Tag: gender issues

How To Get Your Girlfriend Into Your Fandom

tekanji

It is apparently an unending problem for geeky men that their girlfriends, who may or may not be geeks, get upset when their boyfriends jilt them for their geek obsession. So I, in my infinite wisdom, and only parly inspired by this post have decided to make the definitive list on getting your girlfriend into your fandom, whatever it may be. So, boys, please pay attention!

Quit yer whining and realize that it’s okay if your SO doesn’t share all of your hobbies.

I mean, there was a reason that you decided to date her in the first place, right? Like her personality, intelligence, the ability for y’all to click on other levels? Maybe if you, I don’t know, focused on that instead of substituting your geeky hobby for actual quality time, you’d find that geeks can coexist with non-geeks on a romantic level.

So, remember, the world does not end if she doesn’t play games or read comics or whatever.

Really.

The Realism Defense

jfpbookworm

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 Slating 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?

I. Penalizing Women

There’s been a lot of debate over The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion‘s character creation process, which gave different attribute bonuses based on the character’s sex, and did it in such a way that male characters were more optimized, especially for fighting classes. As tikae notes:

It’s that if you want to have a female character, you’re going to be punished if you want to be anything except for a mage – and you’re still not going to be as good at that as male characters of most races are. It’s just how the numbers work. Making it a punishment to choose a certain gender is always going to be bad game design, whether it’s political or not.

First edition AD&D had an even more unbalanced portrayal of sexual dimorphism – the maximum allowable strength for women of any “race” was significantly lower than that for men, with no attempt to balance this penalty. In other words, men were penalized for playing cross-gender characters, and women were penalized for playing same-gender characters – again, especially warrior types.

Arcanum goes even farther than that – many of the species in the game are simply only playable as male. The designers cite the extra work and storage space that would be required to include artwork representing female dwarves, gnomes, etc., and explain it away in-game by referring to Victorian convention. The upshot, though, was that players had significantly fewer options if they wished to play female characters.

II. What Is Real? How Do You Define “Real”?

In addition to simply being glossed over, all of these examples of sexism in RPGs also get defended by portraying critics as valuing “political correctness” over “realism,” a defense that’s especially pernicious because it goes outside the game to make claims about the world in general.

But what do we mean by realism in the context of gaming? I’m not talking about the tired idea that, in any story with magic or supernatural elements, there’s no need for verisimilitude – that’s just a defense of bad writing. When we speak of realism in a game, we usually mean two things: immersion and complexity.

Immersion is the believability of what Roger Giner-Sorolla calls mimesis:

As stated before, I see successful fiction as an imitation or “mimesis” of reality, be it this world’s or an alternate world’s. Well-written fiction leads the reader to temporarily enter and believe in the reality of that world. A crime against mimesis is any aspect of an IF game that breaks the coherence of its fictional world as a representation of reality.

Complexity is the depth of implementation of the game world. Immersion and complexity are often in conflict, as every additional detail is an opportunity for a crime against mimesis to be perpetrated. What we call realism, then, is the combination of the two: a world sufficiently detailed that “rings true” to the player.

Guilded Lilies points out that what breaks mimesis will vary from player to player, citing the requisite detail for any discussion of sexism in gaming, Lara Croft’s breasts:

I feel it is pretty safe to say that women and men have different impressions of male and female game characters in computer games. Exaggerated female body parts may fall into the category of fantasy elements that men are willing to accept, but for women, this might just be the fantasy killer that interrupts her experience of suspended disbelief. A woman knows intuitively that having to haul around an enormous rack would make, for example, Lara Croft’s acrobatics impossible. For a male playing the same game this might never arise as a conflict, and likewise enjoying the presence of such things, he may never be aware that suspension of disbelief is required to maintain his immersion in the story line.

III. Reality is Overrated

The thing is, realism alone – i.e., the combination of mimesis and complexity – is not necessarily entertaining. There are games which are perfectly consistent and coherent in their game worlds, but simply aren’t a lot of fun because those worlds aren’t very interesting to the player (for me, strategy games like Railroad Tycoon and Colonization fell into this category, as did Oregon Trail when I wasn’t trying to make my friends die of dysentery). And there are other games with interesting, believable worlds, but whose complexity bogs down the gameplay until it’s intolerable. Realms of Arkania is the classic example in PC RPG-land; Xenosaga and Star Ocean: the Second Story approached this point for me with their multiple point-advancement systems. What game designers should be asking themselves is not whether a feature will make the game more realistic, but whether it will make the game more fun.

IV. Scope is a Design Decision

The realism that’s being defended in the above examples is selective at best. Some elements get focused on while others are ignored entirely; it’s not so much that these design decisions are expected as it is that they “feel right” to the perceived core audience of male gamers. Gaming, especially fantasy role-playing, has been a “boys’ club” for so long that these little touches of sexism have become cliches that players take for granted. If an area is poor, the reasoning goes, it will have prostitution, and that will invariably take the form of female streetwalkers, no matter what the rest of society looks like. In a multi-species society like Sigil, why would all of the prostitutes be human women?

What the realism defense ignores is that any game – indeed, any narrative or documentary medium – is limited in scope. The game designer makes a conscious choice about what to model in the game world; including sexism under the guise of “realism” makes a statement that sexism is sufficiently important to be included in the world model.

V. A Misguided Attempt at Anti-Censorship

If these aspects of the game could be omitted without notice – since few people complain about the details that aren’t in the game – why does criticism of them always raise such a fuss? Aside from the general backlash against “political correctness,” I think there is a more specific backlash against perceived censorship of games a la the “Nintendo Code,” where adventurers went to cafes to drink soda pop and called each other “spoony bards.” The problem with such a response is that it conflates legitimate design decisions with “fixes” superimposed on the games – the equivalent of renaming the “harlots” to “dancers” or something and blurring the artwork, cosmetic changes that serve to break mimesis by emphasizing what’s omitted.

VI. Boys’ Club Backlash

I also think there’s a subgroup of players who are simply reacting to having their privilege challenged. The following entitlement-laden Usenet post on Planescape: Torment started a sizeable flamewar:

I also appreciate the way the women are dressed, showing much of their breasts and buttocks. To me it is not the main thing of course – who would buy a game just because some of these tiny little figures look a bit sexy, it is just not enough for any real erotic thrill, but it is a small aesthetic delight that adds to the overall thrill of the game. I think a bit of sexiness belongs within a RPG. As I understand it, it is part of the fantasy-world.

