djpretzel
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A consolidated 1-3000 torrent is imminent - stay tuned!
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Should be fixed now!
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Aight, you weathered the storm. Agreed on most points.
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it's probably a little extreme to compare Anita Sarkeesian to Malcolm X
Again, a point to Bleck.
I'll weather the oncoming storm.
Larry, weather the storm, for on it comes... in LARGEFONT, no less
...Cultural criticism is not equivalent to fighting for equal rights. Do not delude yourself otherwise.
When it comes to experiencing art, there are no rights, other than the right to abstain. That's almost the POINT of art itself!! If we're going to mount a coordinated response to Roger Ebert's stance that vidya games will never be art, we shouldn't start by treating them as LESS than art.
Equating ideology-infused diatribes about "offensive" content in art to the direct opposition of legal injustice & civil rights inequalities is a phenomenally bad idea. I'm surprised you'd touch it with a ten-foot pole. One group is arguing that artists are misusing their freedom; the other group is arguing for freedom itself. These are not equivalent, in the same way that an orangutan is not equivalent to an umbrella.
Anita is not Malcolm X. She's the 1960's grad student who wrote lengthy analyses of race in modern fiction that are long forgotten, while actual protesters were out getting shot, sprayed with water hoses, etc. fighting for tangible, real-world policy change that affected their lives.
There's a difference, in the same way that the nation of Russia is larger than a Cocker Spaniel.
Storm over, go clean yourself up.
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If the raving nutbags in the gaming community hadn't made Anita an international name she would be making kickstarter-funded videos for her core audience, would be unknown to the population at large and we wouldn't have a 153 page thread. And you know what, social progress is extremely messy and sometimes we don't always like the advocates for it.
I'd contend that she's not advocating for what I could consider social progress at all, but I can certainly agree that she's close enough to the ballpark that many will simply misconstrue her message as the more reasonable, positive, & progressive sentiment I wish it actually were. That's basically what Larry is saying, and it's hard to argue against. Only time will tell. That does feel like a rather patronizing assessment, to me, but perhaps this is a situation where pragmatism & patronizing go hand in hand.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't dissect and critique things here. I still don't think someone deserves a free pass from making ridiculous claims and reductionist, stale arguments, even if there's a good peripheral cause...
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I think the most reasonable stance is that Anita making people think about these things is a good thing, but also, her videos kind of suck
She's making some people think about these things, that's true. She's pissing other people off into a blind rage completely devoid of thought and apparently even basic decency. And still others aren't really thinking per se, they're just blindly nodding their heads in agreement with anything sold to them as promoting equality.
Net desirable effect? Uncertain... agreed on videos, though.
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To be frank, I'm honestly shocked that there are people posting here in actual support of her message.
Here's the thing... her message, at its very core, only needs a couple tweaks for me to completely support it, 110%.
It just needs to go from this:
"Games are sexist and promote sexist ideas and almost all female characters in games are illustrative of one or more offensive tropes. Also, patriarchy. ADOLESCENT MALE POWER FANTASIES!! <insert-unsubstantiated-claim-here>"...to this:
"Female characters in video games too often fall into a more limiting and less diverse set of roles. This should be addressed both for the goal of hopefully providing more positive/empowered female role models to gamers AND for the general aesthetic improvement and maturity of the medium."The two statements are soooooooo frustratingly close. And yet so very, very far... if you think the first version is hyperbole/travesty, watch her videos
Larry's more optimistic than I am; I don't think we get where we need to be until the discrepancy between the above statements is fully understood and appreciated, and Anita does NOT appear to be facilitating that.
This shift should be motivated by a desire to improve the medium, not by fear of offending and suffering the consequences.
Any outcome achieved by the latter is completely compromised and cancerous from the outset.
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Even assuming she's wrong, and that the real level of problems with the depiction of women in games lies well between her POV and "nothing's wrong", she's promoting a worthwhile re-examination of gender in games. There's a lot of negative chatter and consequences that go along with it, but her critique's a long-run net positive for games. The tropes won't fully go away, so I don't understand why so many people feel threatened, but game storytelling can continue to broaden and serve even more audiences, all while the current style of games stay around.
