Jump to content
Roderick

Feminism

Recommended Posts

Does Hearthstone count as its own franchise or as part of Warcraft?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I was under the impression that the "lore" of Hearthstone was that it's a card came that exists within the WoW universe. Like if Magic: the Gathering had cards based off real world celebrities. But now we're getting off topic.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I was under the impression that the "lore" of Hearthstone was that it's a card came that exists within the WoW universe. Like if Magic: the Gathering had cards based off real world celebrities. But now we're getting off topic.

 

I really hope that is true.  That's such a funny/fun idea.

 

On a creepy side note, I live in Davis too!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What made me never want to buy the comic book:

 

http://www.themarysue.com/mad-max-furiosa-mark-sexton-women-captivity/

 

I generally don't like Ana Mardoll's take on anything and she even got into it with me on twitter about my feelings on Mad Max and went off on some weird tangent about Max's benevolence. I don't think incisive media crit is actually a strong suit of hers. Nonetheless, I have no interest in a comic that graphically depicts rape and bodily submission in that way. See? Nailed my feelings on it in 2 sentences. 

 

Heh, that's the article where I originally heard about the comic. I don't recall where I turned up Ana's one (I thought it might have been the comments) but yeah, I guess everyone was right that it's pretty flimsy in places. I don't think I was reading it critically so much as just enjoying watching a terrible thing be eviscerated.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Does Hearthstone count as its own franchise or as part of Warcraft?

 

The characters and abilities come from Warcraft, but much like how World of Warcraft and Warcraft 1-3 share some lore, they are still two different genre of games, with separate franchises and audiences. Many people will overlap but you can play all three without having to play the other two. Hearthstone is an online CCG, WoW is a MMORPG, and Warcraft is an RTS. They made Hearthstone as an internal project but it got very popular so they fleshed it out for public consumption. Then they retroactively added tiny little touches of it to World of Warcraft to make it "in-universe" but the genesis was not WoW, originally. 

 

Also I counted wrong, there's six franchises, my bad! (Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft and Diablo)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

On the E3 thing, that reminded me of something that happened at work recently. We have this demo coming up and and some of the people on the selection committee are female. So some of the higher ups in our group decided that we should bring one of our female team members along to show better representation. However, when one of our female team members was asked, she got pretty offended because she felt like we were only asking her to come because of her gender, not because her skill set was a good match for what we are trying to show. And I totally agree with her and think she had every right to feel that way.

So what do you do in that type of situation? Do you include a female team member (whether it's the E3 stuff or my situation) just because she's female or do you only do so if that person is the most qualified person to cover that material? It seems like it can be kind of sticky either way and I'm not sure I understand the best way to go about making these decisions.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I totally understand why some women believe that they are only being rewarded because of their gender and not based on merit, because I have also felt that way. My response to that sensation is reminding myself that this is just what society by default does with straight white men. Picking women because they are women and you want to have better representation is no more different than picking men because society unconsciously favors men. It sucks that women or POC are constantly questioning their credentials while white men get to go around believing they got to where they are solely because of merit, but that's the reality of our unbalanced society.

 

Again, I really empathize with the woman on your team, but I wouldn't let her hesitancy convince you to not invite women as presenters. This stuff will only get fixed when underrepresented groups are convinced that they are worth more than their tokenism, and that will only happen when those groups are more present in public spaces. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks Argobot, that's a solid response and I think you're right. It sucks that our industry is so male dominated and that we don't just have an equal number of qualified women so this wouldn't even be an issue. I would love to bring your perspective up to her but I'm really hesitant to try to convince her to look at it another way. Being a dude and all it would feel kind of wrong.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So the Internet, even the progressive thoughtful elements of it, are being all sorts of self-congratulatory about taking the wood to EL James on Twitter.  Fine, some people hate the Grey books and they deserve to be criticized.  But just under the veneer of witty snark is the typical cesspool of hate that coalesces around any successful woman on Twitter, with the misogynistic slurs and seething hate men have for outspoken women.  By celebrating the snark, it seems that people are also silently endorsing the rabid hate that came along with it. 