The later replies defending this mindset use all the standard arguments – it’s PC, they’re just trying to make games less enjoyable, there aren’t enough women players to matter, etc. I guess when the games are being specifically targeted to you, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Conclusion

Game designers would benefit from asking the following about any design decision, especially those that involve gender:

  1. Why am I including this feature?
  2. How will this decision make the game more enjoyable?
  3. For whom will this decision make the game more enjoyable?
  4. For whom will this decision make the game less enjoyable? Is there any way to minimize this?

Designers and players alike need to stop using the idea of realism – “that’s the way the world works” – as an excuse for condoning sexism in games when they’re called out on it. It’s simply passing the buck.

What does your t-shirt say? (now with MORE dumb t-shirts!)

Luke

With the popularity and availability of screen printing and selling t-shirts over the internet, seems like everybody’s got some idea, phrase or illustration they want to market in t-shirt form. So for anywhere from $7-25 bucks, you get to wear not only a piece of clothing but something that says something to everyone else. It’s what you want other people to read or notice or learn about. For that moment, whether it’s a wayward glance on the subway or the start-up of a conversation in line from a deep gaze, the t-shirt and its modern storytelling (oh, lets say in the past couple years) reveals another form of violent backlash and aggression by men to women.

The t-shirt: It’s about half-way between a bumper sticker and a tattoo. With a bumper sticker you face a limited landscape where simple text is the main projection and chances are you don’t see the person whose politics are being espoused unless you drive up and give them a good stare-down. With tattoos, you don’t know what you’re getting because it’s a tattoo. Some people hide them, other display, some mix and match. Now, with a classic t-shirt with illustration/text on the chest area, you’ve got something that says “this is what I think, this is what I think is cute/funny/cool.”

Now, I could give a shit what people wear on their t-shirts, skin, cars or whatnot. If you want to wear a tattoo with the Pythagorean theorem, great. A t-shirt with all species of marine life? Even better. But lately there have been a growing number of people and companies cashing in on misogynist, homophobic, and racist “humor” meant to be funny or worse yet, rebellious and gutsy. In other words, while what Ariel Levy calls “Raunch Culture” oppresses women (and men) through hegemony by co-opting sexual degradation and objectification as liberation and empowerment, for men, the passive-aggressive sexual aggression to women whether in t-shirt form with something like this or in street harassment with “cat-calls” and lewd sexual gestures, the patriarchy of men’s control and power over women is reinforced yet again.

So when a man wears a shirt that reads “If you’re already this close, why don’t you just suck my dick?” what are we to make of this? Is this just crude and typical guy humor? No, I don’t think so. Men, women, everybody engages in stupid, crude humor but when it becomes an immediate projection of sexual aggression similar to street harassment, that’s not funny, witty, rebellious or charming. It serves no purpose other than for men to exert their patriarchal bullshit sense of physical and sexual power over women. This is essentially delusional and idiotic men from the normalized pornographic culture that says treating women like you would a doormat, a sexual object of no humanity or worth, likes being treated like this. In many ways, such shirts become mental Viagras, immediately creating this impressive yet ultimately fleeting and hallow masculinity for men to be crude and somehow held unaccountable for the words on the shirt. “Hey, I didn’t say anything, you read it sugah.” In other words, its what they’re thinking, what they believe, what they think is appropriate and an acceptable way to talk to people, namely women.

But this isn’t just for gender issues and men’s sexual aggression against women. Just as in any areas of patriarchy you find sexist oppression, there are elements of racism through stereotypes. Can you start to sense who these shirts are marketed towards? A very specific demographic, isn’t it? And where there are issues of racism and discrimination are often the general glorifications of physical violence as well as generally being “rebellious” by deliberately being insensitive and “un-PC.” As a culture, we don’t encourage sensitivity. With how stigmatized Politically Correct has become, the cool thing isn’t to use a respectful words, its cool to go around with the “I don’t care who I offend” Eminem/Carmelo Anthony/Avril Lavigne/Ozzie Guillen type attitude that operates under the guise of being raw, real, and unfiltered.

Warming Up: For Exhibit A we have the obvious offender in Urban Outfitters. You’ll remember that they carried the infamous “Ghettopoly” board game a while back so these people aren’t very bright. Anyways, they chime in with some fratty type humor with these losers. “Down with panties and “Let’s make a dirty movie.” hahahah awesome shirt, Brad! Dude those panties will drop real quick when these chicks see it! Idiot.

Head on over to the women’s section of print t-shirts and you find….nothing remotely like what they got at men’s. Surprise? The only t-shirt I could find objectionable was one that just had the first names of famous supermodels which was just blah. This presents an interesting situation. Sexual aggression becomes extremely gendered because it’s a man only thing to street harass, to wear crude sexually charged t-shirts. In that sense, it becomes a sort of unearned gender male privilege to not be subject to sexual harassment or the visual filth of these types of t-shirts. But even so, as you’ll see below, there are a few t-shirts geared towards women to essentially “wear t-shirts like a man”/”have sex like a man”/engage in raunch culture.

Now we’re jumping straight into the icy water with this group. Presenting, the people of Santorum over at T-Shirt Hell.

Let’s see, where to start? How about “Ladies don’t spit” or the aforementioned “If you’re already this close, why don’t you just suck my dick?” or how about “Thousands of my potential children died on your daughter’s face last night”. Obviously these folks are going straight for the jugular with flat out offensive material under the guise of being funny, over-the-top and “we’ll say anything, fuck the FCC!” (raises fist).

How about
“I like my women like I like my coffee (ground and in the freezer).”

”If this is on your floor tomorrow…WE TOTALLY FUCKED (now go make me some breakfast, bitch)”

”Pirates do it for the booty.”

”Save a horse, ride a cowboy.”

”Soldiers need hummers. Please support the cause.”

”Everything is bigger in Texas.”

”I’m ready for a female president [to sit on my cock]”

Or, if you saunter over to the idiots at YQue.com how about some t-shirts poking fun and celebrating the rape cases involving famous celebrities? Free Kobe. Free R.Kelly. Or if mass-murder is your calling, how about Charles Manson?

If those aren’t to your liking, the “Anti-PC” “Anti-establishment” band-wagon is gathering steam. The conservative case here with these t-shirts is essentially that the world has gone soft and that actually having and respectfully recognizing difference, different likes and preferences and lifestyles and cultures is a bad thing.

”I Hate The Environment.” Real witty.

Don’t like the spirit of America, I mean, “illegal immigrants” coming to the US? How about this shirt. How about some more latino stereotypes?

Remember those Burger King and Jack In The Box commercials celebrating macho meat-eating men? Now this.