Ah, well, I don't feel the need to recapitulate dozens of pages of back-and-forth that I'll assume you read, but... she's regurgitating second-wave feminist rhetoric that was previously used to unsuccessfully argue for the censorship of pornography, and she represents a step backwards from third-wave feminism's more pragmatic emphasis on equal rights. In terms of the current style of games staying around, the way she forms her arguments makes it sound like she thinks they should not. If any of the things she cites as problematic and directly correlates (without a shred of causal evidence) with real-world behaviors and injustice are true, the current style of games should NOT stay around. You're not framing her shtick accurately. She's far more zero-sum than you're painting. Perhaps you're just saying "yes, yes, that's all well and good, but we know SOME of those games will stay around, and we'll have to be okay with that..." - in which case I think you'd be surprised how quickly you'd have a patriarchy sticker plopped on your forehead by someone who took offense at such defeatist (i.e. reasonable) notions.
Whether or not she's gotten a lot of silly gamers mad at her for hatin' on they games doesn't read on that, as far as I'm concerned... I'm not personally threatened, I'm just disappointed. I'm disappointed at her most aggravated haters, sure, but they didn't have very far to fall in my mind. I'm actually MORE disappointed by the lack of intellectual maturity of that cross-section of the gaming world that takes her seriously and doesn't have the faculties or context to know that they're being fed second-rate dogma from a bygone era... it's more than a little embarrassing, really, although I bear the curse of a relatively flat learning curve when it comes to high expectations...
There's also the commodification of outrage issue at play... or you can call it "the offense industry" if you prefer: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/09/16/the-offense-industry-on-the-offense/ - I think the Internet has really ushered in an entirely new sphere of content that one should be rightfully cynical towards. There's money changing hands, scandal and outrage sell, and moral compasses are being thoroughly milked for ad revenue.
You plop an "equality" label on someone's agenda and people stop scrutinizing it. That same individual gets attacked/targeted by morons, and not only do people stop scrutinizing it, they champion it, because to do otherwise would be to endorse death threats & death threat mentality. Are you for Anita... or are you for Death? And threats? Pick a side.
God forbid a third option exists...
Now I think you're making the "it doesn't matter" because she's an "agent of change" argument, but that seems rather hasty. Right now we've got a divisive shit show. It's what happens after the dust settles that matters. Fingers crossed.
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I think you have to COMPLETELY decouple the threats from the ideological arguments.
I think we can agree that no one deserves death threats for arguing about video games, however inanely and polemically they may do so.
I'm getting a little tired of these threats ballooning into media events, because I feel like they should be handled by the appropriate authorities and not become spectacle; most problematically, it gives attention to the perpetrators who clearly seek it, but I'm also afraid it imbues the targets with an unearned credibility in the eyes of some. Neither outcome is desirable; arguments should be evaluated on their merits & threats are the actions of cowards and do not facilitate that evaluation taking place.
There's a colloquial thinking that goes something like this:
The reasoning is that anyone desperate enough to threaten violence just to prevent an argument from being expressed must obviously hold a flawed counterargument. I think, instead, the point is this: anyone desperate enough to threaten violence just to prevent speech is pathetic. It doesn't really speak to the issue itself; people have done bad things in the name of GOOD causes, BAD causes, and everything in between."Well, if you're getting DEATH threats just for what you're trying to SAY, you MUST be doing something RIGHT!!" -
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First three pages read exactly like cherry picking ("oh, and look at this! this supports my theory! oh and look at this! this too!") A very obnoxious style of writing with little explanation of how they are congruent and whether or not the theory he espouses has been modified to account for the phenomenon he reports on. Will continue reading, but I hope he breaks out of this pattern because it is not pretty.
Edit: at page five, he starts to recognise Third Wave Feminism. Hey buddy, Third Wave Feminism has been around since the 70s. Glad you're just cluing in. (refering to the author.).
Well, if we're gonna use the word "obnoxious"... your entire response is obnoxious. "Hey buddy"?? You can't just accuse someone of cherry picking, by the way - you have to show how the data being cited is incomplete or is being carefully selected from a larger pool of data with less clarity or competing/conflicting results. You haven't done that, uh.... let's see.... at all. You've just made the baseless accusation, and then called the writing style obnoxious, and then said "hey buddy"... Also, uh... there's no specific hard & fast START date on third-wave feminism. So being glib and saying "Hey buddy" while in the same sentence asserting an unprovable point ("been around since the 70s") seems problematic. The term "third-wave feminism" itself was coined in 1992 as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism. The article also says:
Basically - and I've really kept this civil and not personal as much as possible - you're full of shit. At least with regards to this specific post. Go now and become less full of shit in what way seems best to you.Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, arising as a response to perceived failures of the second wave and to address the backlash against initiatives and movements created by the second wave.I read and thoroughly enjoyed the selection by Pinker. I have no objections!Not to derail too much further, and don't have a lot of free time at the moment after reading that excerpt, but I DO agree with what Paglia is saying about how you can't legislate away the difference in sexes... the evolutionary biology stuff... all good. And there is definitely a line between victim-blaming and common sense advice as we talked about earlier in this thread.
