Look at the pictures below, both from intro movies of two games:
Now guess which game has larger female percentage in the audience! Well, bad news feminists, the one with the sexy elf chicks have one of the largest in the gaming industry while the one with the powerful and competent pilot has one of the smallest. It's not just a video game issue, the party that endorse(d) Rush Limbaugh, who coined the term Feminazi has much-much more female voters than any feminist organization ever had.
Why? In short: because in World of Warcraft you can get anything by doing trivial jobs, while in EVE you actually have to take some risk and effort (not much, but still more than press a random key). Being content with freebies, refusing to do anything isn't restricted to men.
There is an extremely sexist custom, something that constitute outright discrimination: men have to pay entrance fee to clubs, women not. I've yet to see a feminist marching against it. I guess they also like free beer.
There is no such thing as sexist political party. There is no such thing as sexist movement. There isn't a man with any office who'd say a sexist statement in public (and could hope to keep that office). There is no such ideology as sexism. There are just a bunch of lazy, dumb, unsuccessful guys who feel entitled for respect just because they are men. And there are a bunch of lazy, dumb, unsuccessful women who feel entitled for freebies just because they are women.
I'm obviously not blaming the women for the survival of sexism. Accepting free beer is smaller act than offering it. I merely state that they have more to lose, so they should work harder to stop it. If I live near a river, I have more reason to pack sandbags during flooding than the guy living on the hill.
The first thing women could easily do is stop tolerating obvious sex-toy-elves, countless Damsel in Distress quests, systematic mass-murder campaigns against sentinent races and generally a World where you can only advance by performing violence and there is no way to advance by building, creating or caring. Of course the rest of the games are harder, so abandoning WoW would mean abandoning easy game victories too. Well, one should have priorities. The same goes obviously with free drink offers.
Now, can someone create an easy, entitling game with no sexism in it? Unlikely. Ask a bunch of people to draw a picture of two people, one cutting lumber, the other caring for a child! They will draw a stereotypical male lumberjack and a female mother or baby-sitter. Despite the description is totally gender-neutral, the outcome will be not and this is "normal" in our culture, people just fill the holes with their (indoctrinated, sexist) preconceptions. The opposite (female lumberjack, male baby-sitter) would be a comedy/parody. The same thing happens when a game developer is tasked to create a heroic player and some weak non-player characters who are at his mercy. Despite the task is again gender-neutral, he will "naturally" make the hero masculine, while the positive NPCs are made to be women, elderly, children, disabled or members of a lesser race or class. The audience will also "naturally" accept this, and would reject the opposite as a comedy. The solution is not creating a situation which trigger strong cultural resonance in both your developers and players. Since easy games are all placing the player to the position of power and domination over other characters, they will all be sexist or comedy beyond help, save for a few totally human-absent games (like Tetris).
Now guess which game has larger female percentage in the audience! Well, bad news feminists, the one with the sexy elf chicks have one of the largest in the gaming industry while the one with the powerful and competent pilot has one of the smallest. It's not just a video game issue, the party that endorse(d) Rush Limbaugh, who coined the term Feminazi has much-much more female voters than any feminist organization ever had.
Why? In short: because in World of Warcraft you can get anything by doing trivial jobs, while in EVE you actually have to take some risk and effort (not much, but still more than press a random key). Being content with freebies, refusing to do anything isn't restricted to men.
There is an extremely sexist custom, something that constitute outright discrimination: men have to pay entrance fee to clubs, women not. I've yet to see a feminist marching against it. I guess they also like free beer.
There is no such thing as sexist political party. There is no such thing as sexist movement. There isn't a man with any office who'd say a sexist statement in public (and could hope to keep that office). There is no such ideology as sexism. There are just a bunch of lazy, dumb, unsuccessful guys who feel entitled for respect just because they are men. And there are a bunch of lazy, dumb, unsuccessful women who feel entitled for freebies just because they are women.
I'm obviously not blaming the women for the survival of sexism. Accepting free beer is smaller act than offering it. I merely state that they have more to lose, so they should work harder to stop it. If I live near a river, I have more reason to pack sandbags during flooding than the guy living on the hill.
The first thing women could easily do is stop tolerating obvious sex-toy-elves, countless Damsel in Distress quests, systematic mass-murder campaigns against sentinent races and generally a World where you can only advance by performing violence and there is no way to advance by building, creating or caring. Of course the rest of the games are harder, so abandoning WoW would mean abandoning easy game victories too. Well, one should have priorities. The same goes obviously with free drink offers.
