This post has been brought to you by the unbearable d’awwwwwww-ness of Data.
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Ozy Frantz is a student at a well-respected Hippie College in the United States. Zie bases most of zir life decisions on Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and identifies more closely with Pinkie Pie than is probably necessary. Ozy can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter as @ozyfrantz. Writing is presently Ozy's primary means of support, so to tip the blogger, click here.
Sorry for taking a few days off this discussion. I’ll try to summarize my convictions on centrism. (If anyone is still interested.) Centrism is a law of human nature. You can’t wish, or work, it away just because you don’t like it. Trying to do so is at best a waste of time and energy, and at worst a recipe for disaster along the lines of “If you believe hard enough that you can fly, you can. Now jump off the roof.” Centrism is about averages in groups. It may or may not be a fitting description of a specific… Read more »
Superglucose, your comment reminds me of the paradox of the phrase, “Everything in moderation.”
If you must take EVERYTHING in moderation, doesn’t EVERYTHING include MODERATION?
In other words: if you believe in taking everything in moderation, doesn’t that mean you must also take MODERATION in moderation? Therefore, does that not mean that immoderation is a moral imperative for someone who believes in taking everything in moderation? 😛
Yay, meta!
What if humans folloow a superpattern? And this superpattern creates the stereotypes? But we know that there’s a uniqueness that follows this superpattern beneath it, that’s layer two. But beneath layer 2, there’s a layer 3: the pattern. So it goes superpattern, superunique, pattern… but then under that it’s unique, right? The people who don’t follow the pattern. At the end of the day, do we follow a pattern or are we all unique?
I believe we’re…. following a pattern. A pattern so complicated that we might as well be unique, but a pattern none the less.
That’s pretty much it. Men should look good, but not do anything to look good. You just have to be lucky with the genes, or you’re out. Being lucky with the jeans isn’t an option.
(that was horrible, I know)
Actually, I think the notion that softer is better *is* cultural, as are the notions about body hair.
(One of the things that drove me nuts about the book Undateable is the notion that body hair makes you undateable, but then so does manscaping. So I guess I just have to be naturally hairless. GRRRRR)
“In general, “women are softer/prettier/smell better” bugs me.”
Strictly speaking, testosterone does roughen skin. The notion that women are softer isn’t just cultural. But there’s nothing wrong with being rough, and soft skin doesn’t mean soft anything else.
@Fnord: Well, the part about “Women are just really lovely to look at and touch” did kind of rankle me, because it is, as you say, a roundabout way of saying that Men Are Not Hot. In general, “women are softer/prettier/smell better” bugs me. As for your cousin(?): if he’s a teenager, he should be allowed to pick whatever glasses he pleases, as long as they’re not super expensive. After all, he’s the one who has to live with them every day. Most of the frames I’ve worn are pretty much unisex, but I probably wouldn’t wear an overtly feminine… Read more »
Dragon Age allowed homosexual romances well before Mass Effect 3 did.
@All: On the subject of the acceptance of guy-on-guy action, get this: MASS EFFECT 3 WILL PERMIT GUY-ON-GUY ACTION. Ahem. Though I wouldn’t personally take advantage of it, it’s a blow for egalitarianism to finally have the option. Mass Effect is a series of space opera RPGs by Bioware (notable for excellent dialogue), which allow you to essentially “choose your own adventure” as either a male or female protagonist named Shepard (plot and performance are the same, regardless, but some characters react to you differently if you’re male or female). The game presents you with a series of choices, in… Read more »
@Schala: There’s gender inequality in jRPGs and anime in general, you just have to know where to look. I’ll have to do my research to bring myself back up to speed on this, but even an anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena REEKS of gender role and gender performance policing. But what”s being policed is just slightly DIFFERENT than we’re familiar with in Europe and America, because the roots are different. For example: there are, if I recall correctly, five different verbs for giving and receiving in Japanese (discounting honorifics, which represent an additional layer of politeness and, IIRC, are applied… Read more »
@Gaius: Thanks. Normally, I’d leave it alone with family (and that’s what eventually happened), but this felt like something that was immediately relevant and needed to be addressed. For all the good that did it. Sorry, “Bob”, in retrospect I probably prolonged the whole issue more than if I’d just shut up. Amusingly, we actually did have a civil and reasonable discussion about electoral politics more-or-less immediately afterward, although more in a horse-race fashion than an actually talk about the issues fashion. @monkey: Well, it doesn’t talk at all about the problems of reporting, and didn’t really distinguish between the… Read more »
I feel your pain, Fnord. My brother and I no longer discuss sex, religion, or politics — he thinks I’m a “one of those” feminists for insisting that traits are gender-neutral, and that being born with certain physical anatomy does not predispose one to a constellation of traits.