Cool. I think the breakdown of gender feminism vs. equity feminism is especially helpful - much earlier in this thread I was using "second-wave" and "third-wave" as poorly-chosen stand-ins for these two adjectives, which are far more descriptive & accurate.
If I were putting on my "steel man" argument hat, as Dhsu called it (hadn't heard that before), I guess the only point I would make is that gender feminism can be wrong about sex differences being completely socially constructed but still be right about some of the specific aspects that are less biological and more cultural, or that show a clear cultural causation, etc. It's easy to pick apart a target that espouses a 100% nurture position on any given nature vs. nurture issue, but that just invalidates the thesis statement... some of the supporting arguments can still be viable. However, he is less concerned with those arguments because they are not specifically part of his focus with the book. He is not seeking to undermine feminism at all, or even gender feminism specifically, but rather the notion of the human mind being a blank canvas and social construction being the only brush.
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I understand why you like her thoughts on evolutionary biology and the difference between sexes being rooted in biology, since you've talked about that at great length here. But in the context of her argument, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Just revisiting this for a second, for everyone's benefit:
http://www.pasadena.edu/files/syllabi/txcave_18360.pdf
I found THE relevant excerpt from The Blank Slate available online!!
Make me very very happy and read it
There are numerous citations but unfortunately they are not included in the excerpt. Well worth buying the book; Pinker documents all his claims.This is a lot of what I've been saying, only much better. There's even a brief mention of Paglia. To clarify, Paglia is someone I find interesting and who tells hard truths and makes awesome points, but also goes off the deep end for me, personally, rather often.
Pinker, on the other hand, is rock solid. If the only thing this thread resulted in was a few people reading this excerpt in full, I'd be damn happy.
See if you disagree with ANY of it. If you do, I'd love to hear why, with specifics.
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Again I take issue with her first point, that modern feminism's dramatizing of the prevalence of rape is somehow making women more vulnerable. This is JUST as speculative and baseless an argument as the one you've been arguing against consistently here, Dave (tropes of women in games causes societal views on / behavior toward women to change). You persuasively made the point that you can't just say something like that without data to back it up.
Your rephrasing is consistently getting things wrong... her first point is that feminism has "placed young women in danger" by "hiding the truth about sex from them" - the exaggerations about prevalence are part of that equation, in her view, not because they argue that rape is more common than one might think, but because of the contractual redefinition that she describes right in the second paragraph. She's saying that candy-coating reality doesn't change reality, basically. I'm not entirely sure how one would make that an evidence-based argument...
I'm not a full-time apologist for Paglia; she is an agitator and will indeed lapse into bold statements for shock value or rhetorical effect. In this case, I'm not sure the claims are specific enough that I'd hold her to task for not supporting them, but I agree with your observation in general.
Likewise, the author can't make these wild statements about how feminism is making women more vulnerable without backing those statements up. In my opinion, it makes far more logical sense - and describes human behavior better - to speculate that IF women are MORE afraid of being raped, i.e. if they think rape is far more likely to occur than it actually is, then they would be MORE careful, cautious, aware, etc.Not when any discussion about not getting drunk at a frat party ends up in accusations of victim blaming, which again she explicitly discusses. Numbers & statistics are abstract... having real world advice about situations where you need to be cautious is, I personally think, far more valuable. As a common example, plenty of people who drive every day freak out about flying, in spite of the dramatic & publicized statistical difference in odds. When feminism closes the door on any guidance of this nature as somehow exonerating the male perpetrator and blaming the female victim - which I agree that it CAN be, coming from the wrong people at the wrong times for the wrong reasons - it nevertheless candy coats reality.
Your point seems to be that feminism will help prepare women by scaring them through statistics. I know it sounded good when you wrote it, but think about it some more. I don't think it describes reality, and I think that even if it did, it wouldn't be a good idea. Paglia's point is that rape doesn't NEED its stats inflated, that being cautious (or even "afraid") is advisable, and that no amount of equality attained through legislation or cultural reform will change basic human psychology.
