"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Problem Machine]

On the other hand, I guess if you ban this one game, where then do you draw the line, who gets to decide where that line is drawn, etc.

Also, as has been pointed out by others on Twitter, Valve has already drawn this line by deciding not to carry sexually explicit games. That Hatred gets a pass while those still get held back says a lot about our culture.

[Bjorn]

Quite frankly I'd rather see sexually explicit games on Steam than Hatred. The dissonance between our fear of sex but love of violence is something that constantly pisses me off.

[Zeusthecat]

The dissonance between our fear of sex but love of violence is something that constantly pisses me off.

 

I think we have the Bible to thank for that dichotomy.

[Brodie]

I think we have the Bible to thank for that dichotomy.

 

quoted for truth.

[Justin Leego]

I'm asking because I genuinely don't know, but is it a dichotomy present in Jewish culture also?

[Mangela Lansbury]

Yes and no. Depends on which part of the Jewish diaspora you're talking about. If you mean Israeli culture, the answer is pretty much yes. Compulsory service in the IDF and a broad political and cultural conservatism probably has something to do with that.

[Undeadpool]

I think we have the Bible to thank for that dichotomy.

 

quoted for truth.

Not terribly. People talk about a "puritanical" view on sex, and sure the Puritans had some backward-ass ideas, but they also believed in being open about sex with kids and wild ideas like: if a woman doesn't orgasm during conception, the children are more likely to be born with birth defects, or generally be weak and sickly.

 

A lot of the "modern" view of sex, and the role of women began in the 1950s, ebbed and flowed through the '60s and '70s, then took a large, large downturn in the 1990s. Too many people in positions of power believed the "problem" of female portrayal in the media was solved after the glorious tropes of 90s pop culture, so they flat-out stopped trying, but now I'm off on something of a tangent.

 

I guess my main point is that, much like religion is the shortest path to making groups of people act stupidly, blaming religion itself for people acting stupidly is something of a shortest path itself.

[Zeusthecat]

Not terribly. People talk about a "puritanical" view on sex, and sure the Puritans had some backward-ass ideas, but they also believed in being open about sex with kids and wild ideas like: if a woman doesn't orgasm during conception, the children are more likely to be born with birth defects, or generally be weak and sickly.

 

But I imagine they weren't too keen on the whole "sex out of wedlock" stuff which I think is one of the biggest driving factors behind the prevailing view about sex today. No matter how you slice it, I think people's interpretation of the Bible is what primarily drives almost all negative views of sex in our culture. If you are claiming there is some other cultural influence that is responsible for these views, I would be curious to know what you think they are.

 

Anecdotally, growing up my mom was very open about sex and all of that stuff and we were very religious. But it was very clear that this was only acceptable between two married people and any sexually suggestive media and whatnot was bad because it encouraged sex out of wedlock and unclean thoughts and all that bullshit.

[Ben X]

Not terribly. People talk about a "puritanical" view on sex, and sure the Puritans had some backward-ass ideas, but they also believed in being open about sex with kids and wild ideas like: if a woman doesn't orgasm during conception, the children are more likely to be born with birth defects, or generally be weak and sickly.

 

I know I'm ignoring your larger point here, but it sounds like you think that whole 'non-orgasmic-conception = birth-defects' idea is forward-thinking ie correct and awesome..?

[Griddlelol]

I know I'm ignoring your larger point here, but it sounds like you think that whole 'non-orgasmic-conception = birth-defects' idea is forward-thinking ie correct and awesome..?

 

I'm not sure that's correct...at all. Orgasms have been shown to increase the likelihood of conception, but have nothing to do with the genetic make-up of the child. I might be missing your point but y'know...

[Ben X]

I do not think that idea is forward-thinking, correct or awesome, but it sounded like Undeadpool does think that so I was asking for clarification on his position!

[Justin Leego]

Well, he did say it was a wild idea after all. Another interpretation might be that it was placing importance upon a woman's experience of sex rather than envisioning her merely as a passive receptacle or child manufacturing unit? I don't know.

[Ben X]

I'm not sure women feel empowered to be told that if they don't orgasm while conceiving, their child is more likely to be disabled...

[Nachimir]

Thankfully Amazon already appear to have nuked it into a 404, but someone started selling an ebook of thinly veiled rape fantasies about Zoe Quinn

 

I was only slightly pleased to see it getting dozens of one star reviews reading "It's about ethics in game journalism".

[Dewar]

*fart*

 

http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6859671-GamerGate-Recommends

[itsamoose]

*fart*

 

http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6859671-GamerGate-Recommends

 

Man reading those comments is so frustrating.  They do this thing where they say that something is OK because of some inherent quality of a person (for example a woman is the animator, therefore female representations are fine), but then cite some critic's gender as a means to discredit them.  Does anyone have any idea of the relative age of these participants?  I only ask because the things they say are the kind of things I would have probably seen as wisdom in my teens.

