Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

[wcw43921]

Well, it is a cool costume no matter who's wearing it.

[Cancer]

(... long chain of posts ...)

 

And, to be clear, Link IS NOT male, Link has been males. Link is not an "established male property", Link is a reincarnated spirit who so far, has been different males.

The only game in the Zelda franchise I've played is the first one, back circa 1990, on (I think) the old NES platform.

 

One advantage of 8-bit graphics: while I was reasonably confident Link was a humanoid, there was approximately nothing on-screen, merely context, to indicate gender.

 

In this sense the evolution of technology has done everyone a disservice.

[Pattern Ghost]

Well, there was box art back then.

[Cancer]

Suppose so; I was playing on someone else's stuff, so I never saw the box, just powered stuff up, grabbed a controller and played.

[NuSoardGraphite]

The only game in the Zelda franchise I've played is the first one, back circa 1990, on (I think) the old NES platform.

 

One advantage of 8-bit graphics: while I was reasonably confident Link was a humanoid, there was approximately nothing on-screen, merely context, to indicate gender.

 

In this sense the evolution of technology has done everyone a disservice.

It really hasnt. Everyone has gotten way over sensitive. Thats not the fault of technology.

 

When we have serious discussion on whether the new droid BB-8 is male or female, thats how I know PC sensitivity has officially jumped the shark.

[TheDarkness]

It really hasnt. Everyone has gotten way over sensitive. Thats not the fault of technology.

 

When we have serious discussion on whether the new droid BB-8 is male or female, thats how I know PC sensitivity has officially jumped the shark.

I think that's a matter of, someone writes one thing, and then the internet shares it. Years back, we could simply have a stupid theory, and it was just our stupid theory. Now, it gets shared, and people think a large swath of people follow it.

 

The flip side of PC is that many of the arguments that arise are because one person says something silly, and those who disagree generalize it to all feminists, all Republican/Democrats, all Americans, all Christians, all Atheists. Rarely does this apply, the number of groups in the above list that are in lockstep is very limited. Then, others get sensitive and turn it into 'society is falling apart because xxx', when, in reality, PC takes different forms for each of those groups. Anyone who thinks they don't practice political correctness is living an illusion.

[Cygnia]

Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence

 

Later that same year a man walks into Montreal’s École Polytechnique and kills fourteen women. He kills them because he hates feminists. He kills them because they are going to be engineers, because they go to school, because they take up space. He kills them because he they have stolen something that is rightfully his. He kills them because they were women.

 

Everything about the day is grey: the sky, the rain, the street, the concrete side of the École Polytechnique, the pictures of the fourteen girls that they print in the newspaper. My mother’s face is grey. It’s winter, and the air tastes like water drunk from a tin cup.

 

Madame Lemieux doesn’t tell us to call Monsieur Pierre a sexist anymore. Maybe he lets the girls play hockey now. Or maybe she is afraid.

 

Girls can do anything that boys do but it turns out that sometimes they get killed for it.

[Lucius]

http://www.willyoupressthebutton.com/12775/yes

 

Apparently, 61% of people who like to press buttons, would press one that made them change gender - if the change also included becoming "the world's biggest badass."

 

I really really really wish there were a way to tell how many of each gender made which choice.

Something else I noticed at that site: There are a lot of questions obviously written by males and obviously assuming that they would be answered by males. Things like "...but you turn into a woman" or that otherwise just don't make any sense unless one presumes that no one presented with the question would actually already BE a woman.

 

It's as if there are a lot of males who are somehow unaware that females use the internet too.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

I could understand not being aware of palindromedaries but how could someone overlook the possibility of a female reading something you're posting online??

[Cygnia]

[Cygnia]

[Cygnia]

Online abuse isn't going away, but you're not helpless to fight it

 

"It's a tax on women, people of color, queer and trans people and other oppressed groups for daring to express our opinions in public," the trio write in the guide. "None of this is fair. It should not be our meticulous labor and precious funds that keep us safe, it should be our basic humanity. But that has proven heartbreakingly, maddeningly insufficient more times than we can count."