How does the old saying go? “To not know is bad, to not want to know is worse”? Disturbing to see how that motto doesn’t resonate anymore.

Remember how I was talking about Raunch Culture being celebrated and normalized? Kinda like how that Pussycat Dolls “Dontcha” song is so popular?

“I taught your boyfriend that thing you like.”

”I taught your girlfriend that thing you like.”

Women pressured to make out with other women at parties? Girls Gone Wild normalization, anyone? In comes this bs.

Or how about jokes about rape or even child-rape, or those who are pro-choice?

T-Shirt Hell obviously creates a majority of the crap you’ve seen thus far. They’re fully aware of how offensive this is, but for the sake of the almighty dollar (and from what I imagine to be a crappy sense of rebellion and ego) they produce this shit at the expense of women and inevitably, men.

Even with all this, I mean god it’s just a t-shirt isn’t it? Obviously these people aren’t being serious. It’s just a joke. You’re taking this too seriously.

It is a t-shirt. So just as long as you put it on a t-shirt means its free from hate-spewing, sexism, racism, homophobia? If we’re going to be critical of oppressive legislation, the media, the tv shows we watch, the movies we buy, the music we listen to…why not the t-shirts that we see day-to-day?

What can I do? Seems like these crazies aren’t going to listen to reason so what’s the point of arguing. Aren’t you just promoting their website and giving more attention to them?

It’s true, I am giving attention to these websites and so I’ll try to offer some alternatives in the process.

A. You can write them to protest their garbage with something along the lines of:

Tshirthell.com – info@tshirthell.com

Urban Outfitters – http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/custserv/customerservicemain.jsp?cid=7

YQue – admin@yque.com

One Horse Shy – http://www.onehorseshy.com/customer_service/

B. Spend your money elsewhere. There are plenty of great people out there making anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist, conscious, responsible t-shirts that don’t pull Andrew Dice Clay shtick and actually have something meaningful, original and funny to say.

www.blacklava.com is one famous for their “I will not love you long time” t-shirts. I know there are more out there…let’s hear everybody’s favorite t-shirt joint 🙂

###UPDATE: Hey everybody! Found some more dumb t-shirts.

Dirty Shirty is a real piece of crap. Basically, this whole gimmick is trying to cash in on the Christina Aguilera drrty bit (which the video itself, I know to some has potentially redemptive qualities if you take it as a satirical piece criticizing the double-standards of sex, gender and music) and the idea that women who participate in Raunch Culture are then more attractive as women. Look at the shirts for men and women, many (6) of the t-shirts for women loudly display “DIRTY” while for men, only 3 do. For men, we have some frat-type humor t-shirts. That is where in comes in with this t-shirt in the men’s section: Because men think with their dicks, dude. You know, and those women always think with their hearts.

This Gives a Whole New Meaning to 'Freudian Slip'

tekanji
The Almighty Penis... I mean Dagger
Penis Envy

And people said I was crazy when I talked about “girl power” being not much more than male appropriation of female power. Howard Chaykin’s illustrations of Red Sonja take this to an extreme by giving her a penis dildo strategically placed dagger.

She still has the chainmail bikini to give fanservice to the boys, but Red Sonja has always been a strong (both physically and mentally) character and this illustration makes me wonder if the idea of a woman holding that much power herself was so threatening to Chaykin’s subconscious that he ended up giving her a consolation penis. No one’s accusing him of deliberately doing this (because, well, how would we know either way unless he came out and said something?), but come on. Can you honestly say that you saw this picture and didn’t go, “Whoa, she has a penis!”?

Via Dance of the Puppets.

The ups and downs of gender in the CG movie Ark

tekanji

So, I finally got around to watching the movie Ark today. The first half hour or so got me really excited. The rest… well, let’s just say that the movie could have benefitted from an education regarding Women in Refrigerators.

The rest of the article is cut for massive spoilers that will ruin your ability to ever watch this movie if you read them. That being said, if you have already seen the movie or never intend to see it, please read on.

I. The Good

First there was Jallak. The movie opens with him doing the whole “protect the children” spiel when his commander and another fellow soldier want to shut down hibernation pods because the kids in them are Cevean. This gave me a warm fuzzy because usually the role of protector is relegated to women because it allows them to transgress the boundaries into the public/aggresive sphere without compromising their femininity. Them showing a man as having paternal instincts, to me at least, stood out.

Then there is the one kid who wakes up after Jallak takes a stand, Amarinth. She is adopted as his daughter. It skips to 16 years later (making her 18) and she is shown generating an electric current. Cool. The viewer already knows that she’s related somehow to the legendary priestess, Amiel, who built the Ark — the machine that is to help the races leave their dying planet.

And then… then the movie pops out three more surprises: the ruler of the Storrions (the militant race that has enslaved the Ceveans) is a woman, their lead scientist is a woman, and Jallak’s second in command (he’s the commander of the army at this point) is a woman. I mean, not one but three stereotype breaking women? There’s so much potential there I almost wet my pants.

The Empress is shown as a woman torn between her people/duty and saving her own skin. Although she is complicit in the slavery and war-like behaviour of her nation, she takes a strong stand against the nobility who want to build smaller ships and leave before the planet collapses. She also has a clearly evil adviser named Baramanda (he’s a total Sephiroth type).

We don’t get to see much of Piriel, but it’s made very clear that she’s Jallak’s second in command in the army. The doctor is introduced as the Storrians “leading scientist,” and even though the first scene she gets is of her failing, the viewer knows it’s because her task is impossible rather than because she isn’t smart enough.

Early on Amarinth’s love interest, Rogan, is introduced. He is a rebel Cevan who tries to assasinate Jallak to prevent the Storrions from obtaining data on the whereabouts of the body of Amiel. He gets some cool fighting scenes, then his gun craps out on him and he surrenders.

Amarinth gets exactly one cool scene: after all hell breaks loose, she uses her techno powers to power the escape vehicle for her and Rogan. All of her screaming and freaking out about the situation is mitigated by the way that she and Rogan talk about how she “saved him” and stuff.

Oh, and did I mention that all of the women have plausible proportions? None of them have huge boobs. All of the costumes are beautiful and skintight, but it’s not in a way that causes you to focus on their bodies to the exclusion of the rest of them. My only gripe in this area is that the leading men got more variety in their body shapes and age markers than the women did. In fact, for a long while I had a hard time telling the doctor and Piriel apart because they’re both short-haired blondes. Only one visibly old woman appeared in the movie (excepting random people in the street), but she just had a cameo. Jallak was clearly a distinguished gentleman of some years, and even Baramanda is clearly older than Rogan.

