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Tropes vs Women in Video Games

Started by Bludshot, December 06, 2012, 11:48:46 PM

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snabbott

This one is really disturbing to me, especially as I was unfamiliar with most of the games she talked about. I guess I'm familiar with the fridge damsel concept, though I had no idea how pervasive it was. The use of violence against women is a really cheap (i.e. not requiring any actual character/relationship/plot development) way of tapping into men's (can't speak for women) primal fear and bringing out rage. I can't imagine anything worse than something like that being done to my family. I liked how she pointed out that this has a cyclic effect of limiting men's perception of the options for dealing with such tragedy.

This episode was a lot less obvious than the first one, which is good. I don't know how original the ideas she presented are, but at least for me they were thought provoking.

Steve Abbott | Beta Tester | The Silver Lining

Bludshot

Concerning her appearance, I don't see how that is relevant. Her appearance in all of her videos is more or less the same, so I am willing to believe that is just how she dresses.
Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"

Blackthorne

#342
Her dress is very calculated, just as anyone would be when performing in public.  I didn't see it as any more manipulative as one wearing a suit to a business/job interview or wearing a tie-dye to a Phish concert.  I think she just likes to look well put together, and her attire is honestly very neutral.

Self edited easily misunderstood and ill timed joke

Bt
"You've got to keep one eye looking over your shoulder
you know it's going to get harder and harder as you
get older - but in the end you'll pack up, fly down south, hide your head in the sand.  Just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer." - Dogs, Pink Floyd.

Lambonius

Quote from: Blackthorne on May 29, 2013, 05:34:11 PM

Self edited easily misunderstood and ill timed joke

Bt

Awww...I like easily misunderstood and ill-timed jokes.  :(

br305893

#344
Quote from: Blackthorne on May 29, 2013, 05:34:11 PM
I didn't see it as any more manipulative as one wearing a suit to a business/job interview or wearing a tie-dye to a Phish concert.
Bt

Or, in my case wearing tie-dye to a business/job interview and wearing tie-dye to a Phish concert  ;D
"You Can Feel Good About Hood"

KatieHal

Guess it depends on the job. :P Or concert!

Anyways--her dress and appearance has been pretty much the same in all her videos, even if you go back into her archives, yes.

Also, I think we need more Sarah Connors in games. :) (I.E., badass moms saving their sons!)

Katie Hallahan
~Designer, PR Director~

"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." Christina Baldwin

I have a blog!

Lambonius

I think this guy's rebuttals are great.  Curious what people think of this.


Bludshot

Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"

Tomatensaft

Quote from: Lambonius on June 08, 2013, 09:29:07 PM
I think this guy's rebuttals are great.  Curious what people think of this.

It's exactly the kind of stuff you expect from one of those neo-atheists who has just replaced a sexist god with a sexist surrogate god called "the nature". And it's exactly what you expect from someone who said things like "Rape isn't fatal (...) Someone f***** you when you didn't want to be f***** (...) what's the big deal? (...) You vindictive b****! Also, don't you ever get tired of being the victim?"
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/TheAmazingAtheist
And last but not least: it's also what you expect from a submissive bisexual BDSM fetishists (nothing wrong with that, of course!) who tries to gain acceptance by being misogynic and dedicating every second video to the horrors of feminism.

But take just the beginning: Ms Sarkeesian had to face such an horrible amount of hate, of rape threats, death threats, her pages were spammed with p0rn-pictures of women who're getting tortured, her youtube site reported (and afaik even temporarily disabled) as a terrorist activity etc. ... and THEN the amazing atheist complains why she hasn't enabled the the comment section and says that she's just shy of discussion? Come one!

And talking about "discussions": it's pretty easy to "discuss" such topics when you yourself aren't a woman. Then it's of course easy to call for "freedom of speech" and a "rational" debate without those annoying feelings of people, who actually have to deal with that certain kind of discrimination you're talking about, .

You know, I basically think that men shouldn't talk so much about feminism anyway. This is always a slippery slope and it usually results in men telling women that they are just too sensitive, in white people telling black people that they are just too sensitive, in straight people and so on. I'm also a man – so it's kind of a contradiction now, but I guess that you can't avoid certain contradictions in a contradictionary world (eg a world with misogynic women, "uncle toms", self-hating jews etc.) But nevertheless I would say as a rule of thumb: if you aren't affected by a certain kind of discrimination, then talk less, listen more. And don't immediately assume that the person you're talking with jsut tries to blackmail you or just "enjoys" being offended. In the end, you can not verify what sexism, racism, homophobia etc. is without listening to those who are affected by it.