[Zeropoint]

The real irony of the "boy's" chrometrooper costume is that Captain Phasma is a woman.

[Cygnia]

Gamers Have Become the New Religious Right

 

However, though there was a lot of talk about official censorship there was never really any serious chance it would happen in America. Video games were declared free speech by the Supreme Court in 2005 in a 7 – 2 decision, and Nintendo had given up their dream of completely family-friendly entertainment by 1994. Mature content became a badge of honor to the gamer community. It was proof that the medium couldn’t be stopped by moralistic thugs determined to protect us from ourselves.

 

That was the status quo for a long time until the rise of social critiquing of games came about. Journalists like Leigh Alexander and Mattie Bryce as well as YouTubers like Anita Sarkeesian began looking at game content, both narrative and mechanical, and examining what that content said about us. It was not, as a lot of gamers like to claim, a call to censor or ban that content. It was just looking at it in a more thoughtful and nuanced way. With games now protected by all the power of the First Amendment, you would think that discussion over them could flourish more freely since they were in no danger of being taken away.

 

That’s not what happened, though. Organized retaliation against the concept of conversation and dialogue in the form of 4chan ops and GamerGate happened instead. Sarkeesian’s videos were constantly flagged on YouTube in an attempt to take them down and online campaigns to have various journalists discredited or fired became a new way of life for anyone who dared deconstructing games from a social justice perspective. The message was clear: shut up. Stop talking right now.

[Cygnia]

When I Quit Cutting My Hair, I Learned How Men Treat Women On American Roads

 

The fifty-something man in the aging Lexus SUV was red-faced from screaming as he pulled up next to my motorcycle and lowered his passenger window. I caught fragments of every nasty word I'd ever heard my Catholic-school classmates whisper to each other during recess. Then he slowed the torrent of abuse long enough to enunciate the next sentence clearly: "Bitch, I am going to get out of this car and beat you until you can't stand up."

 

"Alright," I said, removing my flower-covered Arai "Oriental" helmet with its mirrored visor and shaking out my hair, "let's get this started. I have to be at work in ten minutes." His mouth froze, and he floored the accelerator, nearly striking a pedestrian as he squealed around the corner. Apparently the guy thought I was a woman. I'd like to tell you that I was surprised, but I wasn't-because this, or something like this, has happened to me nearly a dozen times in the past few years.

[Cancer]

Sexual misconduct case in physical anthropology

 

Still ongoing.

 

That may be behind the subscriber wall.

[Cancer]

Recently there have been some items hit the mainstream media about modern human - Neanderthal interbreeding perhaps as far back as 100,000 years BP.

 

Not intending to fall into Rule 34 issues, but in reading such things, and the inevitable artwork that attends pop-level science articles ...

 

Ever notice that in the images that purport to show the two in the same frame, it's almost always a prognathous, heavy-brow-ridged Neanderthal male face paired with the more delicate modern human features on the female face, rather than the other way around?

 

That phenomenon (of one-polarity portrayal, not the interbreeding itself) is loaded with interesting not fully acknowledged societal attitudes -- some taboos, some others -- which provoke some thought.

[Lucius]

 

The name of the webcomic is "Questionable Content" but in this one, a young woman is UNquestionably DIScontent with the sexist assumptions of a salesclerk in a computer store.

 

 

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3132

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary questions whether the salesclerk was making assumptions based on the customer's gender, or her youth.

[Cygnia]

Why We Smile at Men Who Sexually Harass Us

 

When men are quick to remind us that not all men harass women, I’m quicker to remind them that all women (really, all) have experienced this at least once, but more likely, they have experienced it many, many more times than that.

