#1reasonwhy

Blaming the victim doesn't help resolve misogyny. Instead, it simply shifts the dynamic into a "one versus all" when we really all ought to be offended by what happens. Especially when the perpetrator treats other men with higher respect (he puts on that whole misogynistic show of machismo to impress other men) and other men also have the political authority (one of them organized the whole project, for crying out loud!), the other men especially failed to stand up to that kind of talk. Instead, their silence contributed implicitly to the same consequences as victim-blaming: one person alone having to call out the misogynistic bastard.

It's not so simple as "Well, she's just as guilty as the men for not speaking up!" Sure, she should have stood up to it, but with both her friend and her boyfriend complicit in the women bashing, she can't act on her moral obligation. Especially when calling out the bastard would likely shift his hate-talk onto her, not just women in general.

Dude.

I was talking to one of my partner's co-workers about a last-minute decision to avoid Chicago's Pride Parade at a restaurant. Some idiot who was sitting nearby chimed in with a "Well, you didn't miss anything except flagrant homosexuality and sin."

I've been queer-bashed before and have a pretty thick skin about it, but when the co-worker took off without a word, I grew furious. I lost all respect for him that day, especially as he's a community organizer who claims to be "down" and progressive. You don't stay silent. You don't leave people hanging and defenseless.

You think getting into a verbal (and possibly escalated from there) altercation with a stranger at a restaurant would have been the right choice instead? Maybe there's something I'm missing about the setup, but there are certainly times when engaging the other side is not the right move; from the admittedly short description of the scene you mention it sounds like a getting trolled, don't take the bait situation. The situation in the article is at least seemingly more conducive to a good outcome from confrontation because the principals know each other.

Ingmar: I'd say getting into the altercation with the stranger is indeed the thing to do, provided you're in a safe environment to do it: i.e. one in which other people around you, and especially those in a position of ownership or authority over the space, would back you up. The sad thing is that even those who are overall sympathetic to the cause are unable or unwilling, when it comes to the crunch, to provide that backup.

You don't have to get into a protracted altercation with someone in order to do the right thing. What you do have to do, what is incumbent upon you, is to speak up and make it clear that what the bigot is doing isn't cool, and that you are not okay with it. Yes, that suddenly makes things very awkward and maybe unpleasant for you. Do you know who it makes things less awkward and unpleasant for, though? The person next to you, ostensibly your friend, who was the actual target of the bigotry, and will be again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. You stand up for them, and you stand by them, because that is what friendship means. You do not silently walk away while they are being bashed, right in front of you.

I just have a really hard time with the idea that the right response is always to respond at all.

EDIT:

Let me expand a bit - if my friend and I disagree on whether a situation is safe to respond to and he 'loses all respect' for me, I would have a hard time feeling like I'm the one misunderstanding how friendship works.

I'm a really conflict-averse person (I suppose my tendency to argue on message boards may not reflect just how much that is an issue for me in personal interactions) and not especially comfortable interacting with 'strangers' even when the interaction is guaranteed to be neutral or positive. I don't know, I kind of feel like insisting that some kind of response in the moment is necessary, when the outcome is uncertain, seems to me to get into antiquated notions of manliness and cowardice that contribute to the problem in the first place - especially when you're talking about someone you know is doing something useful at other times that don't come down to immediate in-the-moment kind of reactions.

Response isn't always "Hey shitface stop being a bigoted piece of trash."

Response can be looking at someone and saying "Who are you to cast the first stone?"

Response can also be turning to your friend and saying "I think I just lost my appetite. You wanna get out of here?"

Response is not (literally) leaving your friend alone in the situation.

In a public place, and to a stranger who is making a general comment (as opposed to making direct comments about or to a specific person), a look of withering scorn should be all that's needed to let that person know their comments are uninvited, unwelcome, and unmannerly.

It doesn't have to be a huge production and argument. It just needs to be enough to make it clear that you disagree. A disgusted stare and "...wow," then pointedly returning to conversation with one's friend, conveys "I don't agree with what you said." Scuttling away quietly is likely to convey to the bigot something like "My goodness! You're so right! I can't believe I was associating with this disgusting homosexual. Thank goodness someone stood up for what's right and true; I hope they do so again."

It's not enough for the lurkers to show their support in email.

I'm glad this guy didn't pick up the pile of shit he just squeezed out on my front step and hurl it at my windows.

edit: Holy shit I have to stop replying to old posts.
edit edit: Fuck it, here's one more:

Missed opportunity here by not showing the finger-clicking icon :(

Here's an article on why participation by women in free culture (wikipedia, open source, etc) is so dismally low.

