Thank you Fred–this is important.

Huh! Thanks for the awareness raising you’re doing here!

“This sends a message, sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle, that half of the world is somehow abnormal.”

More than half.  IIRC, women outnumber men in every society.  So more than half the population is ‘abnormal,’ which seems to fly in the face of the very definition of ‘normal’ but then, why would anyone expect this to make sense?

‘which is really interesting and shows that the default-white-dude iconography isn’t just a Disqus phenomenon’
Well, just to take a flying leap into raw speculation, the people who are responsible for coding such systems in Western societies also feel themselves safely ensconced in being default-white-dudes.

Which would imply that the best way for things to change would be to change how we live – but that seems far too hard for most people. Sometimes, I really miss the heady days of the 70s, when it all seemed so possible – because it was actually happening, at least when one looked at the media and government, or thing like Title IX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX ) leading to the start of things like women’s athletic programs. Of course, what I miss is exactly what the Republicans have been feasting on while declaring their opposition to such horrendous unfairness, and cementing power in the meantime.

World of Warcraft (yes yes, I am a huge nerd) is a pretty great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) example of the “breasts and lipstick” phenomenon. Every race in the game, even the giant warrior cow-people and werewolves, have females that are basically giant-breasted stereotypical male-fantasy females. There are zero exceptions. In the next expansion, they’re adding a race of anthropomorphic pandas. Pandas have little to no sexual dimorphism, but it’s a pretty sure bet that the females will be skinny, with huge breasts, and all of the other stereotypical female accouterments.

One idea that might work better is the way Typepad does it, with just a pattern of shapes as the default profile pic instead of generic male silhouette. Like the ones in the article above, it’s not gendered and — unlike the male and the female avatars that a lot of sites use, it doesn’t even hint at or prescribe a certain “default appearance” for men and women (women have long hair, men have short, neat hair and a square jaw).

I really like my Typepad default avatar.  It’s like Typepad read my mind and knew blue was my favorite color.

When you have a live-action TV show with female aliens who look like female humans with some rubber on, I charitably think maybe your special effects budget could be bigger.  If you are designing characters and it ends up like that?  Creativity: Ur Doin It Rong.

We always got Ms. Magazine growing up.  The articles were excellent, but the images were even more valuable.  (Like the add ones.  No Comment?)

Hah. I dealt with this for a singing-related program I wrote once. I was trying to decide what stock art to use for the program’s icon, and was initially thinking of a picture of a person singing, but agonized so much over the weird race and gender connotations of basically every stock image ever that I ended up just using a picture of a microphone… <_<

I also favor the type-pad approach. Failing that, the neutral Disqus
avatar could easily be a circle or a talk-bubble with a smile or…

I would like a gender-neutral, non-race specific avatar as the default.I also favor the type-pad approach. Failing that, the neutral Disqus
avatar could easily be a circle or a talk-bubble with a smile or…

I would like a gender-neutral, non-race specific avatar as the default.

This was something I noticed in the few episodes I watched of the Sigh-Fie series Alphas.  It’s about a team of people with superpowers:  there’s a large and powerfully built African American man, a slightly built white guy with some autism-spectrum condition, a lushly built (but slim and pretty) woman possibly of mixed heritage, another (not so lush, but also slim and pretty) of Middle Eastern ancestry.

And then there’s the New Guy.  The one to whom all this is strange and has to be explained:  the one who’s there to serve as the viewers’ avatar.  Our POV character.  So the writers came up with someone not too out of the ordinary:  a normal character, that normal people could identify with.  A 25-40, able-bodied, neurotypical white male.  You know, normal.

Not sure if this is quite the same thing, but just yesterday, I learned that the Bionic Woman toys came with a “mission purse” and featured a “Bionic Woman Beauty Salon” playset.

Somehow, I don’t think the same was true for Steve Austin.

One of the great features of Science Fiction (and fantasy) is that it enlarges contemporary mores, memories, and memes to the point where they are more easily viewable.

Word. Why couldn’t an alien race have one sex, or no sex, or six sexes*? Why couldn’t the females of an alien species be larger and stronger than the males just like certain insects, arachnids, and many many others on this our very own planet Earth? Or, a la Dwarves in Tolkien, couldn’t the sexes simply be indistinguishable to the uneducated eye?Of course, all of these questions have the same answer: Failure of imagination. Anyone here seen Enemy Mine? It blew my 12-year-old mind when it [spoiler!] revealed that “Jerry” (portrayed by Louis Gossett Jr.) was female because, you know, she looked like a Lizard “Man” to me.

*Wasn’t it Heinlein (God bless his anarcho-crypto-fascist soul) who mentioned by way of passing in one of his books that contrary to human opinion, there are actually six sexes required for human procreation on Earth and that males and females are blind to the very existence of the other four?

Why couldn’t an alien race have one sex, or no sex, or six sexes?

In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode Cogenitor, the crew meet a species that has three genders.

World of Warcraft (yes yes, I am a huge nerd) is a pretty great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) example of the “breasts and lipstick” phenomenon.

In one of my previous lives I worked for a company that was owned by the
same parent company as Blizzard and we worked in shared office space. I
knew a fair number of the developers, at least casually, and this is not a surprise. I’m sad that things haven’t improved in the intervening years.

Oh, and in “Alien Nation” (the TV series) the Tectonese have two kinds of males; one to catalyze the egg so that the other kind of male can contribute his genetic material. And then midway through pregnancy, the embryo is transferred from the female to her mate, sort of like with seahorses here on Earth, who gives birth to the live offspring some months later.

Michael Pullmann: Not sure if this is quite the same thing, but just yesterday, I learned
that the Bionic Woman toys came with a “mission purse”

For some reason I am considerably disappointed that they didn’t call it a “bionic purse”.

Anyway, on alien genders, I recall an episode of Third Rock From the Sun where the aliens (who are on Earth investigating human society) remark that having only two genders must be very limiting. 

Why couldn’t an alien race have one sex, or no sex, or six sexes*? Why
couldn’t the females of an alien species be larger and stronger than the
males just like certain insects, arachnids, and many many others on
this our very own planet Earth?

The Asari in Mass Effect have one sex.

Let me dig out Wayne Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials for a second here…
(These are all written fiction, though)–
There are a number of completely asexually-reproducing entities, Donald Moffitt’s cygnans depict males as tiny parasites on the bodies of the pseudo-humanoid females, Michael Bishop’s cygnostikoi are unknown in reproductive terms, but live in “seven member conjugal bonds,” F.M. Busby’s demu are hermaphroditic, David J. Lake’s dextrans have only intelligent females, Jack Vance’s dirdir has 12 reproductive organs in males and 14 in females (..that’s what it says…), Asimov’s “soft ones” have three sexes, so on. Of course, these are the wild exceptions, but they are out there!

Heck, the expanded universe of Predator suggests females are larger and stronger than males (isn’t that a pleasant thought, larger and stronger beings than the “Predators” we know…). For the life of me, I can’t recall what show or film or comic or what it was where some human makes a snarky remark to a male alien, who says something to the effect of: “Yeah, actually, you don’t want to mess with our females, they are much bigger and stronger. We’re actually kind of scared of them,” or some such. I think I’ve seen it more than once, actually. Admittedly, it’s kind of just a reversal in that respect. Enemy Mine is definitely fantastic in this regard though.

Anyway: it’s worth noting that Mass Effect is one of the few instances with both a developed main character and the absence of wussifying the female one. Female Shepard is only visually separate from male Shepard, but shows no sudden crying, or weakness, or need to be saved, or comparatively excess flirtation, or so on and so forth in the usual fashion of “Wait, we need to make her ‘feminine’!” Doesn’t excuse those oh-so-clever remarks, of course. But Bioware actually did a number of good things in terms of female portrayal (and the endless flak they keep receiving for allowing for bisexual protagonists and homosexual protagonists in the “romantic branches” of the stories…the complaints against which are in that laughable but sad but anger-inducing vein).

Sidenote: Turian females were established in the official Mass Effect comic, and the separation is rather subtle (males have hips like that, too, for the record):
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110131170261/masseffect/images/thumb/2/2f/Turian_female_001.jpg/627px-Turian_female_001.jpg

“One of the great features of Science Fiction (and fantasy) is that it enlarges contemporary mores, memories, and memes to the point where they are more easily viewable.”

I love the way Larry Niven writes – he has a great ‘hard’ sci-fi imagination – but when two of the species in the Known Universe have non-sentient females, and then I read The Patchwork Girl, and then I just had to accept that the dude is sexist.

The Left Hand Of Darkness played with the Default Male idea nicely.  The inhabitants of Winter are androgynous, taking on the role of male or female at estrus, and having no particular bias towards one sex or the other (except for the Perverts).  And the male human Envoy just can’t help from thinking of them as Default Male, and keeps being brought up short when he hears that the King is pregnant or sees his good friend turn female or…

It actually annoys the hell out of me when aliens are depicted as having breasts. Mammary glands are the defining feature of mammals, and not even all mammals have breasts (monotremes do not). Mammary glands are a very specific adaptation to live birth. While I can understand if you have a live actor playing an alien (like Star Trek) having lots and lots of biological similarities to humans, in a video game it is just inexcusable. Particularly when WALL-e showed all you need are two vaguely eye looking things in order to convey expressiveness. Let’s see some creativity!

A Scrabble-enthusiast friend of mine recently told me about this: http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3107660

It’s not just Scrabble either; it looks like nearly every boardgame has a “female” (aka pink) version released, and now they’re releasing pink LEGOs as well, complete with female characters. I also saw a really great article on, I think it was Slate, about the trend of manufacturing pink electronics (such as laptops, smartphones, etc.) and how, contrary to the stereotype, more women then men are buying electronics right now, and only a relatively small portion of them actually want bright pink gadgets.

As a women with stereotypically “male” interests, I’m not really sure how I feel about any of it. I don’t know that anyone here really thinks the problem is that they’re selling pink laptops or children’s books with female main characters; there’s a market for those things, and some people like them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And, to be honest, I think that a lot of the “regular” products are meant to be unisex as opposed to masculine – a lot of women (myself included) find female-cut t-shirts uncomfortable for example, a lot of women (myself included) prefer sleek-looking black, white, or silver electronics over bright pink, etc., so honestly, I would find it sort of invalidating if those were labelled as “male” things as opposed to “the default”. And it’s certainly interesting that there’s really nothing in our culture that says women SHOULDN’T buy non-female t-shirts or black laptops, but there’s still a lot of stigma on a man buying a pink laptop or a V-neck t-shirt. It’s also interesting though that a lot of the most over-the-top attempts to appeal to women are “geeky” products (electronics, geeky t-shirts, LEGOs, board games, video games (see also: Final Fantasy X (marketed toward a general audience) vs. Final Fantasy X-2 (marketed toward a “female” audience and also a gigantic Base Breaker)). Maybe because those are products that in theory could be used by both sexes but in practice tend to be associated with (a certain type of) masculinity, thus creating a need (or perceived need) for advertising execs to make a special effort to “reach out” to women?

The sports equipment thing was just plain insulting though. (Fortunately, that seems to be relatively rare – at least from what I’ve seen in the world of shopping for running shoes. Most stores I go into label the equipment “male” and “female”, don’t seem to assume that female = bright pink, and have roughly equal stock sizes and options for both genders.) As is the default male avatar, and the male-only aliens. (And the last one seems to indicate a lack of imagination on the game-maker’s part too – why would aliens even have the same sex-based characteristics as humans anyway? Even species on our own planet vary in that regard. If they can’t be bothered to think of a proper gender system, then they could at least make the aliens hermaphrodites or something.)

Anyway, hi. Long time lurker, first time poster. And I’m afraid it’s a really long, rambling post. But, um, please don’t kill me with sheep?

How could I forget Left Hand of Darkness? I was particularly impressed by Le Guin’s decision to use male pronouns as way to jar the reader with such phrases as you mention, “The king was pregnant…” etc. It was also very neat how being a mother was valued more in that society than just being a father since most people were both at one point or another and thus understood just how difficult it is to bear a child. Also very interesting how while the king had fathered several children, it’s the children he personally bore that were most directly in line for succession.

[Anyway, just to avoid any misunderstanding, my point was about the paucity of imagination of the Bioware game developers, not that there isn't any SF out there that breaks out of the binary sex trap. Which is my new band's name.]

Edited for grammar/spelling.

…the necessity of making it a habit to look again “Exactly where you don’t want to look, where you never want to look.” That’s not a habit most of us can manage on our own…

Fritz Perls made “follow the resistance” the basis of his therapeutic approach. That is, if you (therapist) keep redirecting the conversation towards what the client skips over, the client will lead himself to the root of whatever problem.