Now, can someone create an easy, entitling game with no sexism in it? Unlikely. Ask a bunch of people to draw a picture of two people, one cutting lumber, the other caring for a child! They will draw a stereotypical male lumberjack and a female mother or baby-sitter. Despite the description is totally gender-neutral, the outcome will be not and this is "normal" in our culture, people just fill the holes with their (indoctrinated, sexist) preconceptions. The opposite (female lumberjack, male baby-sitter) would be a comedy/parody. The same thing happens when a game developer is tasked to create a heroic player and some weak non-player characters who are at his mercy. Despite the task is again gender-neutral, he will "naturally" make the hero masculine, while the positive NPCs are made to be women, elderly, children, disabled or members of a lesser race or class. The audience will also "naturally" accept this, and would reject the opposite as a comedy. The solution is not creating a situation which trigger strong cultural resonance in both your developers and players. Since easy games are all placing the player to the position of power and domination over other characters, they will all be sexist or comedy beyond help, save for a few totally human-absent games (like Tetris).
19 comments:
Mostly off topic.
Google Eve Online / images. It shows spaceships. Not a 3d doll you get to play with. Spaceship. Doll. Hmm. Female percentage? it's the game type, not the reward system or anything of the sorts. I find it funny that anyone in this world could ever come to your conclusion.
Sexism is like totalitarism.
It's definition is amorphous enough that anyone actively looking for things to call sexist can find them anywhere.
For example, i find nothing sexist in the notion that a gender which is irreplaceable and crucial to human reproduction gets to stay in the safety of home, and ends up specialising on household tasks (f/ex caring for children), while the gender which is generally more dispensable, but also biologically more suited to dealing with tasks that involve physicall stress, goes out of the home to the wild (with potential wolves and bears) and thus specialises in outdoor tasks.
As long as genders are different at all, there will be sexism. The instant genders stop being different, we become a one-gender specie, with all the relevant evolutionary disadvantages.
It seems like you are starting campaign against sexism. I am looking forward to campaign against racism and more contemporary bullshit.
How does the notion of "class" fit within the objectivist ideology? As the antipode to collectivist ideologies like communism, objectivism completely denounces the existance of social constructs and elevates the individual to the only actor there is.
So, how can there be social classes if there are only achievers and morons & slackers?
@Folgsam: if it exist in the head of the socials, it exists. The most obvious example is the EVE Class "PvP-er", its members consider themselves superior without any merit (losing frigates is not merit).
@Oska Rus: if you mean posting angry rants, not. If you mean in-game: tempting, but the point of this post that it's a lost cause already. Most people are lazy and wouldn't lift a finger even for themselves.
There is no easy money in it. Keep them stupid and you will be rich.
Makeup, sports, religion, nation, culture and more institutions. All very engraved thought up and forged through time to keep society as it is now. With all its symbols and comparability.
I don't care about all the dating stupidity. 7bil people on earth, natural selection doesn't work since the stone age and our worst enemy are we self. So why waste time with the goal of "building a family" (yet another institution).
So whatever is build; games, movies or books it has to poke some stupidity to get sales and let their zombies "feel good". It's not only Sexism its any *ism that will increase sales. so yeah Gevlon pretty much your bold last sentence!
natural selection doesn't work since the stone age
Nony, either you are a slacker/moron, or just really ignorant. Natural selection is not like a light which can be turned on and off. Natural selection is a process that must always be happening so long as there is genetic diversity -- and there is genetic diversity in all biological populations. The "fit" reproduce. The "unfit" don't. Since genes mediate all human behavior, some genes become more common and others, less common.
But don't trust me. Go read, say, wikipedia. And then google "are humans evolving".
@ Von Keigai: I beg to differ, natural selection requires existence of traits being selected. Natural selection can hardly work on environment such as our current western society where nearly everyone reaches reproductive age and the couples are monogamous with 1-2 children.
Would one make a model of this having everyone pair get two children and pairing be random there would exist no natural selection only random chance, excluding mutations that would stop the reaching of reproductive age (which our modern medicine has made a rare case).
Yet attributes affecting pairing will of course be selected for, and in real world not everyone gets to have children and some have plenty.
Still the classical natural selection is strongly diminished in society like ours, I myself consider this to be ill for humankind, yet pointless to voice concerns as the outcry against em' would be too great to overcome in current political environment in western world.
Last anon:
If you think most of western society is monogamous with 1/2 children you really have to leave your house and look at the world without your preconceptions. You couldnt be more wrong than that. Stop thinking society is like you and your friends. It mostly is quite the opposite.
And, again, you are wrong about natural selection. For instance, dumb/poor people, in general, have no children with smart/rich people, only with dumb/poor people alike. And vice-versa. The difference is, dumb/poor peoble, usually, have 3 more children than smart/rich people in western society.
If you take in consideration that, from those 3 poor children only about 1 or 2 will get to have children too, and of every 1 smart/rich children less than 1 will have children, there it is your natural selection. Only not the way you think natural selection should work.