I understand why you like her thoughts on evolutionary biology and the difference between sexes being rooted in biology, since you've talked about that at great length here. But in the context of her argument, it doesn't make a lot of sense.Okay.... why not? It makes sense to me... she's arguing that feminism is out of sync with reality. Why would biology not be relevant to such a point?
She keeps talking about how modern feminism is misleading women... she talks about the good old days, small towns, small villages, how the old double standard protected women, etc etc. But this is all baseless, factless, purely emotional, speculative bullshit. It's the kind of argument-from-emotion that I'm REALLY surprised to see you supporting.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#mediaviewer/File:Rapes_per_1000_people_1973-2003.jpg
According to the DoJ, the rape rate has significantly declined over time. That flies in the face of all of Paglia's points about how women were more protected before, and how modern feminism has made them more vulnerable. And if we are to believe that modern feminism is causing rapes to be over-reported or the statistics to be overblown, inflated, etc., then the ACTUAL stats make her argument look even worse.
You need to re-read; these comments are not indicative of comprehension of the material. She was not at all making the argument that things were "better" in the past. Some of this might be coming from a lack of familiarity with her work, but when she talks about "towns and villages" she's talking human history... centuries, not decades... so your DOJ chart is kinda moot.
I'd like to point out another way your DOJ chart is moot, just for educational purposes:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Violent_crime_rates_by_gender_1973-2003.jpg
Violent crime, including rape, has actually decreased in general... To cherry pick a single type of crime and look to feminism as a compelling factor in its reduction would be to ignore the overall trend...
However, it's all irrelevant, because she didn't claim what you're saying. She wasn't saying things were BETTER back in, as you put them, the "good old days," she was merely saying that campus life - going off to college, away from the home/community - represented a fundamentally NEW type of threat for women, absent historically effective (to SOME extent) protections. She then is ALSO making the claim that feminism is failing to prepare women for that new threat. Nowhere does she say that it would be preferable for said women to not be going to college in the first place, or that feminism directly created the threat.
At any rate, I think you read the article too quickly and started forming arguments against what you imagined it said. I've done that myself before, no worries. You're also focusing on numbers, but none of her arguments really hinge on numbers. There's plenty to object to, though... personally, she's too pessimistic (even for me!), and I think she misses the role that technology can potentially play when she talks about things having ALWAYS been a certain way and insisting that they'll stay that way indefinitely.
http://everything2.com/title/Camille+Paglia%252C+date+rape%252C+and+me
Very interesting commentary on this article, worth reading!!
It had been YEARS since I visited everything2... fun site to poke around on...
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I'm not sure I buy her initial premise, and I'm definitely not convinced she knows what she's talking about considering the breadth of her generalizations
Still a good read, and there are certainly criticisms to be made of the sort of neo-marxist utopianism that springs from the mouths of undergraduate social science majors, but those criticisms aren't in this article
actually, after discussing the article and thinking for a bit, it really is a load of tripe
Well, it's Time, and it's a brief opinion piece.
Try this: http://www.mtsac.edu/~jgarrett/RAPE%20AND%20MODERN%20SEX%20WAR.pdf
You too, Andy. This is a more substantive version of what she was saying in the Time piece. See what you think. I'm sure you'll find objectionable passages but perhaps a bit of insight as well. Pertaining to Andy's question about her overall point:
"For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, "Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex." This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class."
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On a side note I found that article offensively stupid, but not really for the parts you quoted... those were probably the most reasonable bits in the whole thing. The stuff about how the "majority" of campus rape is false (source?), and how the definition of rape being 'diluted' (how?) makes women more vulnerable to abduction & murder (why?) - a crime that is almost impossibly rare on college campuses... makes my head hurt.
Dude... if you're gonna call an article "offensively stupid," don't misquote:
That's clearly not the same as saying that it's "false"...only making a claim of categorization... How can you hope to understand something, and by understanding it attempt to control and reduce it, if you have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone even trying to categorize it?"the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides."California's "Yes Means Yes" law is a NEW thing... intended to address this delineation. It will be interesting to see how that goes.
As a side note, no one seems to have good statistics on this topic, so perhaps her using the word "majority" was somehow misleading... but part of the reason none of the stats are good is that the entire subject is politicized & FILLED with knee-jerk reactions, and any reported number that seems "too low" is seen as an attack on women. The way they ask the questions in these surveys is often very problematic. As we saw with "patriarchy," getting people to agree on the definition of a word is difficult, and when there are multiple valid definitions, good luck... I think campus police are ill-suited to handling this problem because of conflict of interest, but I think the underlying trouble is that when there's no evidence, both parties were drunk, and it's a question of one person's word over another, ALL police and the overall legal system are incapable or at least severely challenged. This is not questioning the veracity of the claims one way or another, but rather questioning the ability of any system to resolve them in the absence of additional information.