 

Congratulations witty, hipster feminists, for one day you've found something you can ally with the misogynists over.  Hating another woman.

 

 

 

 

This shit is all fucking over my Facebook feed, and most of it being posted by the most rabid feminists I know.  It's kinda fucked and got me a bit irritated.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Man, kind of sad to see some people I really like, like Andrew Vestal, on that list. I'm with you, here, Bjorn. I'm totally down with criticizing somebody's work. Bombarding them on Twitter with a bunch of lame jokes seems pretty petty, though.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It's definitely immature, she told the internet to ask her questions, and people started asking slightly wittier versions of "Why do you suck so much?". Regarding hateful internet misogyny, I think I disagree with your premise though. I scanned a few hundred tweets under the hashtag and almost every non-meta tweet I saw was addressing either a specific flaw of the book, or asking generally "Why is your book so bad / Why are you such a bad writer?". There were a handful that were just being silly or otherwise off-topic: "How are babies made?", and I saw exactly one that seemed like the kind of internet bile you're talking about: "You know nothing, EL James." Everything other than that one tweet stayed within the bounds of insulting her as an incompetent author, not as a bad human.

 

What exactly is the rabid hate you think this snark is endorsing?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It's definitely immature, she told the internet to ask her questions, and people started asking slightly wittier versions of "Why do you suck so much?". Regarding hateful internet misogyny, I think I disagree with your premise though. I scanned a few hundred tweets under the hashtag and almost every non-meta tweet I saw was addressing either a specific flaw of the book, or asking generally "Why is your book so bad / Why are you such a bad writer?". There were a handful that were just being silly or otherwise off-topic: "How are babies made?", and I saw exactly one that seemed like the kind of internet bile you're talking about: "You know nothing, EL James." Everything other than that one tweet stayed within the bounds of insulting her as an incompetent author, not as a bad human.

 

What exactly is the rabid hate you think this snark is endorsing?

 

I didn't do an exacting search, but I did take the hashtag and searched within it for common things like cunt, bitch, whore, fat, ugly, etc., and the kind of hate you expect a woman to get on Twitter is definitely there (along with lots of uses of those words that are not directed at James, but at her fans, or her detractors, or her characters).  And lord fucking knows what kinds of DMs people are trying to send her.  How big of a percentage is is of the overall volume?  Fuck if I know.  But it's there, and no one celebrating the snark is talking about that at all.

 

I also have some pretty ambiguous feelings about the hate the Grey books get in general.  We can explore that if you'd like, I'm not sure if we've ever tackled that in this thread or not.  But I honestly suspect that a lot of the criticism and hate that James gets is both unfair and significantly out of proportion of what similar media creators have received.  And I think the reason behind that is that she is a woman (and not conventionally attractive) who is writing about sex for an audience that is mostly middle aged women.  I have a lot of skepticism about the criticism she gets. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Was looking around for some other reactions to this, and found a series of responses from other erotic writers about the spectacle of the Twitter Q&A.  I find myself agreeing with a lot of what they had to say:
 

The #AskELJames Twitter chat was a perfect example of mob mentality at work, made worse by the anonymity of social media. I witnessed a woman being ripped to shreds on a public forum. Her crime? She had the audacity to write a book that was less than a literary masterpiece, get it published, and become a raging success. How dare she!

 

We would never bully someone for being gay, or being poor, or not having the perfect body. If someone bullied a kid in our neighborhood or a co-worker, we would stand up for those being bullied. But when a creative person makes something that we don’t like or whose work we disagree with, we jump right onto the bullying train, as if being a creative person makes you less than human.

 

As an erotica writer, I would hate for my moral character to be judged based on a fictional character I created in one of my stories. Some of my players can be quite brutal. That doesn’t mean that I want to go out and brutalize anyone. We authors will know when we’ve made it when erotica is truly legitimized, when it is treated as an equal to mystery, sci-fi, horror, etc. Look at Rob Zombie or Quentin Tarantino. Nobody thinks that either of those directors/writers are mass murderers—killers. Yet, exclusively their films portray exploitive, gruesome scenes of murder and mayhem. I think it’s silly that there are people out there who think EL James personally condones or endorses ‘violence against women.’