@Lothildin: There is no "should work" with natural selection. There is an ecosystem, and then some organisms are good enough at replication and continued existence to replicate and continue existing while others are not. Just because someone's life is comfortable, it doesn't mean they win at evolution. At the same time, just because someone doesn't reproduce doesn't mean they lose.
Damn, Gevlon, where to start? I agree that there are lazy, dumb unsuccessful men who feel entitled to respect and reward just for being men. I agree that there are lazy, dumb, unsuccessful women who feel entitled to freebies (from men) just because they are women. There are also smart, successful men who feel entitled to respect and reward just because they are men (i.e. from smart, successful women), and there are smart, successful women who feel entitled to freebies from men just because they are women. But these feelings of entitlement both stem from the fact that they are taught that they are entitled, by the sexist gender-role messages in our society, primarily media. They are not necessarily to do with how lazy, dumb or successful these people are.
Ok I wasn't intending to address that, but let's move on to the point I want to focus on. The clubs that offer free entry to women but charge men.
Firstly, I think you will find that this practice *is* viewed as a problem by feminists. Here's why: the simple fact that what you said about men expecting to be rewarded by the women, is absolutely true. That is the whole problem.
The strategy employed by the clubs is to attract women by offering them free entry. There is nothing entitled about a woman taking advantage of this. The fact that the men are charged entry, creates and reinforces the idea in their minds, that the women present are there for them, for their use. This is not the fault of the women, this is purely an error of thinking of the men.
I think you will find that women tend to go out in groups, and that while they may be open to flirting or finding a potential mate, they are usually just out to have a good time socialising, drinking and dancing. They do not go out to these clubs with the express intent of claiming free drinks from strange men.
(And you know what? Even if they did, that *still* does not give men the right to feel entitled to reward. Buying a strange woman a drink is, effectively, a gift. If they accept it but don't give you the reward you think you deserve, you don't get to demand it or take it by force, or even bitch and whine about it. You gambled, you lost. Suck it up.)
Most women would be quite happy buying their own drinks. They don't need men there to buy them free stuff. If clubs charged women entry, then they might lose a few customers, but again most women would still pay to go there.
The point is, women are not lazy, dumb or unsuccessful just because they take advantage of the marketing strategies of clubs.
The problem is that men are taught by society, mostly through media, that if they buy shit for women, they get sex in return. The marketing media surrounding alcohol and clubbing seems to focus on this in particular. So when it doesn't happen, they see women as breaking the rules, and feel entitled to demand their reward. Surely even your readers can see the problem here. It is nothing to do with laziness or success (one could argue it is about intelligence, but we have seen many cases of otherwise intelligent people being stupid when it comes to sexism/racism/nationalism/etc).
If men woke up and realised just how they are being milked, how their subconscious sexism is being reinforced and taken advantage of, then clubs would be forced to equalise things in order to stay in business, either by waiving the entry fee altogether or by making the fee the same for everyone.
@Maxim
You really need to stop talking, because what you are spouting is pure rubbish, you are just embarrassing yourself.
Last I heard, you need two genders for successful human reproduction. That makes them both irreplaceable.
"As long as genders are different at all, there will be sexism." This just shows that you have no idea what sexism actually is.
@Unknown
" At the same time, just because someone doesn't reproduce doesn't mean they lose."
Er, yes. Yes it does. If you don't reproduce, you have stopped evolving.
@Dahakha: women are aware that the "men are taught by society, mostly through media, that if they buy shit for women, that if they buy shit for women, they get sex in return" and they should reject it, even if this is - by itself - not harmful to them.
The sounds N I G G E R are not harmful. Yet black people reject it as they know that it has a deeper meaning that should not be accepted.
@Maxim: That _is_ sexism. You're assigning roles based purely on generalized biological gender, instead of actual individual inclination or ability.
Of course you're making an exception for yourself, since you're obviously sitting lazily indoors, posting on the Internet. Shouldn't you be outside, facing dangers?
And if I understand Objectivism correctly, Objectivism rejects the notion of restricting an individual's choices based solely on that individual's gender. I'm surprised that Gevlon didn't smack you around already for that.
Men buy sex? Why? Why men want sex? And why women want to sell sex?
Fight against "sexism" is a nice tool for women with higher society status when they want to keep their man. Because men must be able to provide for women's children. That's what men are good for. Otherwise women would raise her children alone like most of the mammals. So women want man who is able to buy them drink or some ridiculously expensive necklace. Or the one with the most expensive car or high society status like for example "the prince".
But men don't need educated women nor successful women. Man need pretty woman. Because than they have the chance their daughter will be also pretty and other men will want her. And his genes will continue.