My policy: family is still human, and therefore fallible. >.<
And my holiday was going SO WELL in the gender equality department… So I was having dinner with my aunt “Alice”, her son “Bob” (who is in high school), and several other relatives. Anyway, they had gone shopping for new glasses for Bob earlier (exactly when is unclear); he was trying on some frames that she liked the look of when someone (a sales clerk?) came by and said that those were girls’ frames. So, he said, he didn’t want to wear them because he’d get teased. She was giving him a bit of a hard time about this, and… Read more »
I have no idea what to make of this, so I’m just throwing this to the group…
http://jezebel.com/5871382/how-many-girls-want-girl+on+girl-action
I’m not sure I agree with your thesis that Japanese RPGs in general are more egalitarian. As someone who’s played both J-RPGS and West-RPGs extensively, I can pretty much conclusively that both sub-genres have their fair share of sexist tropes and egalitarian ones. Both have a lot of games that legitimately attempt to construct fictional equal societies, and many others that explore the evils of sexism by constructing sexist societies*. In my experience, J-RPGS tend to be more extreme in their theme than Western RPGs: when a J-RPG is sexist, it tends to be so TO THE MAX! Alternatively, when… Read more »
I don’t know many Western RPGs, period.
I know Japanese, Korean and such RPGs and MMORPGs. The only US MMORPG I know is WoW and maybe Ultima Online. And not enough to write home about those.
Schala
I find it ironic that both the examples you listed are Japanese.
I think, like most Japanese RPG fans, you have a picture of Western RPGs that is based on stereotypes.
It’s pretty standard practice in videogames where stats matter and stats differ from character to character in growth that females ALL (or nearly all) have better magic stat (both offense and defense) growth, while males have better physical (offense and defense) growth. The hero, if male, might have “the best of both worlds” sorta. Like Ramza Beoulve in Final Fantasy Tactics, who has the best magic and the best physical stat growth of generic characters (plus unique abilities for himself), whereas generic* females have the same magic, and generic males have the same physical growth as he does. *Generic are… Read more »
Or actually it might just be that they’ve figured out that a majority of their viewers are women and wanted to pander to that. (Probs not for Minority Report, but definitely so for Dr Who)
I think I agree with you that its not that simple monkey. Such writing could very well be an expression of the writers internalizing the “fact” that women are superior to men. Probably not too different from a woman who thinks that men are superior to women and expresses it with some similar “men are superior” thought/idea/action.
@Hugh Tipping: I don’t think it’s that simple. I think a lot of men, deep down, feel that women are the superior gender. It’s a form of pedestalizing, IMHO.
The irony is I’m pretty sure that Minority Report’s script was written by a man. I know the Dr Who episode was. I think these are men just trying to affirm their “right-on”, post-sexist credentials.
“I don’t recall a line like that in Minority Report. Agatha (the female) was the most gifted of the precogs, but it’s not like her situation could be generalized onto others. There were no others. The precogs were completely unique – that there’s three precogs, there only ever will be three precogs, and that they can’t be replaced is essential to the plot. (No spoilers, though the movie’s over a decade old by now.)” I checked, and the line is that the “minority report” is always from the most gifted one, and when Cruise asks which one that is, the… Read more »
@Jo: I feel your pain; I was using “womens’ issues” for the purposes of discussion primarily because of the obvious variables I could play with (presence or absence of breasts, reproductive capabilities, etc.). This is an issue that applies to everybody, since someone with sexual anatomy typically associated with males is ALSO expected to perform a certain way. But my partner, who has sexual anatomy typically associated with women, sometimes has physical impulses at odds with [her?] anatomy (don’t worry: our relationship is very accommodating of these impulses). Yet my partner is also one of the most socially cognizant, patient,… Read more »
“But in addition to the above, AND VERY IMPORTANT: Women should, on average, have the strongest vote in womens issues because they are affected the most and therefore care the most.”
You’re still begging the question. By framing the debate as about “women’s issues” you’re engaging in gendrocentric thinking in the first place.