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Having searched for the hashtag plus certain hateful words, I now see what you were talking about. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I saw virtually no hate in my search of just the hashtag. I searched mostly the most recent tweets, so maybe it was more hateful yesterday than today? Seems unlikely. I'd need to do a more thorough survey and make sure my sample was sound, but I have a theory that the hate on that hashtag is just the background radiation of the internet: Twitter is that bilious on average, the hashtag isn't drawing any bile in particular.

 

I tried to avoid discussing the validity of the criticism because that seemed like a tangent, but it is a discussion I'd be interested in having. I actually firmly defend the books (on the grounds of subject matter, writing quality is a different issue). The books depict an abusive relationship, but I wouldn't say they endorse it, except insofar as the narrative implicitly endorses it by giving it a happy ending. That's the same level of endorsement as every violent videogаme. And by violent I don't mean "Blood splatters and chainsaw swords", I mean any Video game in which situations are resolved through violence, even sprite-based JRPGs or RTSs. I think you're only allowed to have as much of a problem with 50 Shades as you have with violence in videogаmes. That's not to say you're not allowed to have a problem, there's a valid argument to be made that both videogаmes and 50 Shades strongly endorse their subject matter and that's bad, but I think it's internally inconsistent to say that one is bad and not the other.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Having searched for the hashtag plus certain hateful words, I now see what you were talking about. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I saw virtually no hate in my search of just the hashtag. I searched mostly the most recent tweets, so maybe it was more hateful yesterday than today? Seems unlikely. I'd need to do a more thorough survey and make sure my sample was sound, but I have a theory that the hate on that hashtag is just the background radiation of the internet: Twitter is that bilious on average, the hashtag isn't drawing any bile in particular.

 

I'm not sure that matters, even if that hate was just the kind of normal, average hate James or any popular hashtag attracts, I think it's still weird for otherwise progressive people to revel in a dogpile on someone, but particularly a woman. 

 

 

I tried to avoid discussing the validity of the criticism because that seemed like a tangent, but it is a discussion I'd be interested in having. I actually firmly defend the books (on the grounds of subject matter, writing quality is a different issue). The books depict an abusive relationship, but I wouldn't say they endorse it, except insofar as the narrative implicitly endorses it by giving it a happy ending. That's the same level of endorsement as every violent videogаme. And by violent I don't mean "Blood splatters and chainsaw swords", I mean any video game in which situations are resolved through violence, even sprite-based JRPGs or RTSs. I think you're only allowed to have as much of a problem with 50 Shades as you have with violence in videogаmes. That's not to say you're not allowed to have a problem, there's a valid argument to be made that both videogаmes and 50 Shades strongly endorse their subject matter and that's bad, but I think it's internally inconsistent to say that one is bad and not the other.

 

I think we are more or less on the same page here.  I've never read them, but the lady has (and seen the movie).  She's unabashedly a fan of smut and genre fiction.  Her opinion is that the quality is not significantly different than the early works of many other authors in those fields, that the primary difference is the popularity of 50 Shades versus other books.  She also didn't find the content particularly out of line with other smut, or even with the writings you might find on BDSM sites.  She's pointed out to friends that they have "Loved" short pieces of fiction on FetLife that are more violent and contain less consent than 50 Shades, but then those same people have turned around and lambasted James.  Similar to your comparison with violent video games, her experience even with the kink community has been one where people have just set completely different, and seemingly arbitrary, standards for 50 Shades that other media are not held to.  The fascinating thing is the variety of directions that the criticisms of James have come from.  She has very few allies or defenders outside of her fan base. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not sure that matters, even if that hate was just the kind of normal, average hate James or any popular hashtag attracts, I think it's still weird for otherwise progressive people to revel in a dogpile on someone, but particularly a woman. 

 

My thinking was that if the hashtag is not attracting bile above the level of background radiation, then participating in the hashtag isn't silently endorsing rabid hate any more than participating in Twitter is silently endorsing rabid hate, since it happens at the same rate on Twitter in general.