But anyway, two more things: What many people don't want to understand is that the so-called "serious, real, more important" problems and the "non-real problems for crybabies" are linked to each other. Discrimination isn't like alcohol with a little bit every once in a while being okay, while being an alcoholic is not – but more like a tree with poisoned fruits. And the poisoned fruit needs a root to grow and it needs to get watered. And you don't need to get raped and murdered, enslaved and gased, first to dislike that tree. Something like Steubenville doesn't just happen out of a context.
http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/03/steubenville-rape-cultures-abu-ghraib-moment
And it has also nothing to do with physical strength. There are a lot of female athletes and female boxers and fit, tall women – if it would be just because of physical strength (like the amazing atheist claims) then we would see dozens of female athletes running around and raping cute, little blonde boys who are on their way to their viola lessons.

That doesn't mean, of course, that women are morally superior because they have a womb and can have those magic babies – that kind of "positive" sexism is just the other side of the coin and you can't have only one side of it. Just as you can't have the intelligent jew without the sneaky jew and the athletic black man without the less rational black man etc.
And the same is true when it comes to "victimization": the cultural victimization of showing women as beings who are helpless without their male hero (and who look so hawt and sexy when they get threatened) etc. is NOT empowerment and is NOT a way out of a society where they face the danger of becoming actual victims of rape and domestic violence.

White people with a dancing-with-the-wolves complex aren't anti-racists and men who want to save the princess (as long as she is hot and white and thin and willing to have sex afterwards) aren't advocates of gender equality. Pointing out the actual victimization because of misogny, racism, homophobia WITHOUT feeding into the idea that people of color can't be saved without kevin costner and women can't be saved without the male hero etc. is, of course, one of the challenges every social movement has to face. This can become difficult and controversial -just look at the discussions about muslim women and FEMEN- but the last thing those movements need are sexists who ridicule and belittle them. After all, the goal is a world where women don't even need a male hero with a gun to walk through the park because they don't have to fear male violence in the first place.

Oh, but one last thing: I'm from Germany – and do you know when the antisemitism here really got started? Not 1933 and not between the two world wars. But around hundred years earlier after the emancipation of the jews and after jews became legally equal. THEN the shocked aryan christendom made up all kinds of biological BS to justify what they were already thinking: that jews are different or deviant or just plain wrong. The same is happening in France now – now that gay marriage is almost equal to hetero marriage and hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against it, got in fights with the police and the violence against LGBT raised about 30%. I've also read once that since Obama is president there are more white people with racist prejudices against black people. And not less. This is not surprising, of course, because discrimination usually increases after legal equalization. When black people or gay people or jews are on the floor anyway – well, then it's easy to get such a "dancing with the wolves" complex. But when they are suddenly presidents or legally equal to you ... omigod!

And the same is true when it comes to women. The images of beauty that are forced upon women are getting crueler and crueler the more equality women achieve. I don't know the exact numbers anymore but the amount of young women here in Germany who are unsatisfied with their looks and their weight increased around 20% over the last ten years. And this is not an accident. And it's not the feminists who are looking for sexism because they want to be offended, it's quite teh opposite: sexists (which includes women who have internalized misogyny or who try to gain acceptance by telling everyone how ridiculous feminism is) are looking for reasons to justify their misogny. And they don't find those "justifications" in god only. They can also find it in a sexist surrogate god called "the nature". Those neo atheists can explain everything with religion. The only thing they can't explain with it is their very own misogny.

Blackthorne

Quote from: Bludshot on June 09, 2013, 06:58:23 AM
Yeah. I'm not watching that.

You'd be doing yourself a dis-service.  His rebuttals are very good - he does have some snark on occasion, but overall, he makes salient points in his rebuttals.


Bt
"You've got to keep one eye looking over your shoulder
you know it's going to get harder and harder as you
get older - but in the end you'll pack up, fly down south, hide your head in the sand.  Just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer." - Dogs, Pink Floyd.

Bludshot

Last rebuttal posted here was anything but, all the rebuttals completely missed the issue to begin with. This video is already pretty obvious in its feelings on feminist frequency. Plus Tomatensaft's wall-o-text pretty much confirms what I expect to find.
Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"

KatieHal

I watched part of the video, and I think he largely misses the point of the whole exercise, actually. (I'd get into it more, but I don't have the time just now--hopefully later this week, perhaps.)

Tomatensaft, I really enjoyed your post. Thank you for taking the time to write all that out and share your thoughts.

Katie Hallahan
~Designer, PR Director~

"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." Christina Baldwin

I have a blog!

Numbers

I've sort of just consigned myself to the fact that I will never understand women, and as such will probably remain ignorant of the ramifications of woman-in-the-freezer tropes no matter how long I live.

And there's a lot of heated discussion in this thread, so I think I'll just lighten things up a bit by sharing this flash animation that has nothing to do with this thread's topic:
http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf
I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Lambonius

#353
One of the best and most memorable writing assignments I ever had in graduate school was an assignment in which I was required to summarize 6 weeks worth of complex course material in 4 pages.  Conciseness in writing is an art and gift.  Just something to think about, people.  If you can't make your point in a paragraph or two, maybe you should spend a little more time thinking it through before you decide to write it down.