I think human persons can train themselves to “look behind” by paying attention to what’s going on at the corners of their mental vision. You won’t catch everything, but you can hook some interesting stuff. Perls’ book Gestalt Therapy has a set of useful exercises and practices. 

And I don’t think this is something anybody can trust somebody else to do. More likely that other person will be trying to train you into ignoring what they want you to ignore.

It’s not just Scrabble either; it looks like nearly every boardgame has a “female” (aka pink) 

Yet in the Victorian era, pink was a most masculine color. It’s almost as if these are all just made-up constructs or something and that they’re being used to sell the same basic products over and over and over again.

Star Trek TNG dealt with gender issues several times, notably with a race of androgynous aliens and a race where women were the dominant gender.  Of course, even more notably, they kicked the legs out from under such ideas by showing that all either race really wanted was a big manly Riker type to come along and show them how to be “normal.”  With his genitals.

As to the original topic of Things For People vs Things For Women: I noticed an example of this the other day at the Wal*Mart.  The new movie “Courageous” comes with two posters you can purchase.  One is titled “The Resolution” the other is “The Resolution For Women.”  (With “for Women” in flowery script no less)

Welcome!

But, um, please don’t kill me with sheep?

I am never going to live that down.

[Anyway, just to avoid any misunderstanding, my point was about the
paucity of imagination of the Bioware game developers, not that there
isn't any SF out there that breaks out of the binary sex trap. Which is
my new band's name.]

To avoid any misunderstanding about *my* post: I just thought it was fair to point out that this was a selective example of BioWare–a clearly and undeniably, undefensibly problematic one–but one that was not universally representative. The hanar are also of undetermined sexual nature, and suspected to be asexual, beyond the asari. In a field like video gaming that is rife with stupid sexism, pointing to those bits and saying, “Wait, wait, these parts are done right though!” seems important. Because there are very few examples of avoiding *any* of those tropes (and, in-game, there isn’t as much representation of it….though not none)

It’s not just the victorian era.  Check out one of James “Bubba” Stewart’s Sx bikes from last year:
http://motocross.transworld.net/files/2011/02/img_2052-600×400.jpg

And one of Pasini’s 250GP bikes:
http://s4.hubimg.com/u/1195415_f496.jpg
I like pink – I like colors that are bold, out there, startling - and pink is one of those.  There’s nothing that needs to be feminine or soft or submissive about it.

I remember way back when getting a free trial subscription to Computing for Women (or some such name) mainly because I was curious what they would come up with that was relevant to my gender. Nothing that I can recall.

My favorite computer reading at that time was Jerry Pournelle’s column in Dr Dobbs’s Journal, all kinds of good stuff. I was disappointed that his fiction didn’t appeal much to me.

This is marginally off-topic but I can’t resist telling the story:

Imagine you are a male college undergrad and you’re playing Humans Versus Zombies Tag–the campus is crawling with people in orange headbands, and whenever you are outside they can chase you down and turn you into a zombie.  You have a Nerf dart gun for defense, but you’re maybe not a good shot, and anything could happen in a firefight.

You’re hiding in the bushes near a building and a zombie approaches.  In a panic you rush to the nearest door and go in.  You only saw a glimpse of the pursuer–mostly that orange headband, which is burned into your retinae.

You talk off your identifying armband and walk through the building to the far side.  You know that the zombie may have done the same, and that zombies are also allowed to remove their identifiers indoors.  So leaving the building is going to be risky.  You pause by the door, getting ready to put your armband on again, and carefully look behind you.  There is a gray-haired woman waiting for the elevator, but no one else.

So you gather your courage and bolt out the door.  Five steps out you hear the pursuer, turn and shoot–and miss.  Welcome to the ranks of the undead.

What was your problem?  Exactly what Fred is talking about here.  Your default zombie was a leggy male undergraduate.  Not a gray-haired female professor pretending to wait for the elevator.  You saw me, but you didn’t *see* me or you would never have gone out that door….

(The zombie professor is very pleased with herself.  I will never catch any of these undergrads by running, but the stealth approach works from time to time.)

Men Are Generic, Women Are Special

(DANGER:  TV Tropes link.  They don’t have one for “Most Programmers Are Males”, but they do have one for writers.)

  For some reason I am considerably disappointed that they didn’t call it a “bionic purse”.   

 
A bionic purse would be cool. (Go go gadget tank!) A purse for the Bionic Woman is not. 

From what I understand, in the androgynous alien race episode, William Frakes wanted the actor playing opposite him — the alien whom he had fallen for — to be male, but this was shot down by the studio.

Which is a shame, because for a franchise that apocryphally prides itself on exploring human nature, that would have been THE episode that everyone would be talking about for years.

Yeah, the defaul Disqus avatar always bugged me, but I sorta shrugged it off with the thought, “Yep, it’s like this all the time, well… I’ve got bigger problems to sort out right now.”

Bless you, Fred Clark, for saying, “No.  This is wrong.  It stops HERE.”

To answer your question, I also think that the abstract images is one of the things that Typepad gets right.  I’m pretty sure that they use some sort of algorithm to match patterns to usernames, so there is consistency across postings, which is nice.  But Disqus could use simple geometric shapes if they don’t want to bother with the fancy spirographs that Typepad has come up with.

Although it would be disconcerting (possibly in a good way) if people ended up in different colors and shapes over HERE than they do THERE. 

Let me defend Bioware, and fiction in general here.  (Notably, not Disqus, about that I agree one hundred percent, because there it is something you absolutely SHOULD be paying attention to.)

There’s lots of talk about Bioware being “lazy” and “uncreative” here, and I think that’s unfair.  It isn’t that they are being uncreative, it’s that they are not telling the stories you want to hear.  Creativity is not something that us artists have in infinite supply.  If I want to tell a story about myth and about language, and the way that they interact – for instance, I probably don’t get real in depth about why it is that elves are unaffected by basic biology.  If I want to tell a story about gender and the default male, and I need my protagonist to talk to Hain, I just invent the ansible, and not really worry about the fact that such a thing obviates the entire the logical underpinning of the universe.

Similarly, if I want to tell a story about giant malevolent robots wiping out all life in the galaxy, I probably don’t spend that much time worrying about the sexual dimorphism of my invented species.  I suppose that in the strictest sense this can be considered “lazy” – but lazy here comes across as pejorative and I don’t think that’s really fair.  By definition, marking mass “art” like video games is an act of privilege – it is clear that the parts where the artist has chosen not to “spend” creativity are going to reflect the privileged world view.  I think that the art itself here is morally neutral.  It is neither good nor bad that places where not much effort as placed reflect the dominant culture.

It says something about the dominant culture sure, and something that’s probably BAD about the dominant culture, but I don’t think it says much of anything about the moral fiber of the concept artists at Bioware, or the independent worth of Mass Effect.  I hardly think that a story that’s basically about laser guns and magic powers should get condemned because it didn’t pay closer attention to it’s fictional xenobiology.  Now if it should come to pass that there is a huge outcry about the treatment of female Turians in Mass Effect, and it’s STILL basically “boobs or loopstick?” there might be a point – but part of privilege is that it doesn’t KNOW that it’s privilege until someone points it out.  A fish doesn’t know that water is wet – that is – until someone pulls it out of the water.

I mean, there’s levels to this – none of the aliens in ME are particularly well developed, so it isn’t like they spent a load of time on world building as long as it had a penis – they just sort of glossed anything that didn’t fire bullets or shoot lightning — and that’s fine.  The problem here is not that some concept artist devalues you, and thinks of you as other, it’s that the culture as a whole does – and it’s fine to protest that, and to want to see more fully developed gender roles in fictional aliens, or girl aliens without totally unlikely bumps halfway up their thoracic cavity – but all of this ire toward the artists themselves feels misplaced.

For a second I had to double-check the title.  I’m not used to Fred mentioning this specific form of privilege.  I honestly thought I was reading “No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?”

I’d actually rather like it if, for a month or so, Disqus switched its default avatar to be female – just so the men can learn, en masse, what it’s like…

> ” I think the first step is to clarify specifically just what it is we want to ask Disqus to do to fix this.”

Yeah, agreed.

My $0.02: ideally, allow commenters to select an icon just like they select a name. Have some default icons, but allow commenters to point to suitable graphics elsewhere as well. Failing that, replace the default icon with something nonanthropomorphic, like a quill.

I suspect there will be pushback from Disqus marketers  on the latter approach because they want to keep the “human element” for their quote-normal-unquote users, and on the former approach because they want to keep the distinction between registered and unregistered users.

The difference between it being mostly ok for women to buy/wear stuff marketed to men, but not vice versa–it’s another sign that men are “normal” and women are “lesser.” It’s ok–admirable or laughable, depending on your pov, but acceptable–for a woman to do something “manly,” because it means she’s trying to better herself. But for a man to do something “feminine” is seen as degrading. Obviously this is a problem and I think that avoiding gendered marketing is a good thing in most cases–but not in clothing. Calling a t-shirt that is designed to fit the male shape “unisex” is just reinforcing the idea that the male shape is standard. Yes, many (but not all) women can wear unisex t-shirts comfortably and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, but many would rather wear something designed for a female shape, and if one category of product is marketed specifically towards women, it shouldn’t be singled out as the “not normal” version.

I know that talking about a “male shape” and “female shape” is problematic and that there are all sorts of body types out there, what I mean by “designed to fit the male/female shape” is “designed to fit an outdated set of standard sizes for men/women.” But there isn’t a set of standard sizes for unisex, not even an outdated one, and it’s pretty safe to assume that clothing marketed that way was designed to fit men, with “oh, but women can wear it too” tacked on.

Just a quick note, from a publishing background. Girls read. Stuff gets marketed to girls because they’re a ready and available and willing audience. Almost every marketing study you’ll read will say that if you put out a book and market it to girls, it will sell.

When I see a book that’s marketed one way for boys or kids and general, and marketed for girls in a different way, I see this as being no different from differences between the general ads for a book, and ads targeted to specific markets.

That said, I do not like this default guy and should very much like to change him. Into a picture of a women, for the first while at least, just to make things even.

 
I am never going to live that down.  

Why would you want to? 

I’d actually rather like it if, for a month or so, Disqus switched its
default avatar to be female – just so the men can learn, en masse, what
it’s like…

That would be awesome.

It’s just, there’s a big difference between marketing a book one way for boys and another way for girls, and marketing a book one way for kids in general and another way for girls. The first says that boys and girls are different, without valuing one over the other. The second says that “kids in general” are not girls, and singles girls out as being abnormal.

Also: Good grief. I never even looked at the little wisp of modern-man-haircut¹ and pointy, square chin. I always saw the Disqus avatar as a hairless generic silhouette (you know, like an androgynous mannequin). But then I have a habit of just ignoring generic avatars in any environment. I’ve seen a few places where it’s randomized blobs of colour, which helps to differentiate posts (and it seems to be assigned by IP or something, as otherwise-anonymous posters will typically hold a colour through multiple posts) and was nice and colourful without being distracting.

¹When my two feet of hair came off, they asked me what I wanted. I said I had no clue. Just…short. When Justin Bieber’s haircut was offered, I said “Okay, well, uh, not that…or anything else that looks like someone angled a fan at the top of my head and put it on high…” Point being: I often forget hair being culturally significant in gender roles, and don’t automatically associate it anyway. Years of “Ma’am?” when people saw me from behind kinda eliminated that desire to immediately assume.

Yes, many (but not all) women can wear unisex t-shirts comfortably and
there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, but many would rather wear
something designed for a female shape, and if one category of product is
marketed specifically towards women, it shouldn’t be singled out as the
“not normal” version.

I agree with this entire principle, but I hate this issue because I can’t figure out what the answer is to “don’t single out, but acknowledge difference.”

I have little interest in clothing as clothing,¹ so I’m typically looking for band-oriented shirts more than anything else. I’ve noticed a lot of those have started to drift into “Men’s t-shirts” and “women’s t-shirts,” which seems to avoid the “normal” and “other” problem but still doesn’t seem right to me, yet if we go with (as you say) the feeling that some people want clothing designed more for their shape, how the heck is that accomplished?

…Nevermind the variance in designs. I always think, “What about the designs on the women’s t-shirts that I like? And why are women usually stuck with 8 designs to our fifty?” And then there’s the business wing of that discussion: if Y% of buyers are male and X% are female, is it cost effective to provide as many designs for the percentage that is lower, assuming pre-production runs are involved? If it isn’t, how does one work that out?

¹Barring my previously noted affection for pop culture artifacts. Which, realistically, still isn’t “as clothing.”

Keep in mind that Bioware also added some horrific sexual stuff in The Old Republic. In hit Bioware game The Old Republic, you can force your nubile young sex slave to watch you have sex with other people and torture her if she tries to say no – and that was left in after lucasarts made them cut even worse sex stuff, according to the LA Times.