 

And as many times as we’ve been party to this — as many times as someone has touched us, yelled at us, hit on us, hit us, raped us , spat on us, stalked us, threatened us, propositioned us — we’ve also been told to just ignore it.

 

The truth is, we don’t have the luxury to ignore harassment. We engage, we’re kind, because that is what keeps us safe.

 

And now it’s time for everyone to engage.

 

If you’re tired of hearing about women being harassed, tired of us sharing our stories about it, maybe that’s because you’ve been ignoring it, and we don’t believe that you should have that luxury anymore, either.

[Cygnia]

Online harassment of women at risk of becoming 'established norm', study finds

 

Harassment of women online is at risk of becoming “an established norm in our digital society”, with women under 30 particularly vulnerable, according to the creators of a new Australian study

 

 

Nearly half the 1,000 respondents in the research by the digital security firm Norton had experienced some form of abuse or harassment online. Among women under 30, the incidence was 76%.

 

Harassment ranged from unwanted contact, trolling, and cyberbullying to sexual harassment and threats of rape and death. Women under 30 were overrepresented in every category.

 

One in seven – and one in four women aged under 30 – had received general threats of physical violence. Almost one in ten women under 30 had experienced revenge porn and/or “sextortion”.

[Cygnia]

“Women built this castle”: An in-depth look at sexism in YA.

 

But the name most often linked to YA now isn’t Stephenie Meyer or Suzanne Collins – two of the largest game-changers – or Laurie Halse Anderson or Sarah Dessen – who helped build YA into what it is today – but John Green, whose first YA novel Looking for Alaska released in 2005.

“This phenomenon of male writers being hailed as the ‘saviours’ of female-dominated genres can also be seen in the recent popularity of young adult author John Green, writer of The Fault in Our Stars. Young Adult fiction has been around since the 1980s, with females writing profusely in that genre for decades,” said Nudrat Kamal in her piece on sexism in literature for the Tribune, noting how many lady YA authors are “rankled” at the idea that it took a man writing YA to make YA a worthy career choice for a writer or a category of literature to consider seriously as a reader.

As Dianna Anderson wrote in her piece “Why criticizing Young Adult Fiction is sexist,” “Before John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars broke records, there was Maureen Johnson, Laurie Halse Anderson, J.K. Rowling, S.E. Hinton, Madeline L’Engle, and Suzanne Collins. Historically, women have populated the genres aimed at teenagers and children precisely because of a sexist publishing industry that deemed women unable to write adult literary fiction.”

 

[Cygnia]

http://www.craveonline.com/entertainment/972903-gamers-flood-baldurs-gate-expansion-negative-reviews-introduces-transsexual-character

[Pattern Ghost]

http://www.craveonline.com/entertainment/972903-gamers-flood-baldurs-gate-expansion-negative-reviews-introduces-transsexual-character

 

It does seem like a case of a writer getting on a soap box, and should be panned as bad writing. The character trusts the PCs enough to tell them her story on their first meeting? That's ridiculous, especially given the medieval setting. Apparently, the game writer and studio don't actually give a crap enough about transgender issues to even attempt to do a good job presenting them and took the lazy way out of just plunking the character into the setting with an unrealistic dialog tree.

 

It would have been more clever to have the PCs help a character by getting them the "cursed" item Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity, flipping it around to be a blessing for that particular character and subverting that old and crude bit of D&D humor. Though, I suppose clever is too much to ask.

 

So, while a lot of the "reviewers"/internet trolls are very offensive, the writer and publisher here seem to me to be being at least mildly offensive, although they may have had good intentions.

[Xavier Onassiss]

This has been all over the internet lately.

 

http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem

[Shadow Hawk]

This has been all over the internet lately.

 

http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem

What has happened to my hobby that men feel the need to actively drive away half the human race?

[Pattern Ghost]

I sometimes wonder if people are getting worse, or if the Internet just makes it easier to find out how bad people have been all along. Neither option is particularly encouraging.