 

I think we are more or less on the same page here.  I've never read them, but the lady has (and seen the movie).  She's unabashedly a fan of smut and genre fiction.  Her opinion is that the quality is not significantly different than the early works of many other authors in those fields, that the primary difference is the popularity of 50 Shades versus other books.  She also didn't find the content particularly out of line with other smut, or even with the writings you might find on BDSM sites.  She's pointed out to friends that they have "Loved" short pieces of fiction on FetLife that are more violent and contain less consent than 50 Shades, but then those same people have turned around and lambasted James.  Similar to your comparison with violent video games, her experience even with the kink community has been one where people have just set completely different, and seemingly arbitrary, standards for 50 Shades that other media are not held to.  The fascinating thing is the variety of directions that the criticisms of James have come from.  She has very few allies or defenders outside of her fan base. 

 

I think a lot of that comes from the perception that 50 Shades has been more successful than it deserves to be. Quality isn't perfectly correlated with success, but 50 Shades is way more successful than it is good (and that's not even calling it bad, it's so successful that there's a lot of room for it to be good, just not that good). To be cynical, that fills people with a spiteful desire to tear it down. To be only slightly less cynical, that fills people with a pedantic desire to tear it down: "No, it's terrible, and I need everyone to understand that."

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There's been a lot of decent feminist takedowns of her work from the standpoint that she's endorsing really unsafe and abusive BDSM practises in her books, not to mention just straight up abusive relationships. The larger issue is that this is one of the few books in the history of publishing to get this big that even comes remotely close to being that openly sexual and be directed at women. However, this is a larger issue with publishing and "chick lit." But I also don't think all criticism of her work is entirely misogynistic in nature - Stephanie Meyers came under fire in a similar way. Because women authors are very rarely breakout hits, and the ones that do are seemingly badly written and handle a lot of topics in a really problematic manner (J.K Rowling nonwithstanding but she is not considered a "solely woman oriented lit writer") 

 

What is even more interesting to me is less that EL James wrote a shitty smut book with horrible abusive tendencies, but that her and Cassie Claire have made a huge career of taking lightly changed fanfic and elevating it into genre lit and a huge career, with possible plagarism issues. (His Mortal Instruments is based on a Ginny/Draco fanfic, iirc. Both of them have huge swaths of burned bridges in the fandom communities they used to be a part of as well.)

 

But all of that stands against the fact that they get twice the criticism as other shitty male authors who also are successful. People get really upset when you criticize any male author ever. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

But all of that stands against the fact that they get twice the criticism as other shitty male authors who also are successful. People get really upset when you criticize any male author ever. 

 

And therein lies my discomfort with the type of shit that was going on yesterday with James.  I know there are valid criticisms of 50 Shades, but the generally gleeful meanness of a lot of it compared with the kind of criticism that other authors get just irks me.  I checked out of the Dresden Files forums quite awhile back, as even relatively mild criticism of his bumbling, insulting handling of homosexuality was met with rabid counterattacks. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think there's definitely a balance that can be struck between jumping on something just to jump on it and actually not pulling punches just because she's a woman author, yeah. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Philippa Warr of RPS gave a talk about how e-sports are not a meritocracy, and gave a concise rundown of some of the biggest obstacles holding women back from being able to compete at the highest level. My wife has recently gotten into DOTA in a big way which has been a lot of fun, but she is definitely understandably bummed about the rarity of women in the game. So we've been talking about these issues a ton lately. It is a really difficult problem to wrestle with!

 

Here's the talk:

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I miss her on Crate & Crowbar. Pip is the best!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Google image search for the first 30ish results for CEO (no bullshit, I just screen capped this)

 

 

post-33601-0-77035000-1436390306_thumb.jpg

 

Learned about that ridiculousness through a linked article in this WaPo piece about the sexism of Google's algorithm

 

The Ad Fisher team found that when Google presumed users to be male job seekers, they were much more likely to be shown ads for high-paying executive jobs. Google showed the ads 1,852 times to the male group — but just 318 times to the female group.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×