Larry Niven’s also kind of racist too. I was shocked to discover that The Burning City was his reaction to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Mrs. Le Guin, on the other hand, is pretty much only awesome all of the time.

The first thing I thought when I saw this blog header was that Fred had picked up  on the Lego thing – the new “Lego for girls” that’s upsetting so many of us for whom Lego already was a girl’s toy.

Is your child normal or is he a girl?

*Lego fan*

Yeah.  Bioware?

’cause my biggest problem isn’t what happened to Aya (tear off her clothes while she fights!) or Samus Aran (daddy issues) or what, last I heard, they were still doing to Lara Croft (DADDY ISSUES) or the moe-ification of Justice in Guilty Gear or taking even the slightest shred of character development away from Dizzy or the total non-event that was Maria in Assassin’s Creed or the ‘costume’ for my ‘heroine’ in FFXIII or the idea that tsundere is somehow synonymous with ‘strong woman’.

Instead I get Isabela and Aveline talking about the value of being a strong woman and the value of believing in yourself.

Yeah this is not the company at the top of my shit list.

It’s just, there’s a big difference between marketing a book one way for
boys and another way for girls, and marketing a book one way for kids
in general and another way for girls. The first says that boys and girls
are different, without valuing one over the other. The second says that
“kids in general” are not girls, and singles girls out as being
abnormal.

While your point is valid: http://thehathorlegacy.com/neil-de-grasse-tyson-explains-why-there-arent-more-women-in-science/ –boys and girls are different mostly if not entirely because, starting at the color-coded baby shower, boys and girls are told they are different.

You know, I really wanted to know what a female Turian looked like, because they were mentioned, but we never see one. That’s one of my complaints about Mass Effect as a piece of art.

Actually, that whole game was rather sexist. Have you seen the clothing for your female crew in Mass Effect 2? I felt like I was watching a porn…

I have long since decided to accept that my experience is the exception rather than the rule, so I can throw my weight behind Fred’s cause for the reasons stated. However, I think it’s worth mentioning that, as a girl, I always assumed that we got our own products because we were superhuman, not subhuman. There is nothing out there that I can’t wear, nothing I can’t play with; mere boys are banned from a significant portion of my enjoyments.

Based on my own personal experiences, I’d be in favor of evening the dichotomy for the sake of the males.

… now I’m wondering if, growing up in a tight-knit family of women, poor Dad may have actually taken the subordinate role that we joked he did.

I know that the Rigelians from Star Trek have four genders, and Species 8472 had five…and you needed ALL of them for reproduction.

You know, I really wanted to know what a female Turian looked like, because they were mentioned, but we never see one.

I posted an official picture of a female Turian upthread, from the official comics.

Actually, that whole game was rather sexist. Have you seen the clothing for your female crew in Mass Effect 2? I felt like I was watching a porn…

Bwuh?
Like Kasumi Goto? Doctor Chakwas? Yeoman Chambers? Engineer Daniels? Tali?

Admittedly, Justicar Samara has a pretty deeply plunging neckline, and Miranda Lawson’s uniform is designed to accentuate and emphasize her curves, and Jack is basically half-naked, but her character would kind of do that, and she wears (or doesn’t) it in the way that action movies have guys with no or less shirt (e.g., McClane in Die Hard), more of an “I’m badass” than “ogle me,” or maybe “Ogle me at your own risk, because I could kill you in a heartbeat.”

It’s not devoid of sexism (there’s some “interesting” camera choices in scenes with Miranda, in particular) but…the clothing? Pornographic? With three exceptions, the women are basically wearing as much as or more than the male characters–and Thane shows the same amount of chest or more.

*applause* Awesome privilege metaphor- I’ll be using that next time. And the Sociological Images post is kickass.

Also, definitely should petition for a new Disqus avatar. It could be the company logo, it could be some kind of writing implement- hell, it could be a scribble, for all I care. Tumblr’s anon logo is just a silhouette of a skull on a light gray background. Really, anything as long as it’s not gendered. I also love the idea of having a selection of default avatars- I’ve never seen that on a site before.

It’s considered “acceptable” for a guy to bare his chest, I always used Jack’s alternate suit because the strap bra was just way too distracting, Miranda’s suit isn’t just tight but impossibly skin-tight, the minor crew were minor crew, the Doctor is old, Tali still had those fantastic child-birthing hips despite being in what was supposed to be an environmental suit, Samara’s neckline was low enough to count for three women as well as being from a race that was transparently designed as ME’s “green women,” and I never could get the expansion packs to work so I have no opinion on Goto.

Plus, it was a general vibe of nastiness that made me uncomfortable, and I normally don’t care about things like that.

As someone who is intimately familiar with large portions of the Bioware staff (Two siblings work for them along with many of my local LARP group and D&D group) I feel a certain need to step in and offer a small defense of them.  A lot of the artists, writers, and designers are aware of these things and want to do better in avoiding these in the future but are regularly stymied by marketing and management types who are interested in the fact that boobs sell and nuanced alien genders do not and generally have a pretty narrow view of who their audience really is.  Even the fact that they`ve recently started including (alternately lauded and demonized) homosexual romance options is almost solely due to the efforts of lead writer David Gaider who had an absolute blowout fight with management and threatened to quit if he wasn`t allowed to start including romance options that would appeal to him in the games he was writing (admittedly he didn’t get to do male homosexual romance options at first but considered female ones to be enough of a victory that he could push for more in the next installment).

As for the TOR ‘romance’ things… well the TOR development team has almost nothing to do with the original Bioware except in name.  Most of the writers came from the Warhammer Online game with all of the ‘nuance’ the Warhammer approaches gender and little things like consent from in the first place.  It doesn’t excuse it in the slightest but it does sortof help explain how it happened.

Miranda’s suit isn’t just tight but impossibly skin-tight, [...] Samara’s neckline was low enough to count for three women

…I made those way more subtle than I meant to. I meant them in the way you’re saying them!
And I don’t notice hips much at all, so that one is just my own blindspot, I guess.

But that is what I meant about Jack–the “bad” part of a woman baring her chest is breasts are sexually titillating which is not allowed, men’s chests are not, so Jack not being bare-chested in a fashion that said, “look! I’m naked boobs!” seemed to throw it back toward “acceptable”–with the harness bra the inevitable concession to the belief that female nipples are somehow magically evil. Which I think–defying the “this one is different and not acceptable” within the bounds of “but if we do complete nudity, there will be a stupid uproar and there’s no prayer of it being just okay”–seemed like a good thing.

I don’t know–I’ve always had difficulty seeing condemnation or distaste expressed toward a group in media, though. When I think I do I’m afraid I’ve just mechanically interpreted it with no realistic nuance of what is and is not wrong, and most of the time I don’t see anyone as representative of anything but that character. Which I hate in some part, in that that would be the ideal approach: evaluate a character not as representative of man, woman, species, whatever, but as a character. But it is inaccurate in a world that doesn’t already see that way (and thus create that way).

I’m just going to shut up, now.

World of Warcraft (yes yes, I am a huge nerd) is a pretty great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) example of the “breasts and lipstick” phenomenon.

For the record, the answer is terrible

I know that talking about a “male shape” and “female shape” is
problematic and that there are all sorts of body types out there, what I
mean by “designed to fit the male/female shape” is “designed to fit an
outdated set of standard sizes for men/women.”

The thing is, what’s been the default male shape for clothing (i.e. not form fitting) really is more of a unisex shape.  Shaped clothing – a female t-shirt, say – is going to fit fewer people than non-shaped clothing – a male/unisex t-shirt, say.  It’s another case of stuff coming in “normal” and “female.”

In some ways, I’m not the best person to talk about gendered clothing, being genderqueer and all, but at the same time…  Well, let me put it this way, I’m thin, 5’5, and biologically female and men’s shirts still fit better than women’s shirts.  Either I am some kind of mutant freak, or the people designing clothing for women haven’t actually bothered to involve any women in the process.

In my more cynical moments, I think women’s clothing is designed to make it harder for women to be physically active. That would explain the too-short sleeves and torso.*  We can’t have women sticking their arms above their heads or even extending them fully in front of them.  They might be able to do something!  The horror!

*The too-narrow shoulders, on the other hand, are a case of my body being a bit off from the norm.  I’m not quite as broad shouldered as a man of my size, but I’m not that far off.  Or most women aren’t that far off from a similarly sized man and that’s more of the “let’s make clothes that hamper women” plot.

Ooh, during that month can we all also assume that posters with non-gendered handles are female? And when we discover that someone whose comments demonstrated our own ignorance is male, can we fly into a rage completely out of all proportion?

Wow. Um, no. The problem with this whole post is that it’s not, um, what’s the word? Oh yeah: true.
You don’t have a sex slave. One of the classes gets a slave as a companion (a sith warrior, in a society where slavery is common), and you can’t gain approval with her past a certain (very early) point unless you free her, and you certainly can’t force her to have sex with you.

The “worse sex stuff” that LucasArts made them cut? Same-sex relationships, which BW had written and (as I understand it) mostly recorded.

Edit: If you read it in the LA times, I’m sure what happened is that someone who never played the game heard that you can have a slave as a companion, and that you can have sex with some companions, and made up the rest from there without, you know, actually checking with someone who played the game.

Re alien genders: This is one topic that fanfic writers are actually covering quite well, and in Transformers of all things.  The aliens are sentient robots.  In some of the eleventy-one versions of the franchise, they are, or have, “sparks,” which are shiny glowy things that (in some versions) come from a point source that is basically a Big Dumb Object.  The spark is the person; the body, or “frame,” that surrounds the spark can be swapped out.  So are the different frames treated as genders, or not?  Seven genders, forty-two genders, what?  Is there a gender hierarchy?  If they don’t have genders, do they grok the human gender thing?  Do they pick genders when talking with humans, and if so which, and why?  Fanfic tackles these questions.  (And also tackles the topic of giant metal people being hermaphrodites with human-analogous naughty bits and hydrocarbon-based human-analogous sex-related fluids, but hey, that’s fanfic.)

(a sith warrior, in a society where slavery is common)

A society notably considered “evil” no less…

Oh, and it seems this was first “broken” by The Daily Mail….yeeowch. Not the most reliable source…

The thing is, women’s t-shirts aren’t “designed for the generic female shape”. They’re designed for the generically-shaped female who wants to expose a lot of skin. If you want a t-shirt that doesn’t reveal cleavage or with sleeves that extend further than the shoulder joint, you usually have to buy a “man’s t-shirt”. So it’s not just about ‘shape design’–imagine if every “male” t-shirt was a muscle-shirt.

I’ve also noticed that in the last few years women’s business shirts are cut so that the first button is about where the third button used to be. If you don’t want to display cleavage at work you have to wear a shirt underneath or sew on an extra button*. I like the cut at the waist in women’s business shirts but I want to be the one who decides how much skin is exposed, not the designer.

*If you have cleavage, that is. I won’t bring cleavage-privelege into the mix!

In my more cynical moments, I think women’s clothing is designed to make it harder for women to be physically active. That would explain the too-short sleeves and torso.*  We can’t have women sticking their arms above their heads or even extending them fully in front of them.  They might be able to do something!  The horror!

I think your cynicism is misplaced. It’s clearly designed to make women visually attractive without concern for their ability to be physically active.

Wait, that’s not really better. Crap.

Keep in mind that Bioware also added some horrific sexual stuff in The
Old Republic. In hit Bioware game The Old Republic, you can force your
nubile young sex slave to watch you have sex with other people and
torture her if she tries to say no – and that was left in after lucasarts made them cut even worse sex stuff, according to the LA Times.

…

Okay… either there’s some really skeevy stuff if you play dark side or the LA Times is misrepresenting something.  Or both.  I’ve been playing The Old Republic and, while there are a few gender related things that haven’t quite seemed right, I’ve encountered nothing remotely on that level.

Granted, I haven’t played a Sith Warrior, which has to be the class involved in that, since it’s the only class that I know of that gets a slave companion.  So, there could be some skeevy stuff if you play a Dark Side Sith Warrior and I wouldn’t know.  (I’m well aware that video games have a bad tendency to be sexist, but the media has a very bad habit of making video games sound worse than they are.)

The questionable things I’ve encountered in the game are par for the course in adventure fiction.  My (female) smuggler’s companion wants to romance her, but is also a sexist ass.  Yeah, there’s a romance that’s not going to happen.  And, apparently, female agents can sleep with someone to maintain their cover on one assignment (and, oddly, act embarrassed about it afterwards, which strikes me as rather WTF?), while that option doesn’t appear for male agents.  (At least not until they put in same sex options, which they claim they plan to.)