[James]

I mean, they could have at least used vaguer language to dance around it all being about women.

[Cleinhun]

I don't understand how that is a defensible position, but I guess gamergate does. 

[tegan]

At least Feminist Frequency started their own Steam Curation list like last week.

[Bjorn]

At least Feminist Frequency started their own Steam Curation list like last week.

 

I noticed that this week, and followed it. I just followed a bunch of curators to try and filter out TB and some other folk from being the default curators Steam shows me when I look at a game's page.

[Pepyri]

So apparently Jimmy Wales said something pretty great, and uh, here it is:

 

Hi [name],
I’m happy to inform you that our current fundraiser is the most successful in our entire history.
But there’s something deeper that is wrong with your argument – Wikipedia is not for sale, not to any donors, so even if donations were dropping, that would not mean to me that we should compromise on our principles of quality and neutrality in response to a pressure group.
My point here is not to say that there is nothing wrong with the article – I actually think it needs a fair amount of work. But I want you and others to understand that threatening people is not helpful.
I’ve recently seen web pages in which people who are – and I don’t know how else to put it – vicious assholes – are gathering data to attack the personal lives of volunteers. It is very difficult for me to buy into the notion that gamergate is “really about ethics in journalism” when every single experience I have personally had with it involved pro-gg people insulting, threatening, doxxing, etc.
No, not all pro-gg people. But there’s a huge contingent to the extent that for good people – and I respect your letter and assume good faith that you are a good person – the name “gamer gate” is toxic.
Even if 90% of the supporters are good and 10% are bad, the bad are poisoning the message for everyone. That’s not an evaluation of right and wrong, just an observation of a clear fact.
You see, a big part of the problem is that #gamergate is not a movement, but a hashtag. And so there is literally no way to have any quality control of any kind. There is no way to see what is or is not a position of gamergate.
I have had several people over the past weeks say to me “It is not about mysogyny.” I was prepared to believe that. But discussions usually very quickly move to attacking a female game developer for events surrounding her personal life. That’s sick.
The contingent of people who are interested in putting pressure on institutions within game journalism to expose corruption need an actual organization – with a mission statement, with a board of directors, with elected people who represent the movement. Barring that, you should very much expect the media to continue to accurately report that the Gamergate community is associated with online harassment and misogyny. But actually, in fact, it is.
I know that may pain you to hear. You thought you were taking part in a movement that would be about ethics in journalism. A movement that would stand for the rights of all gamers. That would welcome women into the world of gaming and would shame those who would engage in personal attacks on the basis of gender. I admire all of those things.
But #gamergate has been permanently tarnished and highjacked by a handful of people who are not what you would hope.
You might not be the person to lead it. I don’t know who is. But I strongly recommend that someone organize a “gamer’s union” of sorts, with a real mission statement, with real rules, with real organization and leadership.
Bitching and moaning on a twitter hashtag is getting you nowhere, particularly for the reasons I have outlined in this note.
–Jimmy Wales

 

You can view what begat that response here: https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/545801519782977536/photo/1

[Undeadpool]

But I imagine they weren't too keen on the whole "sex out of wedlock" stuff which I think is one of the biggest driving factors behind the prevailing view about sex today. No matter how you slice it, I think people's interpretation of the Bible is what primarily drives almost all negative views of sex in our culture. If you are claiming there is some other cultural influence that is responsible for these views, I would be curious to know what you think they are.

 

Anecdotally, growing up my mom was very open about sex and all of that stuff and we were very religious. But it was very clear that this was only acceptable between two married people and any sexually suggestive media and whatnot was bad because it encouraged sex out of wedlock and unclean thoughts and all that bullshit.

And I'm not even religious and was raised secular, I just think that blaming religion for all of modern society's ills, or even the majority of them, is reductive and often used a smokescreen for a form of intellectual elitism coupled with laziness. People have begun to conflate merely NOT believing in God (or whatever else) with critical thinking. Whereas belief or not, thought without CRITICAL thought tends to be incredibly dangerous. 

 

And honestly? My business partner is about 15 years older than me and you wanna know one of the massive things that led to the current American view on sex? The misinformation and delusion around the AIDS epidemic. It sounds like a minor thing, but that event demonized sex to a massive extent. The path from "caution" to "full-on demonization" was so short that the culture HONESTLY has not recovered. I'm not saying that there's NO religious background to anti-sex crap, what I'm saying is that it's a lot more new than it at first seems.

 

 

I know I'm ignoring your larger point here, but it sounds like you think that whole 'non-orgasmic-conception = birth-defects' idea is forward-thinking ie correct and awesome..?

I wasn't presenting it as "correct and awesome" and I never actually said that, I was merely making the point that the Puritans weren't as backward and buttoned-up about sex as they're mostly portrayed as. I guess I'm saying contrast that with the idea in the 1980s and '90s that the female orgasm might be a MYTH, or that the MPAA won't even allow depictions of women enjoying sex without an R or NC-17 rating.