I don't see that problem being solved by anything that doesn't involve giving up some personal freedoms... on the extreme end, the freedom to have consensual intercourse without signing a contract first and filming the entirety of the act should any grievances emerge.
I already said I don't think I agree with the article in its entirety, but before you call something stupid, you should read it more closely. She wasn't saying the definition of rape being diluted made women more vulnerable, but rather that "The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil" - that's the title of the article. She was arguing that campuses are essentially coddling students into a fall sense of security; she also suggested that:the definition of rape being 'diluted' (how?) makes women more vulnerable to abduction & murder (why?)"Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees."
I'll say this, as an opinion piece, it's all over the place. But that's Paglia, for you."They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature." -
Paglia (referenced many pages back as a critic of second-wave feminism's past attempts at censorship) just wrote an article for Time:
http://time.com/3444749/camille-paglia-the-modern-campus-cannot-comprehend-evil/
The subject matter is obviously different, but there are some good quotes:
"Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind."
Relevant portions in bold; not sure I fully agree entirely with how she's tackling the issue in the actual article, but I certainly agree with the above critique of leftist/progressive naivete about "fixing" people and about human nature being 110% malleable.The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.That's precisely why I view the entire question of women in games as an aesthetic issue, first and foremost. We should be interested in making games better, but instead too many individuals are actually interested in making ourselves better through games.
What's so wrong with that, you ask? Well, it corrupts an otherwise agreeable agenda - the diversification and maturation of the medium - with a bunch of ideological name-calling, comical oversimplification, and arguments about the psychological effects of media consumption that are not only specious but bare a marked similarity to censorship arguments made surrounding violence, etc. Given that:
- We don't really know if improving the variety and presence of female characters in games will have any sort of net real world effect on changing cultural attitudes, and...
- We want to pursue it regardless, for the betterment and evolution of the art form... therefore...
- It is best to pursue a line of reasoning/persuasion that maximizes acceptance of the premise & enthusiasm to explore alternatives. In summation...
- Ideology is NOT necessary to make this argument, and will only alienate and polarize.
- We don't really know if improving the variety and presence of female characters in games will have any sort of net real world effect on changing cultural attitudes, and...
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FINAL FLOOD IS OUT!!!
A really impressive noobflood - love every mix, had a blast listening.
So that's four floods total, plus additional mixes... 30 mixes total for the month, averaging a mix a day.
Thoughts on overall concept/execution, now that we're done?
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Aight, I s'pose.... happy birthday.
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Just a heads up. That Emma Watson thing is a marketing thing by Rantic who were hired to create fake drama about 4chan.
They've done this sort of crap before with the whole GTA V is cancelled hoax(Rantic owns Foxweekly. It's not an actual news site) too.
Saw that this morning. Hired by whom, though? It's unclear from reading where the money came from...
At any rate, it kinda proves my previous point about trust-but-verify... which apparently no one was able to do, including all major news outlets, prior to running this story...
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I think a mistake people might be making with the whole sexualizing fictional characters thing is that what we consider sexually suggestive behaviors and appearances aren't the same for both men and women. It's just that for women it's much more obvious. Possibly because people complain about it more, possibly because it is more intentional or possibly both.
Possibly BOTH? How DARE you suggest that a complex topic could have more than one explanation!!
I joke, but seriously... of course both. For so many of these topics, both... Or all three. Or MORE.
For any given debate of this nature, look to the people making single-explanation arguments and drawing tenuous lines of causation that they themselves think are undeniably sound. Those are your extremists.
We've got a problem right now, and it's that extremists on one side of a topic are being validated by the behavior of extremists on the other. So long as 4CHAN et al. harass, torment, and threaten to release nudie pics of those making ANY feminist arguments, to some NO feminist argument will seem unreasonable... at least, that's my concern.
As a related note, I thought Emma Watson's speech to the UN was really well done; it just shows that even a reasonable, almost inarguable approach to feminism will STILL draw the ire of a certain community on 4Chan. I don't think they even care what's being said, or read what's being written... At any rate, contrast the calculated, inclusive approach that Emma took with her speech to the nitpicking, dogmatic shtick that Anita does... that speech was from someone who cares about the issue more she cares about what SHE thinks about the issue...
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Yep. It's already fixed on the live site, btw.