-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Spice Girls Feminism: why the third wave needs more than a band-aid | The Hathor Legacy on Can we stop misrepresenting our own movement?
- If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged. « Restructure! on "Check my what?" On privilege and what we can do about it
- Timothy (TRiG) on Girly kissing, raunch culture, and me
- Maybe they deserve to get married « Random Insignificant Things on World of Warcraft: Sexist by Design?
- christopher bowers on "Check my what?" On privilege and what we can do about it
Categories
- Abuse, rape, and domestic violence
- Anti-oppression activism
- BDSM, fetishes, etc.
- Books, magazines, etc.
- Carnivals, Blog Against -ism Days, etc.
- Censorship
- Childfree Issues
- Companies Behaving Badly
- Discrimination
- Features
- Feminism
- Gender essentialism
- Gender issues
- Just plain cool
- Link Blogging
- Media and journalism
- Multiculturalism
- Personal
- Politics
- Popular Culture
- Privilege
- Queer Issues
- Religion
- Science
- Series
- Sex, sexuality, and sexual politics
- Shrub.com Related
- Technology
- Teh Funnay
- The Evil -ism's
- The Gaming Beauty Myth
- Video Games
Archives
Monthly Archives: June 2006
The Realism Defense
Earlier this month, Collie of Collie’s Bestiary posted about her experiences with Planescape: Torment.
A short while ago I started playing the computer game “Planescape: Torment,†and stumbled across this issue again, with painfully eye-opening results. Keep in mind, this game won numerous awards for its storytelling and quality in 1999, the year it was released — which makes me wonder in appalled horror just how awful the other games were. But to continue: I first noticed the sexual objectification of women with the game’s job/species designations, which float above the head of the graphical character on the screen. There were monsters, and men and women. As I recall, men were classified about 50% as townsmen and 50% thugs. Women were similarly classified as either townswomen… or harlots.
What?! Um, hold on. Why were there no male harlots? Why no female thugs? Is the game trying to teach us that women can only be for sale, and only men are capable of violence? I found myself bewilderedly wondering: are the creators of the game afraid of women or something, that they feel the need to so dehumanize women in the game?
My first reaction was to attempt to excuse these aspects of the game as “ignorable.” There’s no need to look at the portrait gallery to play the game, and the “harlots” don’t actually have much in-game purpose (they can improve Morte’s Curse ability; that’s about it). It seemed a waste to miss out on a game that had so much else going for it. This, of course, is precisely the wrong framing – it puts the burden on the player to put aside her own discomfort. Besides, there are other uncomfortable aspects to the game which are not so easily ignored, such as the geek-girl fetish of the Brothel of Cartesian Dualism Slaking Intellectual Lusts, or how every girl’s crazy for a gothed-out Hulk. A better way of approaching these issues is in terms of the costs and benefits of the design decisions – is it really worth alienating a sizable portion of your audience for this? Continue reading
Posted in Gender issues, Video Games
7 Comments
Changing Pop-Culture to Change Ourselves [Understanding Popular Culture, Part 4]
In the opening of this series, I talked about how popular culture influenced us because it’s all around us. I talked about how it becomes the elephant in the room because of that. But what I didn’t talk about was how popular culture fits into our battle to change harmful cultural paradigms. And, really, that’s a glaring oversight that I intend to correct right now.
You see, I came across a post today (… oy. by Julia) that gave me one of those headsmacking, “OH!” moments. Not because I agree with her — far from it, I’m about to spend this entire post rebutting the points that she made — but because I finally understand the basis for the argument that [x] concern needs to be shelved so [y] and [z] concern can be taken care of first. Continue reading
'Offensive' is Not a Feminist Value
For the record, I don’t think that not giving a shit if you’re offensive to other feminists is something to be proud of, or something to admire. I don’t think that being trollish is something to be proud of, especially … Continue reading
Posted in Feminism
14 Comments
New Carnival: Feminist SF
Ragnell has just informed me that the only love her new carnival has gotten so far has been from me and the author/artist of Planet Karen. This will simply not do! So, even though I haven’t plugged a carnival in … Continue reading
Finally, An End To Single-Sex Televisions
I recently saw a commercial for the Sony Bravia which billed itself as “The World’s First Television for Men and Women.”
At first, I thought they were advertising something like this, but after checking out the web site it turns out that it’s just a marketing campaign for a high-end HDTV.
I’m trying to figure out what the advertisers were thinking this one. I’ve narrowed it down to the following possibilities:
- They noticed that purchasers of HDTVs were disproportionately male, and saw women as an untapped market; however, they were worried that a women-centered ad campaign would lose more male buyers.
- They’re looking to provide the stereotypical man with justifications to his stereotypical partner for the purchasing decision.
Given the blatant sexism of the advertisement, I’m leaning toward the latter. Continue reading
Posted in Advertising, For "her"
4 Comments
Strangers in Paradise and "Man-Hating"
So my latest infatuation is Terry Moore’s comic Strangers In Paradise, which I discovered through the immensely fun Scans Daily Livejournal community. It’s well-drawn and well-characterized, and is erasing that reluctance to check out indie comics that viewing the hipper-than-thou movie adaptation of Ghost World instilled.
What struck me, though, was a letter to Mr. Moore printed in the second issue of the first run, which asked:
I do have some criticism about the writing… is it me or do you hold a dim view of males?
[Spoilers for the first issue of Strangers in Paradise follow.] Continue reading
Just One Month…
I want one month in the feminist blogsphere in which none of us attack each other because someone engages in an activity that we personally don’t like. I want one month in which feminists who have differing views on porn, … Continue reading
llencelyn
tekanji
Sour Duck
lake-desire
jfpbookworm
Luke
Sigel Phoenix
arielladrake
Katie