Though my male agent slept with someone for information, which is also par for the course. (Though he wasn’t embarrassed about it.)

(On the more positive side, despite there not yet being same sex options, my agent’s companion commented that he and another male agent would make a cute couple because they were both concerned about saving lives… and it didn’t seem like a gay joke.  It was voiced exactly how someone might snark about a man and a woman making a good couple because of some common interest.)

I don’t know.  I guess I’d expect to have encountered something more disturbing if the LA Times article is right.  But, hey, I have no particular desire to play evil, so I could be missing all the disturbing stuff.

Do you happen to have a link?

The most striking instance of this I ever encountered was in the early days of satellite TV. We got the device to program our VCR to tape programs (yes, it was that far back,) but it behaved erratically. I figured out the programming error, and managed to fight my way into the tech section. I explained it three times, and each time, with barely managed condescension, the male tech would tell me I didn’t understand.

My husband took the phone from me, said EXACTLY THE SAME THING, and the guy went nuts, saying that was genius and they’d been going crazy and we were getting a free device upgrade.

So ladies, next time you tell the garage mechanic what is wrong with the car? Use a deep voice.

Same-sex relationships, which BW had written and (as I understand it) mostly recorded.

They are still – supposedly – going to add the same-sex relationships as a post launch thing.  Since a decent segment of the fan base got rather pissed at LucasArts for being homophobic.

Everyone I know hopes they keep their promise to add them in.

The thing is, women’s t-shirts aren’t “designed for the generic female
shape”. They’re designed for the generically-shaped female who wants to
expose a lot of skin. If you want a t-shirt that doesn’t reveal cleavage
or with sleeves that extend further than the shoulder joint, you
usually have to buy a “man’s t-shirt”. So it’s not just about ‘shape
design’–imagine if every “male” t-shirt was a muscle-shirt.

I’ve
also noticed that in the last few years women’s business shirts are cut
so that the first button is about where the third button used to be. If
you don’t want to display cleavage at work you have to wear a shirt
underneath or sew on an extra button. I like the cut at the waist in
women’s business shirts but I want to be the one who decides how much
skin is exposed, not the designer.

Honestly, I never thought they were. Band t-shirts, in particular, were the first place I had any reason to be exposed to “women’s” clothing, when they were first marketed as “babydoll tees.” I always thought that name was kind of gross, and was attenuated to women who feel that they should fit that rock/punk equivalent of “geek girl”¹ and thus, indeed, had little or nothing to do with actual shapes.

Of course, I also SAW the shape and thought, “What?” then figured it was something a woman looking at it would understand where I didn’t. Not surprised to find out that was total bollocks.

That said: my SGF decided to screw with her former boss a few times by wearing some of my unseemly metal shirts (one for Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten, one for The Haunted’s The Dead Eye) and they are, of course “genetic man t-shirts.” They hung on her very oddly. But she also has defiantly unusual proportions, so that may have been a contributing factor.

I also had a female friend in the military² discussing female-acknowledging BDUs and the like once, and the complexity thereof, as well as the concerns over whether it would turn out as something akin to “women’s t-shirts.”

¹I saw an article describing this delineation, girls who are geeks versus the “geek girl” thing, where it’s deliberately manipulating one’s image and persona into the approximated “magnet for geek guys,” which has little or nothing to do with personal sensibilities and everything to do with setting oneself out there to be leered at, which kind of creeps me out in a way I don’t know how to explain.

I was reminded of it last night when I went looking for Roland Jenkees music from Sequence on YouTube and discovered a series of videos by a girl who talked in a cutesy voice and had the camera placed above her amply displayed cleavage and talked about Japanese words. Second or third time I saw that. It always kind of disappoints me, as far as humanity goes. Because I know exactly why each of them chooses to do it–and that it will be successful.

²Well…she was supposed to be. DADT kinda messed that up. That was my lesson in, “Wow, Bill O’Reilly becomes even more repellent when he’s talking about someone you know.

@ Lonewolf – how do you know we don’t see a female Turian? it may be that quite a few of the Turians in the game ARE female, and we just weren’t told. All we have, by the game’s wiki (and that’s not even mentioned in the game iirc) is that ” Males and females do not differ greatly in physical appearance, but
female turians lack the crest of horns found in the males of the race.” That’s it. I’m not sure that was mentioned in the game, though. It could have been mentioned in some of the related novels that came later. IIRC all Turians in the game had crests.

It could be all Turians in ME were male, but considering the high level of discipline and militarism in their society, I doubt it – the fluff made it seem that pretty much every Turian is involved in the military. It is more likely that they just made all Turians, well, Turian, and didn’t bother having obvious male/female demarkations. Well, obvious to humans. Kinda makes sense for an alien race, doesn’t it?

Now, D&D 4th edition dragonborn (Geek here), they were… bad. I mean, they were supposed to be reptilians, yet the females had very, very obvious breasts. In 3.5 they were formerly members of other species, transformed by the blessing of a dragon exemplar/deity, so it makes some sense to retain the shape they had. Their new incarnation had no such explanation – they were a race all their own, somehow related to dragons.

Since it stays close to fifty-fifty, I doubt we have any reliable way of telling in any decent sized society.  That is to say, is a sample suggests women are fifty-one percent of a population, there’s probably a margin of error of at least two or three points.  Let’s just say that it’s roughly half and half, and therefore makes no sense to treat one as common and one as irregular.

OT – what? a game with a jenkees soundtrack? awesome, I’ll have to check it out

@2dcfaa32e528f514d540c980d6741b29:disqus Welcome to posting! And allow me to ruthlessly mock the idea that Final Fantasy X-2 was ever aimed at a “female” audience! That entry in the FF franchise is “Fanservice: The Game.” It is totally aimed at the male fanbase who thought the characters in FFX were hot.

I wonder if it says something that my favorite games were always the Myst franchise. True, I liked the puzzles, but I also loved the fact that the first-person POV meant that I felt like *I* was playing the game, and characters, when they interacted with you at all, used ungendered language.

When URU came out and you could create an avatar of yourself as male or female, I suppose they were both stereotypically masculine and feminine (i.e. buff or busty) rather than having the option to look more androgynous. Also, in trying to make my avatar look like me, I could get the waist skinny but then she had no badunkadunk. Apparently the software makers were not butt men. Finally, I made a character who looked nothing like me instead, and more like what I wished I look like. Apparently, I want to be mixed race…

I’ve definitely hit the “female protagonists aren’t relatable” thing in the anime/manga fandom. One of the best female leads in recent history was Balsa in Moribito, a strong fighter of high moral character but also kind and serving as a parental figure to an endangered prince. She has no fanservice, and her (unfulfilled because she’s married to her job) love interest is a healer, a stereotypically female role.

And I wanted to punch a guy in a forum once who said he just didn’t find her attractive, sorry. I was like, “Dude, you’re supposed to RELATE to her, to want to BE LIKE HER, not just want to have sex with her!”

Speaking of anime/manga forums, I get repeatedly referred to as “he” in spite of having an over-the-top fangirly alias. WTF? It has irritated me so much that I’m increasingly trying to either (1) avoid using gendered pronouns altogether, (2) use they, or (3) use thon when I don’t know the forum-users gender.

Yeah, Sequence is a 360/Steam rhythm game. I play it with a 360 controller. It’s mostly Jenkees music, but a few other people in there, too. “Throwing Fire” was so awesome I had to go share it with everyone.

More cynically, I think visually-based science fiction does the sexual dimorphism thing mainly to give viewers eye candy. Most viewers are male, and of course stuff skews that way, but there aren’t a whole lot of major male characters who aren’t good looking either!

Re:Mass Effect: There’s a recurring joke in-universe about a hanar spectre, and persistent rumours you’ll get it as a playable-character in 3! If the game wasn’t completely Shepard-based, I’d want to PC either a Hanar or Turian, myself!

Not sure if this is quite the same thing, but just yesterday, I learned
that the Bionic Woman toys came with a “mission purse” and featured a
“Bionic Woman Beauty Salon” playset.

Somehow, I don’t think the same was true for Steve Austin.

That reminds me of the Golden Age (50s era) Batwoman’s utility purse, and the Silver Age (60s era) Miss Arrowette’s powder-puff arrows.

Particularly when WALL-e showed all you need are two vaguely eye looking things in order to convey expressiveness.

Eyes, nothing. Pixar’s first short makes you empathize with a pair of voiceless, faceless lamps. There’s a lot that can be done with body language.

The spark is the person; the body, or “frame,” that surrounds the spark can be swapped out

What I really like about the mythos is that in some incarnations, it’s really More Complicated Than That. Rather than going with a purely cartesian “Ghost in the Machine” model, each individual transformer is *both* the spark and the frame. Changing bodies can have a radical effect on their personality. In ‘Energon’, you’ve got Scorponok, who, in this incarnation, was an unaligned transformer from planet Q, who had been killed by Unicron. At the beginning of Armada, Alpha Q resurrects Scorponok from Unicron’s dormant corpse. But it is eventually revealed that Scorponok was resurrected not with his own original Spark, but with the spark of a unnamed decepticon that just happened to be in the area. The new Scorponok has the original’s memories, and _tries_ to be loyal to his original mission, but he feels himself compelled to follow Megatron and side with the decepticons, even knowing, rationally, that he shouldn’t want to.

Wasn’t it Heinlein (God bless his anarcho-crypto-fascist soul) who
mentioned by way of passing in one of his books that contrary to human
opinion, there are actually six sexes required for human procreation on
Earth and that males and females are blind to the very existence of the
other four?

I believe it was actually Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse V.

The irony of Lego’s “lego for girls” fiasco is that, aside from the color palette, these for-girls toys are actually *pretty good*. The entire “for girls” change is to make the toys pink and to swap out the traditional androgynous, only-really-human-in-an-impressionistic-sort-of-way minifigs for minifigs that are shaped more like actual people.

They could have just rolled out a New Line of People-Shaped Minifigs, but instead they felt a special need to do the whole People vs Girls thing.

Oh god how I hate that as a man too.

I despise and loathe home reno type work and thus have never gotten any good at it, while my wife is a professional carpenter and thus can easily get it all offloaded onto her.  However when we go to any sort of reno place people talk past her to me and ask me questions when she is giving them specific answers and asking detailed questions which require knowledge.  Then when I’m dealing with mechanics they expect me to know about engines and are completely baffled when my response is ‘I don’t know what horsepower it is, I just drive the thing”.

Gaah Sexism sucks for everyone. 

In response to the question– either, as has been suggested, randomized non-anthropomorphized icons would probably fit. I was going to suggest androgynous stylized stick figures, but that’s too easily seen as a default-male, too.

There was some awful bigotry at the 2011 Botcon Transformers Prime panel where they addressed the persistent rumors that Knockout was gay by saying “Nemesis is a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of place but lets just say there was a glitch in the AllSpark the day Knockout was created”.

I have to admit that part of me wanted to get into Transformers fanfic and explore gender and parenting issues* though them.  Partly because I had a cool idea and partly it amused me deeply to think of getting a heavily male and rather isolated from politics group invested in a plot that was ultimately about reproductive rights.  Ultimately I haven’t got around to it yet because I’ve never followed the various series in enormous detail and diving into a extremely obsessive fandom without the incredibly petty knowledge of details that is insisted on frightens me quite badly.

*My idea was to write an alternate Transformers history where new Transformers were ‘birthed’ by splitting off part of their parent’s Spark (and thus inheriting deliberately chosen personality aspects) rather than being created independantly.  This would provide the groundwork for a more interesting split between Autobots and Decepticons which has always annoyed me in the silly black-and-white way it is portrayed.  Basically, the Primes would have decided to maintain a strict replacement population growth policy so that the Transformers wouldn’t overrun the galaxy and exhaust the resources of all the various planets.  The Decepticons would have been the younger crowd who hadn’t budded and resented their elders who already had the opportunity to do so restricting it from them and engaging in opposition and eventually moving to creating ‘accidents’ to kill elder Transformers (thus opening the chance for a young to bud), and then outright warfare as the Autobots became increasingly authoritarian to counter the terrorism.  The Decepticons would primarily be younger and fighting for ‘human’ rights while slowly losing their moral authority as they take more and more extreme actions while the Autobots would be authoritarians who were defending entrenched power and priviledge and slowly losing their moral authority by responding more and more oppressively.

*If you have cleavage, that is. I won’t bring cleavage-privelege into the mix!

The funniest (by which I mean “crappiest” and not-funny-at-all) part of that is the awful, horrendous refusal of acceptance a lot of women have toward presence or absence of cleavage.