If the women is educated and successful in her job the number of prospective partners is dwindling away. So she must make more effort to keep her successful man. But if the man is successful he wants just a pretty face.
And that's where "sexism" took root. The women movement in 60ies burnt their bra and talked about sexual revolution. And now they talk about sexism and how bad is the pornography.
Why? Because women became free and successful. And older. And all those sexy young girls are stealing their partners. And suddenly the puritanism has its appeal. Or even Islam.
Evolution can't be switched off because our genes can't be switched off. And evolution is not about stronger legs or wings. Its about the genes. The ones that make their bearer to reproduce win.
The strategy employed by the clubs is to attract women by offering them free entry. There is nothing entitled about a woman taking advantage of this.
If women realize that this is a marketing strategy that promotes them as objects 'sold' to the male patrons, and yet they go anyway, is it really the fault of the clubs using said tactic? Where is the 'feminist pride' then, bought out by the promise of free drinks?
The point is, women are not lazy, dumb or unsuccessful just because they take advantage of the marketing strategies of clubs.
They aren't taking advantage of the marketing strategy of the club, the club is taking advantage of them. If they don't realize this or don't bother thinking about it, then they are by default dumb and/or lazy.
@Dahakha
>> You really need to stop talking, because what
>> you are spouting is pure rubbish, you are just
>> embarrassing yourself.
I am sorry that you feel embrassed for me. You don't get to decide what i need, though.
>> Last I heard, you need two genders for
>> successful human reproduction. That makes
>> them both irreplaceable.
A population with a single male and 100 females can reproduce 100x faster than a population with 1 female and 100 males.
It also does not run the risk of losing it's whole future if it's only female catches a flu or something.
Modern society in developed countries masks this fundamental biological truth by imposing some rules on how many partners a single person can have. Masking the truth doesn't make it go away, though, as many African tribes learn first-hand.
>> "As long as genders are different at all, there will
>> be sexism." This just shows that you have no
>> idea what sexism actually is.
Sexism is discrimination based on person's sex. Said to be born from stereotypes about gender roles.
Thing is, as long as two different genders exist, there will be stereotypes and roles. So there will be sexism.
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@Druur Monakh
>> That _is_ sexism. You're assigning roles based
>> purely on generalized biological gender, instead
>> of actual individual inclination or ability.
I grant you the advantage of being internally consistent. Indeed, saying that women are better off at home because they are women can easily be construed as sexist.
However, at this junction i have to question as to how you can separate "individual inclination" from a person's biology, to a signficiant extent defined by a person's gender.
Or rather, i know quite a few schools of thought that achieve said separation, but they do so by introducing a concept of thought existing in a state which is not dependent on biology (f/ex "soul" or "noosphere"). I don't subscribe to these schools of thought.
>> Of course you're making an exception for
>> yourself, since you're obviously sitting lazily
>> indoors, posting on the Internet. Shouldn't you
>> be outside, facing dangers?
I posted that particular post from a mobile phone, while sitting on a conference regarding a deal worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
Not sure if that helps my point or hurts it :D.
Of 10 people in the room, exactly 0 were female, though.
@Maxim
"A population with a single male and 100 females can reproduce 100x faster than a population with 1 female and 100 males.
It also does not run the risk of losing it's whole future if it's only female catches a flu or something."
Both those populations have a vanishingly small chance of survival. Try again.
"Modern society in developed countries masks this fundamental biological truth by imposing some rules on how many partners a single person can have. Masking the truth doesn't make it go away, though, as many African tribes learn first-hand."
No idea what you are on about here, but it sure has absolutely no relevance to the conversation.
"as long as two different genders exist, there will be stereotypes and roles."
Nope. Not if we are aware of and actively try to address them.
@Dahakha
>> Both those populations have a vanishingly small
>> chance of survival. Try again.
You would have a stronger position if you said that such a strong deviation from 1:1 sex ratio is impossible for humans to begin with. For now, i can just increase the numbers from 100 to, say, 10k.
We have evidence to believe that human minimum viable population is about 2k.
Either way, what i'm saying is that population with more females has more chances of successfully surviving than population with less females.
Therefore it makes perfect sense for a population to protect its females more than its males. Which results in cultural stereotypes associated with sexism.
>> No idea what you are on about here, but it sure
>> has absolutely no relevance to the conversation.
It has relevance as long as previous part has relevance.
What i was getting at here is that in modern western society survival of population is currently not an issue at all. Therefore there is no pressing need to especially protect the females.
This does, however, flies in the face of bigender biology.
>> Nope. Not if we are aware of and actively try to
>> address them.
I can agree that sexism is a bit like mess in the living room. If you are aware of it and actively trying to address it, it'll be kept to the minimum.
It's never completely gone, though, and always ready to come back with a vengeance.
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