 

Well, he did say it was a wild idea after all. Another interpretation might be that it was placing importance upon a woman's experience of sex rather than envisioning her merely as a passive receptacle or child manufacturing unit? I don't know.

 

I'm not sure women feel empowered to be told that if they don't orgasm while conceiving, their child is more likely to be disabled...

See above. I wasn't saying much of anything about how women should or shouldn't feel about it, I'm talking about their view toward sex. I never said "Everything about this is correct," I was just pointing it out to contrast pure sex, not gender roles, of then VS now.

 

Edit: I get that a lot of this thread has been about sexism, and rightly so, and I also get that I might be coming off a little more defensively than I'm either meaning to or should, and I get that on a LOT of internet message boards that means I'm overcompensating, but in this case I'm just feeling a bit piled-on. Again: I'm not saying the Puritans were 100% correct, ESPECIALLY in their views on women. These are people who had witch trials (which has a weird resurgence in modern pop culture), I was just taking an example of how strong religious belief doesn't always equate to extremely regressive sexual politics, though there's also an argument to be made that the two shouldn't be separated.

 

At the same time: It WASN'T a wild idea at the time, but oddly if you ask modern media examples, the idea of a woman orgasming being a regular thing still IS a wild idea.

[Bjorn]

The misinformation and delusion around the AIDS epidemic. It sounds like a minor thing, but that event demonized sex to a massive extent. The path from "caution" to "full-on demonization" was so short that the culture HONESTLY has not recovered. I'm not saying that there's NO religious background to anti-sex crap, what I'm saying is that it's a lot more new than it at first seems.

 

I was coming of age around the height of AIDS fear, and I clearly remember the message being essentially, "Sex will kill you.  Better wait for marriage."  It was a crazy time to be going through sex ed and learning about sex.  Like, we were in rural fucking Kansas, and they treated AIDS like it was an epidemic that was going to sweep through town any day. 

 

That said, I do tend to agree that the conservative religious element tends to be pervasive in the US.  Like even in the AIDS example, part of the reason for the misinformation, delusion and fear campaigns is because conservative religious folk opposed to sexual freedom used all those tools to try and make people afraid of sex and to demonize gay men. 

 

But then you can look back on stuff like female hysteria, which as far as I know was not driven by any particularly religious angle.  There were probably male doctors who were influenced by their own religion, but science and doctors managed to be pretty shitty and regressive all on their own in that case. 

 

Also, I totally got the point you were making about Puritans and their interest in women orgasming. 

[BadHat]

*fart*

 

http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6859671-GamerGate-Recommends

 

They could at least get their facts straight, since, you know, gamergate is all about the facts.

 

 

The artist wasn't harassed, a bunch of people contacted the developer about it and the artist's boss decided to tell him to change it based on feedback. I guess in gamergate's twisted world that constitutes "self-censorship"?

 

At least Feminist Frequency started their own Steam Curation list like last week.

 

Followed! I honestly don't check curators too much any more but I just wanted to throw my number in as a small gesture, considering the amount of "lol feminism" groups on the curator list already.

 

Social Justice Wario was already pretty great, too.

[Undeadpool]

I was coming of age around the height of AIDS fear, and I clearly remember the message being essentially, "Sex will kill you.  Better wait for marriage."  It was a crazy time to be going through sex ed and learning about sex.  Like, we were in rural fucking Kansas, and they treated AIDS like it was an epidemic that was going to sweep through town any day. 

 

That said, I do tend to agree that the conservative religious element tends to be pervasive in the US.  Like even in the AIDS example, part of the reason for the misinformation, delusion and fear campaigns is because conservative religious folk opposed to sexual freedom used all those tools to try and make people afraid of sex and to demonize gay men. 

 

But then you can look back on stuff like female hysteria, which as far as I know was not driven by any particularly religious angle.  There were probably male doctors who were influenced by their own religion, but science and doctors managed to be pretty shitty and regressive all on their own in that case. 

 

Also, I totally got the point you were making about Puritans and their interest in women orgasming. 

Precisely! (also glad you got my point) I grew up as a kind of bridging Gen-X/Millennial (born in the 80s to two parents in their mid-30s who had both been very different parts of "free love" and major progressive movements) and, as a result, my sex ed was kind of bridging the gap too. More was known about AIDS, but we still had speakers coming into our schools telling us "If you see blood, DON'T TOUCH IT! It might have AIDS" and that's BARELY hyperbolic.

 

I 100% endorse the notion that right-wing religious movements had a HUGE impact on how we did and do perceive sex in this country as a society, my point simply was that stopping the conversation there is reductive, lazy and a little dangerous. Also: I fear I am threadjacking unintentionally (usually you pay double for that action) from what is a legitimate discussion going on, so I'd personally like to wind this down with this post...