My SGF used to offer to trade her chest with the girls she worked with. They were enthusiastic about this idea. Neither one noticed the other was enthusiastic about the other’s presence or absence of cleavage. Shouldn’t that mean that there’s an appeal in each, and maybe, just maybe it’s okay to have a big chest or a small one or “no” chest or whatever else? If everyone involved thinks the grass is greener, well…

She has a background in reading a lot of shojo manga, where apparently (I barely read any, and what I do is usually either peculiar and off the wall or shonen) all/most women are tiny and look like prepubescent girls in a creepy way, instead of disturbing barbels in a gravity-defying, should-be-bone-breaking sort of way. She discovered American comics and finally felt like, hey, characters can be shaped more like her (!) and I thought, “Oh, dear lord. This is all worse than I ever imagined,” as I had no idea there was the reverse-cleavage-privilege-mentality going on as well. And slowly I started to notice that, as well, since I’ve always been an American comics geek, so the “Women don’t look like that,” was always directed at small waists, big boobs, big butt thing.

I can’t really fathom how stupid and ridiculous it is that a culture can basically shame every female shape there is, short of the airbrushed ones. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more confused than when she told me how *I* would prefer her body to be shaped.

While there is certain appeals to each, I can’t help but feeling like punching small chested women who complain about it after a decade of second-hand experience with a woman who was up to a double-G brasize at the end (having started out around a DD or E and retained an extra two sizes after each child).  The back pain, near-permanent indents from straps, burst capilaries, muscle spasms, and difficulty doing physical tasks even with a sports bra (because it is hard to put your arms directly in front of you) leave me with little sympathy for woman who ‘want to look better’.

Even though I never actually had to experience the misery of large breasts myself when my wife got her breast reduction done (have I mentioned I love Canada’s health care system) it was one of the best things to ever happen to me despite a horrific post-op infection because it has improved her quality of life so vastly.  Today she is heathier, happier, and more capable with C-cups than she ever was before.

Yeah. I’ve got more female friends than male, and one took that route and was way happier and more relieved afterward. I’ve heard complaints from many over time, too, along the lines you mention for your wife.

For complicated reasons, my SGF cannot get a reduction on Fs. And has to special order bras, because, of course, she is actually rather small otherwise (5’0″ to start), and no one really provides for that, apparently (being scrawny and 6’1″, the principle is one I understand, though it’s easier to deal with trousers being too short than bras that, uh, don’t work)

@The Mighty Wombat – That’s a possibility, but there’s still the problem that every single Turian we are introduced to by name is explicitly male, from Saren to Garrus to Councilor McRacist.  I’d actually really enjoy having a Turian woman on the squad in Mass Effect 3.

As an aside, I don’t comment very often, but I should probably get rid of Junius, here.

I’d actually really enjoy having a Turian woman on the squad in Mass Effect 3.

Alas, they are apparently tightening the squad in numerical terms. One more “Generic buff human male” as a new character, which boggles my mind. But then I used to avoid any movie or book that didn’t have aliens, monsters or other creatures, so maybe that’s just me… (oh, yeah–I’d totally go Turian if Shepard was not a necessity for the story)

I can’t really fathom how stupid and ridiculous it is that a culture can basically shame every female shape there is, short of the airbrushed ones.

Yup. The message is, basically, however you look you’re doing it wrong.

See also: height

One of the emerging trends in education that I find encouraging is the number of schools that use media studies or other such subject to show teenagers how their culture feeds them lies to manipulate them into buying stuff in order to “be better”. Lots of teenagers I know are more media-savvy than we were at that age, and outright reject the changing standards set by fashion mags, movies etc.

Way back when I was teaching karate, sparring gear came in red, black, and white. Then one of them came out with the “Lady Century” line in, you guessed it, pink, in kids and adult sizes. It went over like a lead balloon with girls and women alike – but was a bit hit with the guys. As the Serenity crew would say, a man wears gear like that, people know he’s not afraid of anything.

See also: height

Yeah, at 5’0″ for her, I’ve heard that, too. When I met her, she refused to wear anything but 4″+ heels out of the house. And of course it affected her brief modeling career (let’s not even get into the horrific dysmorphia it gave her, alluded to in part above) in that that’s too short to model on stage (so print only). I slowly got her willing to wear flats, because I told her I like her natural height.¹ She also eventually accepted that I honestly like her without makeup–though she is indeed extremely good at applying it. Seeing how hard it is to “break”/convince one person of such things as the possibility that all the accoutrements are acceptable choices,² but not at all preferable, and that indeed the absence can be quite lovely…ugh. I don’t envy anyone who hasn’t gotten that kind of information and education and wish it could permeate a little more.

I have had a lot of friends who have managed to escape all of the nonsense, at least. They like to look “good,” but according to their own standards, which makes sense enough to me. My best friend (who is a few years younger than me) is quite unconcerned with matching fashion standards, as are most of my female friends. There is, I think, a pretty good infusion of information on that front, which I’m glad for myself.

¹Yeah…even though she’s more than a foot shorter than me at that point…

²I’m very careful to not make it “Stop wearing heels and makeup!” or anything. Though it gets confusing sorting out what she likes because she likes it and what she likes because she’s convinced it’s the only way she’s “presentable”…as I don’t care at all if she just likes wearing heels (she does, actually) or makeup, just that she do it because she likes it. Not because she thinks she “has” to…

Cart before the horse, though. Does science fiction continually portray women as fanservice and eyecandy because most viewers are male, or are most viewers are male because the women all get driven off by the way women are potrayed?

I don’t watch science fiction for the misogyny. No one I know watches science fiction for the misogyny. Among people I know, there is an at least mildly negative correlation between misogyny and science fiction viewing.
 
This is another one of those Common Knowledge things. Everyone Knows that the mostly-male viewers want to see male heroes and buxom women, so they make that, and then people watch it because that’s all anyone makes and the makers feel reinforced in their beliefs.

—-

In youth-targeted literature, I notice a strange sort of competition effect between various stereotypes. “Everyone Knows” that boys are the default people, and boys want simple plots and lots of action and Not Too Much Kissing and shallow characters and genre cliches.

So if I happen upon a book targeted at girls, if it’s not a romance, there’s a good chance that it will have deep characters, not too much action, a bit of romance and not too many genre cliches, because the writer is more likely writing for A Certain Kind of Reader, and not “default human”.

And so, my experience was always that the books targeted at girls were the *good ones*.

Precisely because boys are the “default human”, boy-targeted books are more likely to try to *appeal to* some kind of imagined human-default, and that means being as generic as possible and catering to the lowest common denomonator.

Somewhat related: I heard (was in the other room) a movie trailer recently that went thusly:

“It’s an adrenaline-packed action film for men, and a sexy spine-tingler for ladies…” I don’t remember what movie it was for, or any of the other lines, but I growled under my breath for the next half hour. At least Doctor Pepper pretended to be joking.

“It’s an adrenaline-packed action film for men, and a sexy spine-tingler for ladies…

That sounds like a movie that can’t decide what it is, even excepting the “for men” and “for women” points.
How is adrenaline-packed action spine-tingling?
Isn’t that like…I don’t know…in your face subtlety?
Maybe my inner horror fan is showing though (too much William Castle association with the word choice?): “It’ll creep up on you by repeatedly punching you in the face!”

This is another one of those Common Knowledge things. Everyone Knows
that the mostly-male viewers want to see male heroes and buxom women, so
they make that, and then people watch it because that’s all anyone makes and the makers feel reinforced in their beliefs.

Yeah. This.

You know, for all that I bemoan the fact that it’s becoming more and more difficult to separate dross (when everyone trying to record music or make a movie has access to more advanced technology, there’s not even, “Well, SOMEONE had to put money into it/approve it/go to the trouble to produce physical copies…?”¹) from interesting stuff…that’s a good aspect of it I had not considered.

If you are no longer required to go through a studio or A&R person (only one I ever knew personally was female, actually…I forget what label she worked for, as she had left the business a while before, but it was one of the biggies), you don’t have to pander to expectations like that.

¹Also that studio trickery can bury a lot, or force more careful listening/watching for sorting them, and an increasing homogenity as everyone tries to do it “right” because they are doing it themselves as songwriters/directors/whatever, rather than people focused on engineering/mastering/cinematography/etc.

Over the past couple of months, I went through blip.tv’s catalogue and tried out a dozen or so web original dramas. On the one hand, you get to see a lot of people try things that hollywood would never allow because it doesn’t fit into one of their convenient demographics.

On the other hand, you get to see a lot of stuff that hollywood would have known in advance wasn’t very good.

It wasn’t first “broken” by the daily mail, anyone who has played the beta knows about it. If you don’t think it’s real, you can literally log on right now and roll up a Sith Warrior and try it. You don’t even have to get to level 20 before you get the opportunity to force your slave (who, by the way, is portrayed as so young that she makes a joke about high school) watch you have sex. By the way, that doesn’t even count as evil, it just gives you -affection. Not even enough -affection to affect the romance, by the way. Oh, and eventually she totally learns to love the pain you inflict on her, so the torture was okay, she was asking for it.

You’re seriously going to try to defend pandering to straight male players with that kind of horrible stuff with “well the sith are bad so obviously it’s okay for them to include torture-rape romance plots in the game.”???

You can do all the skeevy stuff and still be a light side sith warrior. I’ve played the sith warrior storyline myself and seen it. (You start getting horrible options on the second planet.)

>designed to fit men, with “oh, but women can wear it too” tacked on.

Exactly this. I went into a sports store the other day and asked for some women’s weightlifting gloves. The man at the counter laughed at me and said “gloves don’t come in men’s and women’s they are generic”. So I said “Fine, I’ll take a size five.” He said “Oh, they don’t make them that small…” 

If they can make fitted surgical gloves in a size five (and I know they do) then they can make weightlifting gloves in a size five – if they wanted to, and if it ever crossed their minds that a woman with small hands (even by women’s standards) might want to actually lift weights! Us small girls like to get fit too, and I can’t stand aerobics or Zumba or whatever it is called now…

>It’s just, there’s a big difference between marketing a book one way for boys and another way for girls, and marketing a book one way for kids in general and another way for girls. The first says that boys and girls are different, without valuing one over the other. The second says that “kids in general” are not girls, and singles girls out as being abnormal.

It has long been recognized in children’s publishing that girls will read books marketed to boys or with a boy as the main character. Boys are much less likely to read a book with a girl as the protagonist. There is a sound economic rationale for marketing to “kids/everyone” a book with a boy in it, but only marketing to girls a book with a girl in it. (The publishers are reacting to the reality of how society buys books – it isn’t accidental or values based. Unless the value you’re talking about is money…)

>Then when I’m dealing with mechanics they expect me to know about engines and are completely baffled when my response is ‘I don’t know what horsepower it is, I just drive the thing”.

Sounds like our last car shopping experience. *I* was buying a new car and my hubby was along to watch the kids. He had to say over and over (to the same person) “I’m not buying the car, my wife is… I don’t want to test drive it… I won’t be driving it… It will be her car so it is her choice.” The ONLY thing the salesmen (yes they were all men) wanted to ask me was what colour I wanted. Apparently that’s all women are allowed to have an opinion on regarding cars.

Female t-shirts which display cleavage: oh gods yes. I do not want t-shirts that display vast acres of chest, which is why I why I have to resort to buying male ones. Female t-shirts, as has been noted, are also shorter; and the range of colours and designs I can find them in is limited compared to the men’s.

Dammit, I just want something that looks like a proper t-shirt. Is that so hard?!?

@ El Duranzo de la Muerte – actually, I was somewhat mistaken, rho’s blog links to the original designer video, and it says they were all males in the game.

My point was that it could well be that there are alien races where the visible differences between the sexes are very small and practically undetectable by humans. Since they were, well, aliens, any telltale signs don’t have to be obvious to humans.

It’s a bit weird, actually I’d say Bioware tends to be fairly good at making ok characters and not just tons of fanservice, yet they seem to be getting a lot of flak. The sex slave thing… I find the idea disturbing (actually, I did roll a Sith Warrior, but didn’t play it much), but on the other hand, it’s the Sith: a philosophy known for extreme lust for power and control. They are the iconic “bad guys”, the champion of the “dark side”, no matter how they try to break the cliche. It’s the tradition that has wiped out entire planets and broken near any taboo if it got in their way. Yeah, I imagine they may support slavery (which iirc has always existed in some form in some places in the Star Wars canon – it’s an entire galaxy, after all) or may be prone to some deviant sexual ideas.