That said, I did take the time to read all of that, and I don't necessarily disagree with it.  I like intelligent discussions, and when people make good, solid points, I think it's worth spreading around.  I think Anita's videos do that, somewhat, but I also see the flaws in them, too.  She's majorly guilty of cherry-picking and ignoring important context in her examples, as well as ignoring research and statistics that don't directly support her claims, among other things.  But I also see the flaws in a video like that rebuttal I posted--that guy clearly is operating with his own set of biases, despite making some good solid points.  He mentions confirmation bias, which I definitely think Anita is guilty of, though perhaps not to the extent that TheAmazingAtheist says she is.

Tomatensaft

#354
Quote from: Lambonius on June 09, 2013, 10:16:12 PM
One of the best and most memorable writing assignments I ever had in graduate school was an assignment in which I was required to summarize 6 weeks worth of complex course material in 4 pages.  Conciseness in writing is an art and gift.  Just something to think about, people.  If you can't make your point in a paragraph or two, maybe you should spend a little more time thinking it through before you decide to write it down.

Hehe, and I haven't even written about everything I think is wrong with that rebuttal video. :P

For example, comparing that damsel in distress thingie with a gay hero who wants to save his gay lover (Yeah, I'm looking forward to the gamer reactions to that, lol...) only works when you completely deny the history, the tradition and the culture of misogyny - and how the construction of female weakness (and vulnerability, sensitivity as something that is "feminine" and therefore also "faggy" and degrading for strong, superior men) is used to build and legitimate social hierarchies: then a powerful men and a powerless women would be just the same as a, say, modernized gay Sherlock Holmes saving his gay Dr Watson. But denying those differences is just like saying that it doesn't matter if all people in positions of power are white, because we should be colorblind anyway.

But ... err: those people don't just want to debunk a certain point or a certain video a feminist makes, they want to promote biological determinism, debunk feminism as a whole and show it as something that's just utterly stupid, whiny, wrong and against "nature". And I think that when this happens, it is neccessary to point out some of the basics you can not always summarize in catchy little paragraphs. Adorno once wrote "Only what they don't need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar. Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate."

I also think that you can not separate the "good points" from "the wrong points out of misogynistic delusions". If you hear a feminist talk about women's rights and sexism etc., and your first, immediate reaction is,"Where is a rebuttal video, where is a rebuttal text, what is wrong with that, there must be something wrong with that, the other side will have good arguments as well!", then there's something wrong. This is like with Israel. Criticizing Israel isn't principally anti-semitic, but if you have the obsessive desire to find guilty jews and you can not bear hearing someone talk about antisemitism without feeling the desire to find someone on youtube who tells you that the jew is exaggerating as always, then ... well. 

Apart of that: the fundament on which those rebuttal stuff is based, are biological determinism ("Men just are like that because of nature, because they are so STRONG and TALL and because the genes, biology, neanderthals ... "There is nothing more natural than rape", Sam Harris once said.) and denying that sexism is more than the bad habit of some misguided individuals.
And just as you can not build a house on sand, you can not make a good argument based on that.

darthkiwi

QuoteYou'd be doing yourself a dis-service.  His rebuttals are very good - he does have some snark on occasion, but overall, he makes salient points in his rebuttals.

No they're not. They're entitled, whiny, shallow and completely miss the point. They could only have been made by someone in a position of power and privilege who doesn't want his toys taken away.

Tomatensaft made a lot of good points; I'll add a few of my own.

Ok, love is a powerful plot driver. Ok, we should allow both male and female avatars. But I mean HOW can he just ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of action heroes are straight white men? And that the overwhelming majority of characters who need to be rescued are young, slender, attactive, (probably) white women with almost no personality who are defined only by their relationship with the protagonist?

I actually think one of Sarkeesian's best points was that this kind of stuff doesn't help men either. This mode of thinking - where men are the strong, powerful ones who have the responsibility to hit monsters in the face and save their loved ones - is totally out of date. Violence and the "strong silent type" are no longer useful in our society. Rather than responding to crises with grand gestures, it's generally better to respond with rational, thought-out acts of compromise. Frankly, assuming that your significant other is helpless and you have a responsibility to rescue her (if you're a straight man) is an INSULT to her, and shows that you don't trust her to be able to sort out her problem herself. Yes, all of the women in these games are in extreme situations, but when that trickles down a man's consciousness into a real-world situation everything is going to be much less clear. And acting in a certain way because you feel you'd be emasculated if you didn't is a very troubling way to go about helping people.
Prince of the Aquitaine. Duke of York.

Knight errant and consort to Her Grace the Empress Deloria of the Holy Roman Empire, Queene of all Albion and Princess Palatine.