II. The Bad

The first 30 minutes sets up so many awesome possibilities, but things start going downhill from there. It all starts with Jallak being caught as a traitor when Baramanda calls him out on the incident with the kids in the first scene where he got Amarinth from. He gets arrested and Baramanda goes to get Amarinth because they now know that her blood will make the Ark run. I’m sitting around witing for her to bust out with her cool techno powers, but no. Not even a little bit. After her screaming and struggling ineffectually with her captor — who is a machine — Rogan comes to save her. And gets a cool fighting scene while he does so. Amarinth sits back and does nothing.

Then she wants to save her father and says that she’ll do it her way. Cool, right? Except her way involves her giving herself up to Baramanda with no actual assurance that anyone will be safe. You’d think she’d try to bust out her cool machine powers to stop the machine that’s about to kill her dad. But, no, she walks into the middle of the square and says, “Here I am, take me.” Great plan there. Great plan.

Rogan and Jallak join forces after Baramanda double-crosses Amarinth (and puts her to sleep, of course, which shelves her so that the boys can take centre stage). They get some wicked cool fight scenes. Remember Piriel, that female commander I mentioned? Yeah, no one else does, either. She got one scene telling Jallak how he had disappointed her and how he was on his own, and then she doesn’t show up again until after all the action has gone down. But her arm was shot when the rioting began! Wow!

Speaking of the rioting, that’s when we see the last of the Empress. But, I mean, she was clearly evil for asking her nobles to go ahead with the plans when it seemed like the whole finding Amiel’s body thing was a bust. Some pissant rebel shoots her in the head while she’s being all, “I’d never abandon you, my loyal subjects!” Her anti-climactic ending was assured by then, however, because Baramanda had been stealing the limelight with his blood-sucking bug power and obsession with Amarinth.

So, Amarinth has been out cold this whole time and Baramanda starts sucking her blood to steal her techno powers and get all the glory for himself. The doctor starts arguing with him, secure in her knowledge that he wouldn’t dare do anything to her because she’s the only one who knows how to run the Ark. Except for her assistant. Who apparently is in love with her. Gag me.

Just like Amarinth, the doctor gets taken down by Baramanda because her armour of moral outrage just didn’t cut it for protection. She’s actually shot, and killed. Her last line? She tells assistant-boy, “Just shut up and hold me.” No joke.

So, anyway, Baramanda continues sucking Amarinth’s “life force”. The boys bust in, but only manage to take out Baramanda’s guards before he gets his bugs back in her. At this point his blood triggers Amiel’s body to sort of wake up and shoot green things through him before disappearing. She also activates the Ark with all that stuff.

Baramanda is down for the count, and the boys rush to try to help Amarinth (still unconscious) while the assistant holds the body of the doctor. Piriel joins up at some point, sporting that wound I mentioned earlier, and the boys plus her take Amarinth to the escape pods. She decides to sacrifice herself to stay with Jallak try to shut down the Ark. Rogan and Amarinth (kicking and screaming like the helpless little girl she is) get sent to the location of the second ark.

You should know what comes next: Amarinth is told that she is to sacrifice herself to power the ark, of course! Women who get too powerful can’t be left to survive, you see. And she has to do it because Baramanda (remember him?) has joined with the other ark and is coming to kill everyone like the one-dimensional psychopath he is. She gets to have one kiss with Rogan and then she merges with her Ark for what has to be the most painful mech battle I have ever witnessed. And I saw Iczer-One, mind you.

Here’s the only real fighting scene that Amarinth gets in the entire movie. And it consists of her being knocked over and stepped on until she gets lucky and grabs the residential sector off of Baramanda’s back. Giving her father and Piriel a chance to sacrifice themselves by shutting down the core. And by that I mean that Jallak has been hacking the code to shut it off while Piriel stood around looking pretty and asking him if he was done yet.

Rogan lives at the end to give this long speech about how Amarinth taught the two races so much about living together and made The Big Sacrifice.

III. Let’s recap

All the women introduced are dead with most of them not having done anything worth note.

Amarinth, the lead female, has had to sacrifice herself because her Phoenix-class powers are too awesome to let her live (forgive the comic book reference, but it’s the same paradigm being used).

Piriel, who presumably has military experience, was never given a scene in which she could kick ass, but Jallak and Rogan were given several painfully long Matrix-esque fighting scenes. And, don’t forget that after her brave speech where stays behind with Jallak, she does squat except for die along with him.

The Empress, who should have been a driving force, is nothing more than a plot device used to introduce Baramanda, who is a one-dimensional Sephiroth clone. She also dies in a completely unbelievable manner. Honestly, even if there hasn’t been a riot in her entire lifetime (which is highly doubtful), at the first sign of trouble she would have been taken to a secure location — or, most realistically, the machine she was riding in would have snapped up a shield. Having her stand up and be like, “LOOK AT ME, I AM AN IDEAL TARGET!” just makes her, and her guards, look stupid and incompetent. Which flies in the face of the previous times we’ve seen her.

The doctor’s expertise on running the Ark comes to naught, and she’s killed because… well, I’m not exactly sure why they killed her. Maybe because she could have stopped Baramanda from fucking things up so badly?

Ultimately, I’m disappointed that the movie started off with so much potential to do something different but instead decided to fall back on tired old cliches with a tired old ending and a big ‘ol heaping of misogyny. In some ways I think it’s worse than if it had been honest about its intentions from the beginning, because then I wouldn’t have gotten excited and I would have been able to enjoy it for the carbon-copy cliche that it really was.

I'm flashed, yet somehow it's my fault

lake-desire

Yesterday, my friend and I were sitting on my apartment’s balcony eating dinner when something happened. My building overlooks another apartment building that is across the street. One of the neighbors in this building was sitting with his chair beside his open porch window, turned sideways. My friend remarked, “That guy keeps staring at us.”

I looked, and saw a pink cock in a rocking hand. My first instinct was to yell at him, publicly call him on what he was doing. But then I thought what if he comes over here? He knows where I live. “[Friend],” I said. “He’s masturbating. Let’s go inside.”

We lost our appetites, and were no longer comfortable sitting outside. Our mobility was limited by our fear of this man.

When relaying the story to friends, I had a few laughs with friends. But I was asked innocently, “Guess no more wearing skimpy outfits!” (We weren’t–not that I owe anyone that explanation–but so what if we were?) I was teased, “Were you wearing skirts?” And I was told, “That’s what you get for looking in someone’s window.”