It has long been recognized in children’s publishing that girls will
read books marketed to boys or with a boy as the main character. Boys
are much less likely to read a book with a girl as the protagonist.
There is a sound economic rationale for marketing to “kids/everyone” a
book with a boy in it, but only marketing to girls a book with a girl in
it. (The publishers are reacting to the reality of how society buys
books – it isn’t accidental or values based. Unless the value you’re
talking about is money…)

I’m not sure how reasonable those assumptions are though.  Books being written to be marketed towards girls are more focused on providing a ‘girl book’ than a ‘good book’ because of the assumption that ‘kids in general’ are not girls.  I read nearly every book in my elementary school library and the conclusion I reached was that most “girl” books were poorly written, lacked plot, and had boring characters.  Even formulaic “boy” books were better because you almost always got action and/or mystery even if the characters were cardboard (Hardy Boys were the big “boy” choice available) while the girls were stuck with cardboard characters misunderstanding each other and learning a lesson about being good friends while nothing of interest every happened (Sweet Valley books were the main “girl” choice).  It isn’t until you hit teen fiction that I found you start seeing good books with female protagonists and even then the male protagonist novels are more reliably good but by that point male readers have learned that “girl” books are terrible and don’t bother with them anymore while female readers continue to look for decent protagonists that reflect them and their experience in addition to a good read.  My experience reading YA is that female protagonist novels vary from really awful to really amazing while male protagonist ones swing from mediocre to pretty good (female novels have a higher variance while male novels have a higher baseline).

I find it very much like a much overdiscussed issue in the comic community of oversexualized female characters and woman in the hobby.  Girls don’t buy superhero comics (partly) because of the absurd body images and costumes female heroes wear.  As a result comic companies continue to put out comics with alarmingly sexist and sexual female characters because “Girls don’t buy comics anyways”.  However, in the manga, graphic novel, and some of the indie comic lines females make up a significant (if not yet parity) part of the demographic making it clear that appealing products will attract their interest even if the mainstream superhero comics want to throw away their business in order to pander (unnecessarily IMO) to adolescent males with gigantic, barely covered breasts.

Generally, I never use images in a browser, and had not noticed that disqus even uses avatars (when the capcha appears, I just use load image in Sea Monkey). What I would really like is that people stop using avatars entirely – but since that seems unlikely, I just do the next best thing, and never see them anyways.

Which is actually my solution to a lot of problems, specifically on the web – I never use cookies, only turn on javascript occasionally (to post here) which means no google ads or analytics, don’t have flash installed – my Internet experience is lacking in all kinds of things.

I actually recommend it, especially after experiencing how some friends in the U.S. view the web – I quite honestly don’t know how they can stand it, but you can get used to anything in the end. Or not, depending on how much effort it is worth. Which, considering this little avatar thing, is already a lot. My children found it interesting that they weren’t blocked from Wikipedia during its sit down strike – no javascript meant no block – just a hint for how much the modern web relies on your machine doing what other people want it to do, especially for advertising and data collection.

If someone tells me there’s no inherent sexism in our culture, I just tell them this:

Think of five disparaging epithets meant specifically for women.  How many of them are criticisms of her perceived lack of sexual subservience?  Now think of five epithets meant specifically for men.  How many of them are meant to convey that the man is too much like a woman?

In our culture, we insult men by calling them women, and we insult women by calling them women.

Ok, I tried posting this last night and it didn’t go through, and I think I remember people mentioning that posts with links often have trouble, so I won’t bother with the link.

CafePress, though, gets it right–they have loose and close-fitted tees in both men’s and women’s sizes. Obviously a place that prints on demand can provide more variety, but at least someone is out there making non-”sexy” women’s t-shirts. 

Getting people who sell tees to provide options for both men and women and getting people who make tees to realize that “women’s” != “sexy” are two different, if related, problems–I don’t think the fact that the second remains unsolved is a valid reason to ignore the first. 

That sort of thing with “teh airheaded wimmins” and any mechanical or electronic gadget really chaps my buns. I’ve heard it’s bad enough in some places where garage mechanics basically see a woman driver and assume it’s open season on her wallet, but if she brings her boyfriend/husband/brother/father along to get stuff explained, the open season becomes more of a reasonable impact.

(>_<)

PS. It seems some "QUILTBAG-friendly" shops have this problem too; they just treat any person who's not obviously knowledgeable like a complete idiot. I once got told I needed new brake lines for a Toyota Corolla. Another time I got told I needed a new idler arm for a Crown Vic. In both cases a second opinion indicated neither replacement was really necessary.

Girls don’t buy superhero comics (partly) because of the absurd body images and costumes female heroes wear.

This was the thing that so completely made my jaw drop. My SGF discovered The Magdalena, and that made her more comfortable with her body, for once. None of them are realistic about how a woman looks if she actually can do martial arts, of course, (my SGF is a 5th degree black belt, and her pride was how many teeth she knocked out of opponents’ heads shortly after I met her, mostly with kicks, so she knows that one still does not maintain quite that litheness) but it is away from the skeletal approach of a lot of modeling. Of course, all I’d heard prior was what you said, and known people who felt that way themselves, so I knew that was a truth for plenty of people.

To find out the literal opposite was also true? That that image was almost an affirmation of an acceptable body? That was seriously bizarre.

She’s always done cosplaying (there’s a few images around the web, including the disturbing image of her as Pyramid Head…) so the sexualization doesn’t faze her, for good or ill. I’ll take that, honestly, just to leave her an independent cultural confirmation of herself.

It’s called “tertiary sexual characteristics”.  It means all anthropomorphized characters are assumed male unless given an extra indicator, such as eyelashes or a hair bow, that they are female.  I drew this to explain it to someone: http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w119/inu-papa/tertiary.gif

No, seriously, the Sith are evil. I’m not saying that as a goddamn opinion, it is Star Wars fact decided at the highest levels and every single person who plays the Old Republic knows that The. Sith. Are. The. Bad. Guys. As in, the ‘obliterate entire planets because we’re kind of bored’ sort of bad guys. Being ‘light side’ as a character serving the Sith Empire means you are just a reasonable, even affable sort of evil rather than ‘oh dark side make my penis so big’.
If there’s one thing reading Ana Mardoll’s blog has helped me to recognize (one out of many, ofc) it’s that fantasy is okay. So you know what? My fantasy about my wife and a Barry White album is okay. A fantasy about violently and graphically murdering your boss is okay. A fantasy about your mom’s feet is okay. A fantasy about sexual slavery is okay. You know why? Because it’s fantasy, and every person has a right to their fantasies without getting judged, period.I do agree, and it’s obvious, that certain categories (male, straight, etc) get their fantasies pandered to far, far more, even in the specific example of TOR. That’s something that should certainly change, and we’ve got no argument there. How do we do that? I honestly don’t know, but that doesn’t mean the goal isn’t worthy.When people try to turn a fantasy into reality where it would hurt others, then it’s wrong, and we’ve also got no disagreement there. But as a video game about a galaxy far, far away in which you have explicitly chosen to walk the dark path as a member of the Sith Empire, a society which actively promotes racism and slavery? Unless you can draw for me a connection where real people are hurt, then exactly why the hell are you attacking peoples’ fantasies?

You can do all the skeevy stuff and still be a light side sith warrior.

Well, that’s just lovely.  Apparently my lack of interest in force users has given me a very different game experience than you.  I’m not sure what to make of that.

My Imperial Agent is merrily being a traitorous* James Bond (only nicer) while Sith Warriors are off doing creepy horrible things.  I’m fairly certain that the dark side options I haven’t chosen mainly amount to actually following my orders and killing people.  The same game shouldn’t play that differently depending on the class you choose. O_o

I realize the Sith Empire is evil and all, but why does one class get the option to be a good person in an evil world – and minimize the evil wherever they go – while at least one other class takes the evil part for granted, even with the light side choices.  That seems all kinds of wrong.  Possibly fractally so.

*A vast majority of light side choices involve exceedingly creative interpretations of orders, or just plain disregarding what I’ve been asked to do.  I lie to my superiors and other Imperials a lot.  My alignment is apparently Trying To Get Myself Executed Chaotic Good

Let me dig out Wayne Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials for a second here…

Marry me.

Let me dig out Wayne Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials for a second here…

Marry me.

Being ‘light side’ as a character serving the Sith Empire means you are just a reasonable, even affable sort of evil…

Maybe as a Sith, but I’m not kidding that my light side Agent would be executed (or whatever far worse thing they do to traitors in the Sith Empire) if the powers that be knew about all the people he hasn’t killed, all the force sensitive people he’s let leave the Empire, etc, etc.  Yes, he’s still supporting an evil country, sort of, but so far the story reads more as lone good person doing their damnedest to minimize the evil around them.  To me, anyway.

I don’t know, maybe the Sith storylines are for people who’s fantasy is affably evil or diabolically evil.  But a rape-torture romance seems kind of out-of-genre for Star Wars, in story sex slaves or no.

It seems to be a mix of that – sometimes even the lightside choice is to poison the water of a slave rebellion, but sometimes the lightside choice is genuinely noble. 

I wish I could check it for myself, but I’m not going to be playing a Sith Warrior for a while, if at all; it’s the imperial class which least appeals to me, and I’ve already got way too many characters on the go. 

I’m assuming that the Sith Warrior is deliberately set up to mirror the Sith Inquisitor to demonstrate the various sides of Sith society, since the Inquisitor by contrast begins as a slave. 

True enough; my comment was made in annoyance and on an empty stomach. There are certainly shades, especially amongst the Bounty Hunters and even Agents, who aren’t as completely plugged into the evil nexus as the actual Sith classes. I think the TOR folks did a good job on the advertising campaign, always talking about ‘your own Star Wars story’, because you can play the same character way different depending on your outlook and decisions. 

There are limits, of course, and I’ll certainly not defend everything about it, but seeing Bioware of all companies singled out for attack annoyed me when they’ve already stepped out onto branches time and again in a toxic culture for taking a step or two in a progressive direction… it’s annoying.

I’ll agree that the sex slave torture thing seems out of genre for Star Wars, but the Old Republic storyline is definitely different from standard canon. The KOTOR series has always brought at least a speck of depth and grit to a world that was usually fairly black and white.

“The Sith are Evil” is a total non starter, Jonathan. Pro-tip: The Sith aren’t real. The Sith don’t choose to do anything. The Sith are characters in a game that are written by real people and it’s those real people who decided that forcing a slave to watch you bone other women was hot hot hot and needed to be put in as wank material for the dudes out there. That’s why all this “But sith are BAD!” stuff is so colossally stupid and misguided. TOR didn’t arise from the aether fully formed, it’s literally a product of the scoiety that created it. Guess what? That society has problems with it’s portrayal of women!*

I can criticize a person’s fantasy because it’s literally a bunch of straight white men saying “you know what’s hot? forcing a woman who doesn’t want to watch you to have sex watch you have sex.” They are choosing to make this a part of their game, not the sith. They are saying that in MMOs, it’s not far enough to have women always be nearly naked and on display for men, with no realistic armor options. No, that’s tame – we’ve got to be edgy. We have to have what Bioware called “the new shit” which apparently involved throwing consent out the fucking window like a baseball, because consent isn’t sexy enough for the TOR audience.

If you don’t think getting bombarded with messages that say “It’s hot when women are degraded” affects you, I don’t know what to say. Do you also think you are magically immune to advertising? If that was the case, advertising would be a broke-ass field.

I’m critical of TOR because I like it. The Sith Warrior story actually has a bunch of great opportunities for actual light side choices that involve being a hero, “Affably evil” is just one of many options. I don’t want to spoil it in case anyone in planning on playing it but there’s some great twists in act 2/3 that compare with the Imperial Agents in terms of “minimizing evil” and it owns.

I just really wish bioware had someone with some sort of education that could step in and say “Hey, you know, sexual violence is probably something women get enough of on a day to day basis and we shouldn’t add to it by throwing it our game.”

I would say that I think it’s interesting how you impute a ton of shit to me that I never said and don’t believe, but I know exactly why you did it, to make a strawman bullshit point. Where exactly have I said that the Sith exist as real people? 

You don’t really believe for a moment that my post was intended to argue for the literal existence of the Sith Empire and its evil minions who wear black and wield swords of red light as well as the mythical life energies of the Force. Where exactly have I said that the culture in which a bit of fiction is made doesn’t affect it? Where did I say that The Old Republic sprang into existence as an immaculate conception, free of human influence? I didn’t say that and don’t believe it, and claiming that’s what I believe makes you a fucking liar, and you know it. You know that what you’ve just done is lie to make your point.

Your point that I don’t disagree entirely with, by the way, but the way you’ve made it is odious and deceptive.Do you think that Twilight is unacceptable as wank material for women? (I would cite things like smut that are literally intended for that purpose but everybody kind of knows that and accepts that, yeah, that’s the point.) Even with its portrayals of emotional abuse, racism, rape culture, etc etc etc? A lot of the worse critiques of Twilight I see boil down to ‘it’s a fantasy for teenage girls or some shit and therefore invalid’.

