually a lot of contributors despite how pervasive the people seem on Twitter.

 

This is not an attempt to reduce or shift the responsibility. It's more just me coming to terms with the fact that a lot of people who subtweet me out of the blue to take a shot at me or whoever I happen to be tweeting at for no reason are not actually reasonable because they actually don't care about the substance of their arguments. There is a specific segment of people who are co-opting this argument so they can play a game of their own choosing.

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Hrm, I don't know, that's kind of dumb. I appreciate the idea, but the work is done so poorly it exaggerates the problem. The head in particular is a clear tell that whoever made that doesn't understand perspective, and that's the worst bit. And I mean the rendering. I feel like these divert from the actual problem.

If the poses were easier on the anatomy, I don't know if that would actually fix anything.

 

My wife follows this thread despite not actually participating in the forums and she had a response that I thought was worth sharing -

 

Making the poses "easier on the anatomy" would actually be so wonderful. When I clicked on the tumblr link I wasn't really expecting to have any kind of reaction, but seeing the women redrawn to show real anatomical possibility moved me to tears because it instantly humanized them. When they are not human looking, the sexualization of their poses is easier for my brain to ignore, but when they are drawn like real people my brain instantly responds and sees the wrongdoing.
 
As a feminist woman, it was jarring for me to realize that I had been considering these anatomically impossible renderings of women in games and comics as throwaway garbage because my brain wasn't recognizing them as human beings.
 
Drawing women in sexist but POSSIBLE poses of course doesn't fix everything, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. If we portray women as real, possible people perhaps it will be easier for everyone to see them as such.

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One thought I've been mulling over is the repeated idea (including in this thread) that a lot of this is driven by teen boys, which is a statement that makes me uncomfortable. 

 

You make a good point, I guess its my instinct to assume it's teenagers because I don't see how anyone over that age can possibly be so immature and in most cases downright disgusting. Also the twitter conversations like the one above involving Jeff Gerstmann seem so incredibly childish. The replies like "What does he do then?" just screams child to me, since you know, anyone with any sense would have just used google instead of asking for the information from the person they're arguing with. 

 

I suppose most of the people I see doing the talking on forums or twitter all engage like a teenager would. Spelling mistakes, basic childish language, not doing any research (although I guess that's evident in the whole movement), logical fallacies coming out the ass, anime avatars.

 

Jon Tron is basically a teenager in every sense of the word, except the literal, chronological meaning. I don't actually know what he did, so I don't really want to comment on that, but his videos are totally adolescent, and aimed at that demographic.

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I think the word 'manchild' was invented for this purpose: they're not necessarily teenage boys, but they exhibit the thoughtlessness, self-absorption and occasional cruelty that is stereotypically associated with teenage boys.

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I can't stand that word because I've seen it applied to any male who likes video games and cartoons and is over the age of 18 (so basically me).

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I regularly refer to myself as a manchild! Because I live mocking myself.

But it is one of those overused words. "Dead to language," etc.

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Falling over laughing at this, tweeted by the same Mr. Fart that made the boycotting list:

 

BwYymkvCYAAcATP.jpg

 

 

This is really how these people see themselves. As liberators and guardians, not bullies who are angry because they think their toys are being taken away.

 

 

PSST! Guess which character in GotG wants to keep things pure, fights change, and wont make amends and alliances? I'll give you a hint, It's not the guys in the poster.

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I just can't believe people are still using "TORtanic." That pun stopped being funny after like five minutes.

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This is really how these people see themselves. As liberators and guardians, not bullies who are angry because they think their toys are being taken away.

 

PSST! Guess which character in GotG wants to keep things pure, fights change, and wont make amends and alliances? I'll give you a hint, It's not the guys in the poster.

 

It was only upon the second reading of your post that I realized this wasn't intentional satire by their opponents. How could they be so out of touch with the consequences of their actions?

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