My friend and I are involved in someone’s fetish against our wills, and we’re the ones questioned by people who are generally supportive. Hell, the first thing I do is defend that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But so when would the wrong have started? If my friend and I had been egging the guy on? By being physically affectionate towards each other? Sunbathing in our bikinis?

Pimp Your/My Oppression

Luke
[First a big shout-out to Tekanji, Lake Desire and Shrub.com for giving me the chance to guest blog! My name is Luke and I rushed this post out to press once I read jfpbookworm’s great post below that I think is a good branch-off point. I warn, however, that this post is a real behemoth in length. The more I went back to it, the more I added on so you might want to pack a ham-sandwich before diving in or something. Anyways, i’d love to get your feedback, thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc.]

We’ve all seen them.

It’s some night-owl hour and in-between reruns of Roseanne and ElimiDate you see for 30 seconds the uniquely American bazaar of young, thin, often blonde women with flowing hair and large breasts: In some form, you see “The Yes Girls.”

All-too-discreetly advertising itself as none other than a phone-sex line for men where young women dressed (or undressed, for that matter) in lace and satin seductively grasp their phones, bodies supine with eyes gazed towards the camera whispering lines of “We always say ‘yes’” like they know exactly what customers of the phone-sex line would want to hear in some meta-rape fantasy sort of way.

But phone-sex lines aren’t by any means some taboo cultural anomaly servicing the closet desires of perverts or deviants. Rather, their persistent popularity speaks largely to the ways in which men’s (and women’s) sexual identities are shaped—let’s make it “warped”—by what they’re told their fantasies are and in turn reinforced to fantasize again and again.

So placed between Roseanne, perhaps the lone television representation ever of a working-class white America with a stereotypically unattractive and wholly uncompromising woman actress at the helm who articulated a big “fuck off, Dan Quayle” season after award-winning season and ElimiDate, the “reality-TV” hit where petite, scantily clad women compete in a lascivious macho fantasy for the attention and affection of a man, usually tall, white, muscular and unable to hold a non-sex ridden conversation, in order to avoid getting “eliminated” each round, watching The Yes Girls gives us a jump-off point as to how men specifically are taught/cultured/socialized to think about women and sex. The two seemingly become synonymous if you begin to imagine what such commercials essentially say to men: “They’ll do anything…they never say no…they only wants sex…I must have her…I must have them…I must have sex.”

Even as I’m writing this, I’m hearing about how yet another season of The Bachelor is coming to ABC. Forget that every, and I mean EVERY relationship post-Bachelor has crumbled, forget that there is hardly a gender-equality of male and female bachelors and bachelorettes (didn’t ABC only make ONE The Bachelorette?) people love to see not just the paternalistic Cinderella chivalry fantasy anymore, they want to see one pimped out for the new age.

So if that’s what men are conditioned to want, to see as the ideal fantasy and to revolve their sexual and gender identities around, how do they go about achieving a constant state of sex with young women (who are often white, Latina, or mixed race)? If that’s the fantasy, then what’s the situation of the reality and what men are advised and told to do about it and how to go about it?

Based on the flurry of men’s “how to get women” books published largely in the past several years, you sense that what was once the immediate concern of meeting a soulmate, a wife, a husband, a life-partner has become one centered on men meeting and sleeping with as many “girls,” “bitches” or “chicks” as possible.

Like Samantha Jones drawing on the so-called liberating power of no-strings-attached sex (or “sex like a man”), the goal of “getting laid” then comes at a cost of women being seen as new hybrid of animal-commodity. That is, “animal” in the sense that these men’s advice books weave an intricately bullshit guide which adheres to the beliefs that #1, the behavior of women, like animals, is by nature predictable which involves a lot (and I mean a lot of animal watching), and #2, women’s bodies are the only things valued that one must possess through the consummation of sex—and I mean a lot of sex. And “commodity” in the sense that women, reduced simply to women’s bodies, are seen as goods that exchange hands through “purchase” by way of deception, backhanded-coercion and manipulation by men under the guise of having “skills” with women.

Just read the titles of some of these books that have boldly emerged recently in a symbol of immediately impressive yet ultimately fleeting macho bravado based identity:

–What Really Works With Women: Do What Works, Get What Matters To You (2005)
–The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks (2003)
–The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005)
–The Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed Possible No Matter What You Look Like or How Much You Make (2004)
–How To Succeed With Women (1998)
–Seduce Me! What Women Really Want (2003)
–How To Get The Women You Desire Into Bed (1992)
–The System: How To Get Laid Today! (2003)

The covers alone of many of these books tell a story in itself. On the cover of The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks, we have the classic macho trucker/truck mud flap decal and sticker of a caricatured large-breasted woman with hair flowing in the wind.

In The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, we see another silhouette this time of women sprawled out in sexual stripper poses while the shape of a man twice their size stands proudly drawing upon celebrations of pimps and the prostitution of women.

Perhaps most ridiculously in The System: How To Get Laid Today! is a drawing of a young woman dressed in a corset, leather thigh-highs and cat-ears on knees and elbows seductively drinking a large bowl of what appears to be milk.

Dare venture into the book descriptions and you’ll find the animal-commodity storytelling continues flavored with the old “nuts and sluts” mentality made famous during the Kobe Bryant rape trial:

“We’ll take you from the day you’re born to the day you die and show you how women can be manipulated, frustrated, and ultimately dominated throughout the course of a man’s life. By illustrating the insanity of the female mind, we’ll show you why the flawed chick psyche causes them to continuously fall for the a**hole, no matter how many times they get burned.” – From the book description of A Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks

Or you check out similar-themed websites like FastSeduction.com where you see things like:

“You have to be the MAN who has all the sexual power. And when a woman (no matter how hot) sees and feels the presence of a man whom she recognizes as the dominant one while SHE isn’t, she does what every woman does – that is SURRENDERS to the more powerful being. And all that acting like she’s hot and knows she’s the stuff and all those other “head up in the air” tricks are just a test and a way to weed out all the men who are less powerful than her and don’t know their role as a MAN.” – FastSeduction.com’s “Be the Alpha/Dominant Male”

Ultimately, these books provide a crude and patriarchal and thus attractive-to-men analysis of why, if they haven’t “gotten any,” the women they want aren’t attracted to them. Of course it’s the same spiel that’s been revolving in pornography for year and only now seen in the forms of Eminem’s celebrity and the pandemic spread of “pimp” in the American lexicon: Women must like being treated terribly and that’s why they deserve what they get. Women must like bad-boys. Good-guys and nice-guys “finish” last.