I will say this again, and more clearly, because apparently you have a hard time understanding it: some people have fantasies that are harmful in real life, whether they be incestuous, violent, degrading, bigoted, etc, etc. Some people even fantasize about being used and abused. In real life, they wouldn’t want that, and don’t act upon it, because there’s a difference between a storyline option in an MMO and actions taken in the real world. People have the right, fullstop, to their goddamn fantasies, even if you don’t like it.Does that mean that this slave forced thing should have been in the game? I actually don’t know, and I’m inclined to say ‘no’, but… let’s put it this way. If options were put in for a female character to treat a male character the same way, would that be more ok with you? If so, why? If not, why? (I’ll also admit that it’s very unlikely that will happen, because of culture and the things you outline in the part of your post where you aren’t making the conscious decision to lie as a fighting tactic.)

I like most of the depth that they’ve added, or, perhaps I should say they’ve pointed out the depth and complexities that fans have always seen in a supposedly black and white world.  But I’m not entirely comfortable with a fantasy world bringing real life stuff into it, both because I want my fantasy to be an escape and because it’s easy for it to end up being exploitative rather than thoughtful.

I think the skeevy stuff in the Sith Warrior story was a phenomenally bad choice though – because it ignores that it might alienate (or worse) a segment of players and because, whether it was put in because “it’s hot” or because “it’s evil,” it’s too much part of what people call rape culture.  I mean, they had enough thought to (for the most part) not fall into chainmail bikini syndrome with the armor, but, at the same time all the sex slaves and exotic dancers are female and then there’s the bit we’re discussing.  How can a company have a clue and then lose it so badly?  (I know, because it’s made up of a bunch of different people – some with clues and some clue-resistant.)

I think Bioware takes it on the chin because they’re sooooo close to getting it.  It makes it far more disappointing when they don’t.

Good post! I like it very much.

I’m all for petitioning disqus. I figured out how to change my avatar to my own face by signing up thru facebook, but the original problem is still there…

I think we should ask for a default avatar without an identifiable race or gender. And if we provide examples like the sociological images post, then they’ll know what we’re talking about? thing is, I’m not exactly sure who to contact about it.

reaching the end of these comments and now I’m wondering if I’m even commenting on the right post anymore @_@

The main reason I am so critical is because people think their getting a few things right whitewashes everything else. They have bisexual characters in their game, so in that same game when they set up a comedy scene to laugh at transgender people it’s suddenly not bad because “They are the most progressive game company!! stop picking on them.”

If they are the most progressive game company they should know better than to do that. Covering it up and going “Well they did a good thing…” doesn’t help them get better.

Perfectly understandable.  Perhaps that educated person could also fix the slave girl/exotic dancer problem while they’re at it.  Seriously, would it kill them to have some male exotic dancers?  Or are we supposed to go away thinking there are no straight women or gay men in the universe?

I am glad to hear that one can play a good (or goodish) Sith Warrior.  Like I said earlier, all the classes should allow for both good and evil.

It’d be lovely if they could adjust the Sith Warrior/Vette storyline to remove the skeevy stuff.  There are other ways to be evil.

I’m currently playing a Sith warrior, but since I took off the shock collar first chance I got I suppose I won’t be able to see that option for myself.

I do have a question.  In a game in which people have the option of betraying friends, committing torture, murdering people in cold blood and intentionally and personally causing the deaths of thousands of innocents, why is forcing someone to watch you make out with a rival the act that puts the game beyond the pale?  This is not meant as a dismissive question either, since I wouldn’t have my character do that last one either.  (All the rest of that list of evil is stuff I did do playing as an Imperial Agent.)

Fair enough. I can see, now that I’m bit less angry, that, yeah. When we take everything into consideration, that probably shouldn’t have been a part of the game. At the very least, I wouldn’t die on the hill to defend it at all. It’s the same sort of meta-considerations that make me, for instance, take random characters in my book and say ‘and what if I made this person a woman or minority or disabled or transgendered person or etc etc etc, and changed nothing else about it?’ ‘what if it’s mentioned, in passing, that he used to be a woman?’ Writers have to keep the culture they write for in mind.

Despite what Mitt Romney would tell us, Bioware’s a conglomerate of many individuals with many mindsets, and it all exists in our culture, which is so far from perfect that it’s tough to even see the shore sometimes. But we’re going that way, in the long arc of things.

Well there was some quote from a person involved somehow in Star Wars, Lucasarts probably, that ‘the term homosexual does not exist in the Star Wars galaxy’. He didn’t mean that people weren’t being labeled negatively for their sexual orientation, either, if you get my drift. That stood as the most canon statement about homosexuality in SW for a while, until the backlash forced them to realize how stupid that was.

I know you don’t believe the Sith Empire is real, but your excuse for the content was “They are bad guys. Of course they do bad things!” This is defending the situation by saying that since they are the bad guys, they can’t help but do it. But they they don’t have any agency so saying “They are the bad guys!” doesn’t absolve anyone of anything. Being the bad guys doesn’t lead to rape unless the writer does it.

This is a basic foundation of criticism. Let me repeat it in clearer terms: “Appealing to a character to justify the characters actions when it’s the writers choice to create the character that way, and the criticism is directed at the writers is really dumb obfuscation.”

You don’t believe that, it’s obvious, but your defense of the gross options bioware programmed into the game is pretty much based on. I was simply pointing out the absurdity of your defense – because, as you point out, no one actually believes the sith are real. So why defend rape in a video game on the basis that it’s totally what the sith would really do if they were real?

You’re “People have a right to their fantasies” is true, but you are making it way too broad. People have a right to their private fantasies. When they try to normalize that into culture by making it the hot cool option in hit game, TOR, that’s not their private fantasy anymore. Now it’s out there influence people, portraying it as cool to degrade women. It’s causing actual, real, social harm with is totally different than a person with a fetish engaging in it on their own, and your attempts to conflate the two are absolutely hilarious. The media you consume absolutely has an affect on how you treat others, and if you set out to spread media that portrays degrading women as a rad option that gets you cool stuff to several million people like TOR does, that’s a lot of people you are influencing. That’s beyond someone “Having a fantasy.”

Comparing a woman having the option to a man having the option just shows you don’t get where the harm is – Society isn’t absolutely struggling with the idea that it’s okay for women to ignore issues of consent when it comes to men because it’s hot, but it DOES have that problem with how men treat women. We already have the problem that men tend to bulldoze over issues of consent – TOR isn’t even challenging that, it’s reinforcing it.

I think the easiest way to fix it would be to remove Vette as a romance option and add a second romance option in. Actually, there’s a romance imbalance with some classes (iirc, there are female characters who only get one romance option) so maybe just making it so both light side and dark side sith warriors could romance your later companion instead of just dark side sith warriors might fix something.

In a game in which people have the option of betraying friends,
committing torture, murdering people in cold blood and intentionally and
personally causing the deaths of thousands of innocents, why is forcing
someone to watch you make out with a rival the act that puts the game
beyond the pale?

Disclaimer: I have not played a Sith Warrior.  Madhabmatics will hopefully address this as well.

I am assuming that in the scene in which the Sith forces Vette to watch, we get the fade to black that I, at least, assume means sex is had.  (I certainly assumed that when my agent seduced a woman for information the cut to black after suggestive comments and kissing meant they went off to a room and did the horizontal mambo.)  That’s a bit different than simply making out with someone in front of someone else.  Also, it’s not that you make out with someone in front of a rival for your affections – you’re forcing your slave to watch you *whatever happens in fade to black*.

The scene is also part of a larger story which apparently involves one’s Sith keeping the npc a slave (you can release them) and torturing them with their slave collar.  Which, apparently, does not mean you can’t have a romance with them.

A + B = WTF was Bioware thinking.

(Though this discussion has put a different complexion on a conversation my agent’s companion had with him before she was his companion.  It was darkly flirty, but I’m now vaguely disturbed by her dark flirting including hoping she wouldn’t have to put a slave collar on him.  I took it as a comment on the fact that he seemed like trouble at the time, but what I now know about the Sith Warrior/Vette stuff suggests… er… other interpretations. Perhaps the sexual violence – or threat there of – is not limited to one gender in the game.)

In a game in which people have the option of betraying friends,
committing torture, murdering people in cold blood and intentionally and
personally causing the deaths of thousands of innocents, why is forcing
someone to watch you make out with a rival the act that puts the game
beyond the pale?

Disclaimer: I have not played a Sith Warrior.  Madhabmatics will hopefully address this as well.

I am assuming that in the scene in which the Sith forces Vette to watch, we get the fade to black that I, at least, assume means sex is had.  (I certainly assumed that when my agent seduced a woman for information the cut to black after suggestive comments and kissing meant they went off to a room and did the horizontal mambo.)  That’s a bit different than simply making out with someone in front of someone else.  Also, it’s not that you make out with someone in front of a rival for your affections – you’re forcing your slave to watch you *whatever happens in fade to black*.

The scene is also part of a larger story which apparently involves one’s Sith keeping the npc a slave (you can release them) and torturing them with their slave collar.  Which, apparently, does not mean you can’t have a romance with them.

A + B = WTF was Bioware thinking.

(Though this discussion has put a different complexion on a conversation my agent’s companion had with him before she was his companion.  It was darkly flirty, but I’m now vaguely disturbed by her dark flirting including hoping she wouldn’t have to put a slave collar on him.  I took it as a comment on the fact that he seemed like trouble at the time, but what I now know about the Sith Warrior/Vette stuff suggests… er… other interpretations. Perhaps the sexual violence – or threat there of – is not limited to one gender in the game.)

Oh good, I broke disqus.  *facepalm*

Here’s a simple reply to you: I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said. Even so, I refuse to engage any further with you because you’re just going to get me angry again and let me tell you that won’t help me see things your way. 

Yeah, this is coming from me, but when I blaze away at Republicans and conservatives, it’s not because I’m trying to change them so much as argue to everybody else in the room. If your objective is to change the way that I think to come around to your side, mocking and belittling is a counterproductive and shitty way to act. In fact, if your attitude had been better, I probably would have come out agreeing with you on post one.

Marry me.

I have the fantasy guide, too :S

Even having her only as a romance option if you take the slave collar off early would help.  (Which, I guess, would make her a light side only romance option.)

And yeah, the romance options are unbalanced.  Pretty sure the female smuggler only gets one and there are issues there.  (The npc is sexist, for one.)  I’m kind of glad I’d already decided my smuggler wasn’t interested in sex, period.  (Because asexuals are so bloody rare in fiction, playing one seemed fun.  And makes a contrast to my agent, who will flirt with anyone the game will let him flirt with, provided they’re not Sith.)

Depizan’s got it covered pretty well, but I will say that a lot of those other things are problematic too, but they are less problematic than sexual issues because society frowns on most people outside of politics doing the former things, but issues of consent are hazy for anyone who has sex (a lot of people!)

I mean, I can easily point to (I think it was) Justice Alito’s use of the television show “24″ to support “enhanced interrogation techniques” as proof that showing torture as entertainment can have a real effect on society. But, to it’s credit, I think TOR handles the issue of torture alright enough (At least on the Sith Warrior, where it’s clear that torture doesn’t work. What does work are ancient artifacts plundered from a sith tomb.)

I’ve yet to try TOR yet, even though Mass Effect 1 converted me to a BioWare fan. I’m partly afraid of timesink implications, and it also sounds like it’s way more fun with someone running through it with you, but I don’t know anyone who’d really be interested.

I think we can all agree that Tony Perkins getting all hot under the collar over a Star Wars game is pretty funny, at least.

Touching on the car buying thing a few people have noted: when I bought my car I invited my dad along with me, just for general guidance. It was all I could do to make salesmen talk to me, and it drove me nuts. I was the one buying the car, I had the loan, my dad was just around because car-shopping is fun, but the salesmen constantly made the pitch to him. Complaining to my friend about this, he said his mom walked out mid-sale because the salesman refused to talk to her, talking only to her husband (salesmen used instead of salesperson quite deliberately. Seriously, they’re all guys, what’s with that?). I was pretty tempted to do that myself, but the dealership had the exact model I wanted and there was none other anywhere close.

To be fair, that’s how it was supposed to be originally designed. Vette was only supposed to be romanceable as a Light Side sith warrior (in which case the dynamic is supposed to be “She has fun being the mean right hand of a good guy”) and Jaeca is only supposed to be romanceable as a Dark Side Sith Warrior.

However, people apparently complained enough in beta about not being able to do the horrible stuff (if you look at google caches of the beta forums you can see this) that they retooled the dark side points / affection numbers so it’s possible to do both. Your smuggler thing is great though because it does point out that the fault really lies on a few employees heads specifically, because in the smuggler story you can…

SPOILERS

…tell the sexist npc what sexism is, yell at him, and he’ll quit being sexist!
However, you can only get him to shut up with the sexism as a female smuggler, IIRC.