In other news, I finished Saint's Row 3 last night, which was like 85% "haha what, this is awesome, I'm parachuting in a tank" and 15% "really uncomfortable misogyny." Unsurprisingly when the end credits rolled I was treated to dozens of pictures of the crew that worked on the game, which appeared to include about 5 women, although I may have lost some due to sea-of-bearded-white-faces fatigue. Even setting aside the usual WHORES WHORES WHORES issues that sandbox crime games have (in what is probably the game's worst moment, you "rescue" a cargo ship full of "hos" and are presented with the wonderful choice of "put them to work for you" or "sell them back to the other gang"), they made a couple other smooth moves:

- Need a character kidnapped to move the plot along or force a "hard choice"? Better pick one (or two...) of the woman characters.
- Need your badguy to prove how mean and evil he is? Have him strangle a female character who is like 1/10 his size on screen.

It's made all the more obnoxious because the game itself isn't far off from being a truly great game; the gameplay is generally a lot of fun, it has a load of extremely funny moments, it more or less avoids falling into the racial stereotyping issues common to crime games for the most part, and there are even a couple glimmers of advancement around gender stuff, as hairstyles and outfits* are all open to both genders.

*Some of the outfits don't help AT ALL though.

I guess I'll be skipping giving them any more money via DLC purchase, although I suspect it is too late for any wallet-voting to be meaningful given THQ is gone.

I got it on a Steam sale for like $7.50 (all DLC included) and... yeah. I pretty much had the same feelings. There are a few things that I did really like (you could give your character a voice opposite of their "gender," for example), but seeing how much of the team was white and male made me feel so exasperated. I also tried to count how many women they had and couldn't pay attention long enough to get through it all. I'm doing another playthrough (co-op with hubby this time), so I'll try again if we ever make it to the credits again.

What if the character themselves is sexual? Is It okay then for revealing clothes? Like Lust from FMA.

The character can do whatever it wants to do. Oh wait, it's not a real person, it's only a character! It was created by someone who had some idea in mind when designing it. Can you determine that seminal idea? Usually, not perfectly - unless you're telepathic. Instead, you have to follow that character's story and attempt to determine the significance by reasoned deduction. Sadly, most character designs are quite banal, either being one-note tokenism (often unconsciously tinged with the social mores of the creator) or simple contrast/contradiction. Sometimes, though, you come across a character designed to explore a concept or ask a question - for example, to challenge your assumptions. If you have any.

Earlier in the thread you may recall a discussion about the Mass Effect strippers. It may be illuminating to review that section.

Edit: it kicks off around page 7 or so.

The whole clothing thing is pretty complex, as Mox Jet says. As one example, I was bothered by Isabella's lack of pants in DA2, until I got to know Isabella well enough to figure that wearing no pants is in character for her and that her character is sufficiently complex/nuanced to not have it be an eye rolling oh-she's-only-like-that-to-titillate-the-author thing. (Once marketing got ahold of her though, well, there's not a lot of excuses for that stuff.) On the other hand, a Bayonetta type situation is pretty much Objectification 101, no matter how many protests of "BUT SHE'S A STRONG CHARACTER" I hear.

EDIT: I don't know this "Lust" character, but a better starting point for inquiry into whether the character is problematic is probably not how she is dressed, but whether the concept she's meant to express is troublesome in the first place. A succubus isn't objectionable because she's naked; she's naked because she's objectionable, if that makes sense.

Can you elaborate the succubus part?

Sure. Conceptually, a succubus is essentially an allegory for the evils of female sexuality - the idea that women will try to turn your brain off and lead you astray using their sexy time powers is a really old and problematic aspect of the patriarchy; see St. Augustine et. al. They're depicted as naked, often with exaggerated sexual characteristics, to help convey this concept. So in this case it would be the nudity being in service to a fundamentally misogynist idea, not a problem with the nudity itself per se.


EDIT: I mean ironically they're an expression of a kind of cultural prudishness that feminists are often incorrectly accused of when they object to such depictions! Sluts are bad, here's a slutty monster to prove it, and if you object to that depiction you're a prude. The logical leap there is pretty strange.

Women are just still expected to be pure and saintly by society. A woman sleeps with to many men and she is branded a whore. Even by other women. While a man doing the same is encouraged by other males.

The succubus is like. The embodiment of that. She is evil because she uses sex as a weapon and lures men astray from things more important than stupid ol' women. So unless you do something really clever with the succubus part, she could be dressed in anything and still be problematic, because she's still a sex demon stealing men's essence.