To women, of course, the message then becomes that they should validate and be attracted to these images. Women must like being objectified and degraded, why else would they allow themselves to be put on a meat-rack on shows like ElimiDate? Why else would women like the delinquent Mark characters or the abusive Fischer characters on Roseanne and why else would women send love letters to convicted killers like Scott Peterson. He’s a bad-boy misunderstood with a soft-spot inside, really. Women, remember, it’s your job to change him and take away the beastly exterior. Or in other words, be like Belle before he runs out of rose petals and runs out on you, right?

Read the back-pages of any so-called “Magazines for Men” like GQ, Maxim, FHM, or Stuff and you see it’s older cousins in shady black-and-white rectangle ads: “Pheromones proven to drive women wild!…100 pick-up lines guaranteed to work with the hottest girls.” Listen to any recent episodes of Tom Leykis and you’ll hear “Leykis 101” in which men are taught specifically how to “bang chicks” through deception and macho posturing.

The message is clear: This is how you get that and we know this works because they instinctively respond to it—it’s in their DNA. You’d almost think you were learning how to catch Sockeye salmon off the Alaska coast. What lure do I use? Where do I go? When do I know to “go in for the kill”?

Head off into Amazon’s “Bestsellers” or autobiography section and you find the hugely popular I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max. Max, a Duke law-school grad who writes about his supposed true-life escapades, proclaims proudly

“My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world.”

Again, even more telling than the subject of controversy itself is often the cultural response to it. Read any of the many five-star reviews in which men and women have bought, read and proudly promote the book to others and the attitude of praise and dismissal of any criticism of such praise is unbridled:

“Make no mistake, Tucker Max is a vile vile person, but his own admittance. And if you try not to think to much about his victims…er…marks…er… girlfriends/hook-ups, then this is a hilarious book.” – Jake Mckee

“For the people who think that he’s some terrible person who has sex with poor innocent girls, give me a break. It takes 2 to tango as they say. As my wife put it, if there weren’t so many whores in the world he’d have a lot less to write about.” – Travis Stroud

“Tucker Max is pure genius. An excellent writer, and even better comedian, he has Michael Jordan’s bball skills when it comes to women, and an eclectic, highly exciting group of friends and adventures he chronicles in this absolute must-read book.” – Michelle Park

“This stuff can make you laugh until you pee your pants, but I would only recommend it for those who can take racist, sexist, and despicable jokes lightly for that seems to be the life of Tucker Max. In other words, this book is beautiful.” – Samantha Miller

“I loved this book. The stories are funny and remind me of my college days. Good times, good times.” – Jeff White

So the response then isn’t that his behavior lacks repulsive qualities deserving of unflinching dismissal but rather that his life is humorous to women and men and a cause-of-envy to young men in particular. Like he says, summoning all the bad-boy machismo he can, “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.” He knows he’s going to hell (well, assuming one believes in it) and that’s why he couldn’t care less. He’s a bad-boy and a “rebel” engaging in behavior so supposedly gutsy that it is suggestively a this-is-how-I-did-it guide as to having “success” with women. Why else would many aspiring sports-athletes read biographies and autobiographies about Michael Jordan, Brett Favre or Tiger Woods? “Know the legend, be the legend” as the saying goes?

But this type of macho posing behavior isn’t new and Tucker Max, as much as I hate to say it, doesn’t deserve all the blame. Look at what he probably grew up watching. Films like Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Old School, Road Trip, American Pie and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder all celebrate the stereotypical prime of sexual masculinity through the oppression of women: have as much sex with as many women as possible regardless of consequences, engage in high-risk drinking and drugs without any negative repercussions, feel no emotions, display little conscience and give the middle-finger while yelling “feminazi man-hating pussy faggot!” to anyone who says different. It’s college and that’s what you’re supposed to do in college, right? Or, as the Sean Michael Scott character in Road Trip says with his famous Stifler charm “Think about it Josh, you’re in college. The window of opportunity to drink and do drugs and take advantage of young girls is getting smaller by the day.”

The unfiltered Virginia Slims message here is the same. To women and young girls, this says that there’s a proper way to act as women and to have fun, to have some sort of an authentic experience. Worse yet, the message is that the only thing they have going for them is their bodies and by extension, the approval from men of their bodies and the use of those bodies for sex.

But to men, the message isn’t as closely examined or seen as having any sort of significance. Just as women are taught in this way to self-hate and reduce their own human being to an ass, breasts and vagina while validating so called “bad-boys,” the message to men is that this is what men do, this is what an authentic manhood looks like and this is what you want…this is how you’ll be happy. To so-called “nice guys,” the imagery leads to some dumbassed and disturbing deductions: “women like to be objectified, degraded and essentially treated like shit so even though I know something aint right, there’s no moral dilemma if I’m going to objectify, degrade and treat women like shit. Hey, at least I’m not a bad guy!”

So it’s clear then that young men are buying into these books and misogynistic attitudes in hopes of navigating the social scenes with some sense of direction in terms of women. And that I think is where a significant amount of unseen danger is. Not only does this supremely hurt women through yet again another form of men’s oppression of women, but it also denies men and young boys the ability to engage responsibly, honestly and freely.

We’ve all seen this. This reinforced sexist, homophobic and racist socially constructed cultural norm to nurture men simply as emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive whose only purpose is to engage in macho high-risk behavior, see women as animal-commodities and to have misogynist meta-rape fantasies by removing feeling any sort of personal human emotion, all sorts of attachment or desire for more in things like sex or relationships.

And this, to deprive men (and women) from living real lives and identities of free-choice without inflicting pain and suffering on others…to me nothing is more anti-male, man-hating or male-bashing than that.

Gunning Down Romance

jfpbookworm
[Quick intro in lieu of the full introduction I haven’t bothered to write yet: tekanji invited me to guest-blog here a few days ago. I don’t currently maintain a blog, but I moderate the Gender Roles and Patriarchy Hurts Men Too communities on LiveJournal, the latter of which I’ve crossposted this article to. Like the other bloggers here, I’m especially interested in the intersection of feminism and popular culture.]

There have been quite a few discussions lately – on Hugo Schwyzer’s blog, at Punk Ass Blog, and at Pandagon (also this post), Saucebox and Neurath’s Boat – about young men who think that feminism and heterosexual male sexuality are incompatible. Which is even more interesting given the discussions here and Putting the “Fist” in “Pacifist” about how most men aren’t feminist *enough* to be worth getting involved with.

I originally started this post as a “how-to guide” for these (presumably) sincere but frustrated nice guy types (I’m probably giving their professed sincerity more credence than it deserves, but the ones who are just the larval form of MRAs don’t really deserve much mention – I’m talking more about the ones Protagoras calls “Shy Feminist Men”), but was quickly overwhelmed by how much “how to” would be needed, and it was increasingly obvious what was fueling these misconceptions.