Lambonius

Quote from: darthkiwi on June 10, 2013, 02:49:28 PM
Frankly, assuming that your significant other is helpless and you have a responsibility to rescue her (if you're a straight man) is an INSULT to her, and shows that you don't trust her to be able to sort out her problem herself.

That might be one of the most ridiculously cynical statements I've seen on this forum in quite a while.

Neonivek

Honestly with the second video Anita just kind of told me that her series is just not very good.

Now when I originally watched her first video the major fault I could see without putting much thinking into it was that ultimately it was just so general and with the barest of explanations that it came off as just a flat out introduction.

With the second this trend continued.

So what happened is I looked back and started to really think about and listen to a lot of what Anita said and the examples she used and the more I actually thought about it and the more I learned about the games she was using as her examples, the less valid her videos became. If these weren't professional videos they would get a pass as they are just an opinion.

Basically the three main areas of weakness are as follows
1) Poor explanations: She often treats her words as if they carry weight without saying without ever explaining the why. This was originally not one of my complaints, well major ones, in the first video because it seemed like an introduction to a larger subject... but it wasn't. A lot of her examples rely on just accepting things at face value, yet she always begs closer analysis.
2) Poor Examples: Many of the examples she uses are just flat out terrible examples of the trope being used, are terrible examples of the trope being used the way she says it, or she just doesn't know the material.
3) Bending Language: This one is harder to catch onto but she will bend the human language in ways never before. Often switching from plot to metaplot within the same sentence or using words as a shock factor but not for the sake of accuracy.

The odd thing is that there is never a need for her to do any of that. There is more then enough examples of these tropes in videogames in their purest form that she doesn't need to misuse anything. I would even go as far as to say she is outright dishonest in her approach.

As for the video Lambo posted. Indeed it does make a few good points and it also makes a lot of bad ones.

QuoteI also think that you can not separate the "good points" from "the wrong points out of misogynistic delusions".

Ok here is the thing.

Tropes are not sexist in it of themselves. The video is mostly attacking Anita on two things
1) Is the inconsistency in her thinking and methodology
and
2) The idea of sexist tropes to begin with

But the odd thing is. They do explain themselves, they do present 'evidence' (They do get her Thesis wrong though, She was likely referring to "strong" as in physically strong as a male trait)

Where the video fails though is that simply speaking. Anita knows these tropes exist for a reason, though she REALLY REALLY doesn't explain it very well, and she has nothing against the existence of the trope (once again she doesn't explain this and even if she did she also buried it under a lot of buzz words) but rather its excessive proliferation.

Now I am not sure how long this reply can be, but since it has been a while...

Quoteonly works when you completely deny the history, the tradition and the culture of misogyny

Well no, because if you brought up the tradition and culture of misogyny you would understand that many of these roles came about not because of a notion of male superiority, but because they fit within certain story arcs. Often these were used as a metaphor to understand certain power relationships.

And even then their past roles are always ignored for their current role anyhow because literature and art are always evolving.

Quotehow the construction of female weakness (and vulnerability, sensitivity as something that is "feminine" and therefore also "faggy" and degrading for strong, superior men)

That isn't a female weakness. In fact as we have evolved as a society we have started to understand that sensitivity and even vulnerability as a positive trait instead of a negative one. It hasn't completed itself.

In fact the female myth of superior sensitivity as even gone as far as to create one of the few instances where women actually tend to be superior to men in institutions.

Ok I cannot write anymore. So I have to stop here. I will apologize though since by only commenting and talking about these two quotes it is a very disjointed conversation. You are free to respond but remember these thoughts are mostly incomplete (except my overall opinion on Anita's videos).

To sum up Anita's videos are: confusing but hopefully the third will be better...

The Counter video brings up SOME good points but mostly doesn't understand Anita's video.

Lambonius

Quote from: Neonivek on June 11, 2013, 12:56:29 AM

The Counter video brings up SOME good points but mostly doesn't understand Anita's video.

I agree, and that's really all I intended to do by posting it--just to take a look at some of the more intelligent (nobody ever claimed perfect) counter videos out there.  Believe me, there are a lot of utter s*** ones, too.

I have to say though, I find the "I won't watch anything that runs counter to the opinion I already hold" responses to be rather rock-headed.  Broadening one's horizons is what makes one grow as a person.

KatieHal

Quote from: Lambonius on June 11, 2013, 07:21:04 AM
I have to say though, I find the "I won't watch anything that runs counter to the opinion I already hold" responses to be rather rock-headed.  Broadening one's horizons is what makes one grow as a person.

Hah--interesting thing is, you could be saying that about people who won't watch the rebuttal video but also about people who flat-out refuse to believe Anita has anything worth listening in the first place as well.

Katie Hallahan
~Designer, PR Director~

"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." Christina Baldwin

I have a blog!