You can have a strong, sexually active woman character. Isabela from DA2 is the best example I can think of for that. She gets slut shamed, but she won't play that game, because she knows simply sleeping with a lot of dudes people does not define her. The game helps out by it not defining her. The people who try to make it define her are clearly portrayed as wrong and/or going for the easy, low hanging fruit to shame her, and it doesn't work. It would've been easy to go "slutty pirate, NEXT" when writing her. But there is more to her than her sexuality, and it turned a character I was sure I would hate into one of my favorite Bioware characters.

EDIT: Derp, Isabela doesn't limit herself to dudes, correction needed to be made.

Isabella is also one of my favorites. So maybe the succubus itself isn't bad. Just how it's used in stories and such

Certainly, there are times, and there are occasions when it's not going to be constructive and needs to be defused more than anything else because there are legitimate concerns about violence or what have you. The thing about trolls is that they also win if no one calls them out on it and they get to set the temperature of the room, which makes for a delicate balance. But speaking for myself as someone who should have been called out a lot more in my youth, and I'm sure today, it's remarkably deflating when the veil of "everyone accepts this as edgy but ok" gets taken off, and a lot of different context-sensitive ways to approach that goal. You have to read the group and decide whether simply saying "I won't be a part of this" is your best answer relative to your personality and your situation or something else. In my case, being a jerk myself and my experiences teaching have given me a lot of practice with the less confrontational ways to convey "you're being terrible in some way" with younger people without losing sight of the specific problem, and a lot of that carries over to people if you wish to give them the benefit of the doubt. And then there are just times where simply being supportive of the targeted person when they themselves take the bull by the horns is more productive.

But as zeke says, it's really just doing nothing that isn't an option if you have any kind of power in a social dynamic.

Getting around to reading this, the exact moment at which my eyeballs rolled so hard that they fell out of my head and are now under my desk:

The succubus in Clash of Heroes is an entertainingly wonderful "playing straight" and "aversion" of this both at the same time. I don't know why, but I feel much more comfortable with that character than with most of the purportedly better female characters in other video games.

Of course, it doesn't help that the characters in other video games are usually terrible. Argh.

Oh, this is going to go well.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57565446-1/get-ready-for-objectify-a-male-tech-writer-day/

Sigh.

Rather tends to trivialize the issue, don't it?

It'll just be a huge exercise in GOSH IT DOESN'T BOTHER ME WHY YOU SILLY BITCHES ALWAYS COMPLAINING

And the women promoting the idea won't understand why it didn't work and will probably come up with something else just as silly and ill-thought out.

No good comes of this idea at all.

Well, this idea is the brainchild of Leigh Alexander, whose personal contribution to the hashtag was, in essence, "People won't let me forget about that time I keep bringing up when I was drunk and absolutely horrifying on a podcast." I'm not sure that she's precisely in the heart of this particular social phenomenon.

Leigh often strikes me as well meaning but in an entirely different zip code from the point.

Yeah, if they kept it up for a few months or a year and targeted specific individuals then maybe they'd get somewhere. Except then they'd be sexually harassing people for an extended period in order to make a point, which would be more than slightly grotesque.

Not that it isn't already.

I've seen Leigh Alexander speak about street harassment quite a bit, which was actually my first introduction to it - I hadn't previously realised it was a common phenomenon.

Reading that Objectify article, the aim doesn't seem to be to replicate the feeling of harassment, but just to highlight how odd it should look for comments about appearance to accompany every mention of a person. There's a blog I remember finding once that replicated news articles about politicians, but added a reference to them being cisgendered to every sentence, in the way that a trans* person cannot be mentioned in a newspaper article without their gender and sexual organs being brought up and depicted as their single defining feature, which I thought was quite effective.

That's kind of funny to read this. When I first saw the trailer for Bayonetta I shared it on The Other Place cos it was just absolutely insane, with the long shot along the boobzone and the camera tracking through her legs while facing straight crotchwards. When the game came out, though, people loved it. They loved how zany the overt sexism was. It was so over-the-top it seemed to've been deemed acceptible.

Leigh generally strikes me as a stone cold dumb dumb, but I've basically avoided anything she's said for the past two years.

Male Tech Writer Objectification Decade might be more like it.

Rumor is that Saints Row ended up on the desk of the torso gore guys.

"Didja hear Sarah call me hunky? Score!"

Along these lines, you can install Jailbreak the Patriarchy on Google Chrome. It provides you with a button that flips all the gendered nouns and pronouns in whatever you're reading.

Yeah, they were the winning bidder for the Volition part of the THQ breakup.

Giant Bomb got several women from the game industry to weigh in on the horrid Dead Island bust. It's pretty telling that one opted to go anonymous for fear of backlash. And one even addressed Tom's incredibly stupid point about how it's totally like traditional and stuff.