I. Patriarchy and the Single “Nice Guy”

I think the main problem this sort of “nice guy” has is that, while he tries to meet a few feminist standards (no means no, don’t harass, etc.), he still buys into a lot of patriarchal bullshit, namely:

  • Sex and desire are inherently dirty, shameful, and degrading;
  • Being attracted to someone entitles you to their time, attention, affection, body, whatever;
  • Women are less interested in sex than men (and consequently use it as a means to achieve other ends);
  • Women are less attracted to “visual” characteristics than men – so if she’s not attracted to you, it’s because (a) you did or said the wrong thing; (b) there’s something wrong with her standards (she only likes “jerks, “she’s a “gold-digger,” etc.); or (c) she’s a lesbian.
  • To not have your attraction reciprocated is a serious insult, or a statement about your worth as a person;
  • Heterosexual “courtship” consists of an active man approaching a passive woman, and her acceptance or rejection of his “offer”;
  • Any interaction that doesn’t ultimately lead to sex is a failure;
  • A conventionally attractive partner is a symbol of status and a panacea for depression;

And so on. But because the feminist imperatives are explicitly expressed while the patriarchal ones are harder to dig out, feminism gets all the blame for the conflict, and the “nice guys” conclude that feminism is something for when they’re older, but not now when it would involve work or sacrifice.

II. And Everything You Thought Was Just So Important Doesn’t Matter

About this point, I realized that there were going to be far too many of these patriarchal assumptions to go into detail about all of them, other people had already begun to do this, and besides, they could be summed up in a single sentence:

“Everything you’ve heard about relationships is wrong.”

III. Shoehorning Life Into Glass Slippers

The reason why our model is so erroneous, I think, is because of the essentially private nature of most relationships, which means none of us have much in the way of direct observation to rely on – and observations of any relationships other than our own are likely to be incomplete (i.e., we see them as they are in public, but not as they are by themselves). What fills the gaps in our knowledge are “cultural narratives” – ideas about how the world works that we’re generally familiar with and sound plausible enough. When it comes to (heterosexual) relationships, the cultural narrative is one of “storybook romance,” and it’s one that’s fundamentally flawed.

The problem with “storybook romance” is that life isn’t a storybook, and attempts to force experience into a narrative structure are not only prone to getting it wrong, they’re prone to getting it wrong in systematic ways, and those ways promote harmful misunderstandings.

IV. And There’s Gonna Be A Happy Ending, But That’s Only the Beginning

The first way that the cultural romance narrative gets human relationships wrong is by assigning a beginning, middle and end to them – and by encouraging us to look at relationships this way while they’re in progress. This gives us expectations that our relationships will take these forms – most notably:

  • That a nonreciprocated attraction is merely a relationship in the “beginning” stage;
  • There’s a “middle stage” with easily identifiable and understandable conflicts; and
  • If those conflicts are successfully resolved, there’s a “happily ever after” stage in which the relationship has no more major problems.

Though I’ve been using the phrase “storybook romance” to describe this cultural narrative, even something as conventionally “unromantic” as a one-night casual fling can get mapped onto this structure (meet, flirt, go off together; beginning, middle, end), with the same harmful assumptions (if she’s not into you, flirt more; once you’ve left together it’s smooth sailing, etc.)

V. What’s Montage? It Is Nor Hand, Nor Foot, Nor Arm, Nor Face…

The second way that “storybook romance” as a cultural narrative lies in the necessity to compress the relationship (and the character introduction) into 90 minutes of film, or 400 pages, or a three-minute song, or whatever the medium dictates. So we usually get, instead of a real incipient relationship, a quick montage of “fun dates” (usually culminating in a scene on a playground) without problems, “downtime,” or any concerns whatsoever, either within or without the relationship.

VI. Attack Of the B-Plots

“Storybook romance” is also problematic because of our insistence in including it at every opportunity. I can’t remember the last CRPG I played that didn’t have a romantic subplot (probably one of the NES Final Fantasies); hell, I’ve even seen sports games that had a rudimentary dating sim tacked on. And pretty much any random movie is going to pair off the leading man and leading woman by the end of the film. In a patriarchal movie culture where “lead actor” and “leading man” are virtual synonyms (with the exception of movies where the romance is the main plot), this has the effect of making leading women into love interests first and characters second.

VII. But I Like Those Stories!

I’m not advocating that we do away with romantic plots and subplots, any more than I’d advocate that we chuck high fantasy because the magic described therein isn’t real. I’ve enjoyed plenty of stories in each genre – and that’s pretty much what this romance narrative is, even when it’s not published by Harlequin: a genre with its own conventions and expectations, that’s there to make it easier for the audience. It’s just that when it comes to fantasy, we don’t expect the conventions of the genre to accurately reflect our own experience, and we don’t demand that every story include elements of the genre.

Conclusion: What Now?

“Everything you’ve heard about relationships is wrong.”

So what do we do? At this point, where all we know is our own ignorance, we’re all pretty much without a net, which can be both liberating (I don’t have to play this role that isn’t me!) and terrifying (so what do I do instead?).

What’s needed, I think, is a way to get these patriarchal assumptions, and real-life counterexamples, out into the open, so that we can develop a more authentic understanding of what a truly feminist form of initiating heterosexual relationships would belike. (You’d think with all the time abstinence-only sex ed frees up, there’d be plenty of time to talk about relationship stereotypes…) Heterosexual feminist/pro-feminist men, in particular, need to combat the assumption that this patriarchal model of “romance” is the only reliable one for relationships.

How NOT to get me to support your cause

tekanji
The Right Reason?
The “Right” Reason?

Note to Mother’s Rights Activists: If you want my support, do not use sexist advertising like the image above.

My tits will never feed babies. This is by my choice. Not you, not your group, not anyone has the right to decide what the “right” way to use my tits are.

And, frankly, setting up this “right” way — ie. breastfeeding — sets up the “wrong” way as any way that is not involving a child. Way to reinforce that women should feel shame about ourselves. That breasts should only be seen as neutral when there’s a baby attached to them. That every woman wants to be a mother, and furthermore that they should be a mother.

You can decide how you want to use your breasts, but leave my breasts — and the breasts of all other women — out of it. Leave them out of your sexist, anti-woman, anti-non-mother campaign. Leave me out of it. Because I will never support you.

Update: Darth Sidhe has posted an excellent analysis on why this campaign is anti-woman.

Hat tip to Darth Sidhe, image found via cf_hardcore LJ.

Wonder Woman brings up problems with E3's dress code

tekanji

I blogged about my mixed feelings regarding E3’s crackdown on booth babes a while ago, but it seems the ambiguous wording has caused some problems. Kasey Poteet, a VJ for MusicPlusTV, decided to put the policy to the test by dressing up as Wonder Woman.

I. Against the rules? By the rules? What ARE the rules, anyway?

If you’re wondering what Wonder Woman costume would merit being kicked out but don’t want to watch the film, you can see a screenshot of Kasey’s outfit here:

Inappropriate Attire
Inappropriate?

At first glance I could have told you that E3 would deem her attire inappropriate, seeing as she has on what amounts to a sparkly bathing suit. But, given the ambiguity of the rules I personally have seen, I believe her claim that she read through all the handbook carefully before deciding on her outfit.

What she says next, however, really sticks with me [emphasis mine]:

I would also like to point out that, uh, I am representing a game that they are showing here, wearing more clothes than the character from the game. And yet I’m still inappropriate to minors, which aren’t even allowed to be in the show. From what I understand it says 18 and over.

I’m going to address the latter point first, as I think it illustrates the weakness of using minors as a shield. If E3 allowed people under the age of 18 in, then it might carry more weight. I mean, while I’m not sure I personally agree, I can see the logic behind trying to stay away from “adult” themes and materials during an event that is attended by a lot of minors.

Putting off the discussion on whether or not a Wonder Woman costume is “adult” themed or not for the moment, I think that saying that claiming the dress code violation is offensive to children erases the entire reason behind the offense. The point is not — or at least I don’t think it should be — that sexuality, or sexiness is wrong or whatever, but rather that the abuse of booth babes was taking the focus away from the game by using women as sexual objects.

Which leads me to my next point…

II. Good for the game, not for the cosplayer?

Justice League: Heroes for PS2Another issue that has been overlooked by E3’s ban on booth babes, and apparently any woman atendee whom they deem inappropriate, is that it severely limits women’s ability to cosplay as female characters. Especially female characters in upcoming games.

Kasey’s costume was a pretty typical Wonder Woman costume. The one my sister wore for Halloween a few years ago wasn’t much different, in fact. I’m not sure if the featured game was Justice League: Heroes or not, but I’ve included a screencap of Wonder Woman from that on the left. No matter what incarnation — including the one with the skirt — Wonder Woman has always worn a glorified bathing suit.Inappropriate?

Other popular characters like Lara Croft, Rayne, even Rikku from Final Fantasy X-2 would be banned from potential cosplay lists given E3’s rules, too. While there are undoubtedly male characters, such as Conan or perhaps the Hulk, that are similarly limited, the laundry list of usual suspects isn’t nearly as long. In fact, I was kind of grasping for the two I mentioned.

I wish Kasey had given more airtime to her comment about how her costume wasn’t any worse, and perhaps showed less skin, than that of Wonder Woman in the game. This is an issue that has gotten swept under the rug by the language E3 has chosen to employ in its rules. If these kinds of costumes are inappropriate for the people attending the convention, then why are they acceptable in their showcased games? Why does E3 allow games that create these kinds of characters that are inappropriate to cosplay in their non-adult games?

III. Wonder Woman: Crusader for justice or perpetuator of raunch culture?

I don’t know how I feel about Kasey’s stance on all this. While trying to find more clips of her show, I checked out her profile on MusicPlusTV and MySpace. She’s out there being a VJ, which I think is cool. She took a stance and stuck to it; also cool.

What bugs me, though, is that she pushes herself as sexy first and a geek second. To clarify:

    Tits are not indecent

  1. She seems to cosplay as “sexy” characters on her show. From the two clips I could find, she cosplays in outfits that show off her figure. Okay, given what I said in Section II of this post, that in itself is not so surprising. Nor something I can get overly grumpy about, although I’d feel better if I knew that her male co-host also did the cosplay thing.
  2. The vast majorities of pictures of her that I saw were of her naked, partially naked, and/or in erotic poses. She’s a model, so she’s obviously proud of her body and it makes sense that she’d want to show it off. She’s also into fighting sexual censorship, which I admire, but I personally don’t think that her approach gainfully combats a sex negative society. Especially given the way that geek culture already objectifies fictional women as well as real geeks who happen to be women.
  3. She projects a ditzy persona.This last point probably pisses me off the most. Even her having a bubbly personality doesn’t explain her saying things like “[sometimes I’m] WAAAAAAY to thinky,” and just in general downplaying the intelligent woman that I’m convinced that she is.

Bringing that over to her activism at E3, I must admit that I was at first annoyed. I thought to myself, “Did she honestly think they were going to let her in???” But, having watched the clip and sat and thought about the issue, I don’t really think she did. I think her entire point was to bring light to this issue.

I don’t know if there was more discussion on this outside of the clip, or if it was brought up in a later episode. Because of that, I don’t know exactly what angle she was approaching it from. Given her brand of activism, I think part of it might be from the, “Look, they’re barring women who want to do this from doing it!” And I both agree and disagree with that sentiment — something to be discussed in further detail at a later date, although I will say that I find the way in which E3 has chosen to approach this issue as troublesome (ya think?).

I also think that she wanted to bring to light the hypocrisy of E3’s attitude towards real women versus their silence of the women they allow to be showcased in the games. At least, that’s what her one line about Wonder Woman’s in-game costume conveyed to me. Seeing as, you know, I ended up writing a lengthy post on the matter.

Overall, I’d have to say that despite not agreeing with the way in which Kasey conducts her politics, I am glad that she took a stand. I’m glad that her stand was passed around the internet and that I found it.

IV. Conclusion

Bringing things back to the original issue, about E3 and its ambiguous line about “appropriate” oufits… Wonder Woman is not rated M for mature. She’s not sexually explicit. What she, and Lara, and Rayne, and even friggin Rikku, are is objectified. For good, ill, or neutral, that’s the lot of most video game women. Up until this year, real women were dressing up in the same manner that the video game creators dressed up these characters. Because of this they, too, were objectified.

And E3’s enforcement of the dress code has done nothing to address this root cause. In fact, I’d go farther to say that it has covered it up like some dirty little secret. When the announcement to ban booth babes was first made, I was skeptical. And, I think this incident has caused me to realize why: the lack of booth babes at E3 has done nothing to change the boy’s club of video games, nothing to fight or even address the ever-present objectification of women, and in the end amounts to nothing but them becoming hypocritical moral police of what women can and can’t wear.

Via When Fangirls Attack.