Fear of a time sink is an extremely good reason to not want to play the game.  If you’re still interested I’d hazard that there are a number of people here who’d be more than happy to play through with you.

I remember reading, in Courtship Rite, that it’s hard to have a species where the males and females share genes but the female is supposed to not do certain things. (In this case, the males were all experts in mathematics, and the females weren’t supposed to do math at all, but were just as capable if actually taught math.)

Fa Shimbo created the satamuri, amphibians that look like cats and have three sexes.

I’m not playing TOR because I don’t have the time, but, female here,  and I’m vaguely amused that everyone here assumes that the whole slave thing is just a male fantasy.  
Women.  More diverse then you think. 

 And has to special order bras, because, of course, she is actually
rather small otherwise (5’0″ to start), and no one really provides for
that, apparently

I would suggest looking into custom-made corsets, which would support from below, putting the stress on the hips (which are much better designed for carrying weight). Talk to the costumers – re-enactors, for preference.

They could make guitar and keyboards for people who are less than 5 foot 10, too. But they don’t.

Oh, mechanics and stereotypes of women.

My mother had a car die on her, quite suddenly (but fortunately close to the dealer’s lot). She said she could see the thought crossing their minds was ‘stupid woman, doesn’t know she’s out of gas’. The service manager kept telling her it would only be a little longer, when she wanted to use the phone (to call me to come collect the groceries). Turned out it was the brand-new-installed-that-morning fuel pump which had died. And she reamed the service manager.

 I had a female friend along when I bought my car. We got a female salesperson. (I got the car the way I wanted it, stock, and a color I could live with.)
One dealer I visited had a salesman who kept trying to sell me a car that was larger than the one I said I wanted to look at. (I won’t be going back to that place any time soon.)

I would suggest looking into custom-made corsets, which would support
from below, putting the stress on the hips (which are much better
designed for carrying weight). Talk to the costumers – re-enactors, for
preference.

She has a background in cosplay as well as some “finishing school” (and has worn her grandmother’s whale-bone corset on occasion), so hopefully she knows this. However, I know that doctors have advised her strongly against wearing (real) corsets for health reasons. Does the same support benefit apply with “fake” ones?

Before we got out of contact (it’s a long story and the reason there is the “S” for Schrödinger’s) but one of the gifts she left me to keep her in my heart and mind was the corset she bought and wore for only me and my birthday last year (and for nothing and no one else)–which I think is a “fake” one (I could go get it out of the safe place I keep it, but I could stare at it forever and never truly know) anyway. I kinda sided with the doctors…things to change her body shape have tended to get excessive and unhealthy for her in times before I knew her so I try to politely keep her on that track :

I do know in part it’s for sleeping, though…which I imagine would be super uncomfortable in a corset x.x

Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I always find it disconcerting to see my words coming out of a man’s mouth, but I don’t have the time/energy/desire to change my stupid default icon. I have complained to disqus, but I am but a mere plankton in the vast ocean of the internet.  Hopefully more complaints from people who actually administer blogs with the Disqus commenting system will fix things.

For the record, other services that do have gender-neutral default icons include Flickr, Twitter, and WordPress.  Flickr has an emoticon, Twitter an egg, and WordPress has several options including geometric designs.

Oh, mechanics and stereotypes of women.

There’s a reason I used to always say “someone I know,” because otherwise I sound like a broken record and I’m mortified I’m really obnoxious for it. So, sorry…that said:
My SGF isn’t a car person.¹ But she’s also not an idiot. She knows when mechanics are talking down to her or trying to screw with her. She will ask questions and research everything to understand the details of what she’s told is happening with her car. They do it a lot.

¹Now, in defiance of that: I have models of the Ferrari F50 littering my apartment, as it’s my favourite car, but I know SFA about them, realistically. I did once have a subscription to Road and Track, but she still learned more than me about them by dating a shallow, sexist asshole some years ago who was loaded and owned multiple Ferraris and was passionate about cars. And made me feel very stupid for it, once. She likes Aston Martins most, but she’s admitted that’s more out of solidarity with her home than anything else.

Disqus could easily just use each site’s favicon ( http://www.patheos.com/favicon.ico ) 

Pratchett and Tolkien both had dwarfs where women and men are indistinguishable. There’s a short Discworld fanfic out there where, after dwarf women start dressing in more “feminine” styles, human women decide that if dwarf women can choose to wear skirts or trousers, they can too. And then the idea spreads…

She has a background in cosplay as well as some “finishing school” (and has worn her grandmother’s whale-bone corset on occasion), so hopefully she knows this. However, I know that doctors have advised her strongly against wearing (real) corsets for health reasons. Does the same support benefit apply with “fake” ones?

My wife loves corsets and costuming and makes her own, so I have a bit of second-hand knowledge here.  A corset can provide support similar to that of a sports bra (by pressing the breasts back against the chest) or that of an underwire bra (by having a ‘shelf’ the breasts rest on) depending on how it is designed.  Most modern designed corsets are going for a sexy look and use the shelf technique however unlike a underwire bra this doesn’t provide any seperation between the individual breasts which some women (particularly larger breasted ones) find uncomfortable.  As well they are designed only for light activity as vigorous motion can cause breasts to ‘pop out’ of the top.

Corsets mostly only can cause problems and health risks if they are laced too tight.  However needing to lace a corset too tight is almost completely a historical problem due to the materials used for boning (reeds and whale bone mostly) because they wouldn’t hold their shape properly otherwise and the extreme body reshaping they were attempting.  Modern materials (plastics and steel) are much stronger and more flexible and can be worn without tightening the corset to the point it begins to constrict the lungs (which is why women used to faint easily).  My wife much prefers the steel boning over plastic but other women are equally opinionated in the opposite direction so it is mostly a matter of trying out and finding what she likes.

reaching the end of these comments and now I’m wondering if I’m even commenting on the right post anymore @_@     

We are pretty notorious for wandering off into strange and often geeky tangents in the comments thread that are often fairly unrelated to the initial post.  Personally I consider it something of a feature of the Slacktivist community.

Corsets mostly only can cause problems and health risks if they are
laced too tight.  However needing to lace a corset too tight is almost
completely a historical problem due to the materials used for boning
(reeds and whale bone mostly) because they wouldn’t hold their shape
properly otherwise and the extreme body reshaping they were attempting. 
Modern materials (plastics and steel) are much stronger and more
flexible and can be worn without tightening the corset to the point it
begins to constrict the lungs (which is why women used to faint
easily).  My wife much prefers the steel boning over plastic but other
women are equally opinionated in the opposite direction so it is mostly a
matter of trying out and finding what she likes.

I didn’t know about the boning-shape-holding portion of the cause for that tightness, that’s interesting. I did (I suppose this showed?) know that reshaping was intended, and she’s gone through some of that. Which is, of course, fantastic with a weakened heart and awful asthma. I don’t know if she varies these days, but the one she left me, I couldn’t tell to save my life if it can be laced too tight (I suppose that’s what I would call “fake,” though it also applies to my experience of the majority of women who wear them when I go to Dragon*Con who don’t even tighten them enough for simple support…), but I can, of course, at least tell it’s plastic.

Dammit, I always want to talk to her about these things….

Corsets mostly only can cause problems and health risks if they are
laced too tight.  However needing to lace a corset too tight is almost
completely a historical problem due to the materials used for boning
(reeds and whale bone mostly) because they wouldn’t hold their shape
properly otherwise and the extreme body reshaping they were attempting. 
Modern materials (plastics and steel) are much stronger and more
flexible and can be worn without tightening the corset to the point it
begins to constrict the lungs (which is why women used to faint
easily).  My wife much prefers the steel boning over plastic but other
women are equally opinionated in the opposite direction so it is mostly a
matter of trying out and finding what she likes.

I didn’t know about the boning-shape-holding portion of the cause for that tightness, that’s interesting. I did (I suppose this showed?) know that reshaping was intended, and she’s gone through some of that. Which is, of course, fantastic with a weakened heart and awful asthma. I don’t know if she varies these days, but the one she left me, I couldn’t tell to save my life if it can be laced too tight (I suppose that’s what I would call “fake,” though it also applies to my experience of the majority of women who wear them when I go to Dragon*Con who don’t even tighten them enough for simple support…), but I can, of course, at least tell it’s plastic.

Dammit, I always want to talk to her about these things….

Of course, the Star Wars franchise has had this problem since its inception.  As Michael Swaim put it in a discussion about sexism in the original trilogy on After Hours, “In Star Wars, a boy can grow up to be a knight or a wizard, but if you’re a girl, you have one good role model… but you better be born a princess or good at space hookin’, ’cause those are your options.”

Of course, the Star Wars franchise has had this problem since its inception.  As Michael Swaim put it in a discussion about sexism in the original trilogy on After Hours, “In Star Wars, a boy can grow up to be a knight or a wizard, but if you’re a girl, you have one good role model… but you better be born a princess or good at space hookin’, ’cause those are your options.”

One of the Rebel leaders was a woman. I’m not sure if she was named in the movie or not, but at least she got a speaking role providing exposition. Then there’s (briefly) Aunt Beru.

It does not speak highly of the original trilogy that those are the only alternatives to princess and space hooking that I can think of. I have no problem with the Empire being sexist, but you’d think the Rebellion would have some random female soldiers and pilots running around.

One of the Rebel leaders was a woman. I’m not sure if she was named in the movie or not, but at least she got a speaking role providing exposition. Then there’s (briefly) Aunt Beru.

It does not speak highly of the original trilogy that those are the only alternatives to princess and space hooking that I can think of. I have no problem with the Empire being sexist, but you’d think the Rebellion would have some random female soldiers and pilots running around.

Anecdata on the “women often get treated as inferior by the service industry” theme:

I have a few males friends who have little or no personal income. When I and one of these guys go out to dinner or a movie together, I usually cover their costs cos I have a high income. It’s amazing (and amusing, when I’m in the mood) how often I will hand over money to the cashier, who will then give the change to my male companion. Like we all know that he’s really paying, but he’s given me a 50 to play pretend.

Anecdata on the “women often get treated as inferior by the service industry” theme:

I have a few males friends who have little or no personal income. When I and one of these guys go out to dinner or a movie together, I usually cover their costs cos I have a high income. It’s amazing (and amusing, when I’m in the mood) how often I will hand over money to the cashier, who will then give the change to my male companion. Like we all know that he’s really paying, but he’s given me a 50 to play pretend.

I’m not sure if she was named in the movie or not, but at least she got a speaking role providing exposition.

Mon Mothma.

EDIT: oh, right. Not in the movie. In the credits…I think?

It’s amazing (and amusing, when I’m in the mood) how often I will hand
over money to the cashier, who will then give the change to my male
companion. Like we all know that he’s really paying, but he’s given me a
50 to play pretend.

I don’t…what?
Why?
Wh…what..

They did cover the exceptions (in fact, the sentence immediately following that quote was, “Or you could be Luke’s Aunt Beru, but what did she ever do?”), but like you said, said exceptions are scarce on the ground.  And the prequel trilogy wasn’t really any better on that front.

I should probably post a link:
http://www.cracked.com/video_18249_why-star-wars-secretly-terrifying-women.html

They did cover the exceptions (in fact, the sentence immediately following that quote was, “Or you could be Luke’s Aunt Beru, but what did she ever do?”), but like you said, said exceptions are scarce on the ground.  And the prequel trilogy wasn’t really any better on that front.

I should probably post a link:
http://www.cracked.com/video_18249_why-star-wars-secretly-terrifying-women.html

Keep in mind, though, that Episode 2 suggests that Princess is an elected position.

(I remember seeing that in the theater and thinking “Wow that’s an obvious retcon to make the hamfisted moral less ridiculous”)

Keep in mind, though, that Episode 2 suggests that Princess is an elected position.

(I remember seeing that in the theater and thinking “Wow that’s an obvious retcon to make the hamfisted moral less ridiculous”)

Keep in mind, though, that Episode 2 suggests that Princess is an elected position.

(I remember seeing that in the theater and thinking “Wow that’s an obvious retcon to make the hamfisted moral less ridiculous”)

Keep in mind, though, that Episode 2 suggests that Princess is an elected position.

What’s an “Episode 2″?

Keep in mind, though, that Episode 2 suggests that Princess is an elected position.

What’s an “Episode 2″?

It’s the middle part of the explanation for why Obi-Wan and Yoda are screwed up enough to do things like use Luke as a weapon against his father or warn him against rescuing his friends from torture.

It’s the middle part of the explanation for why Obi-Wan and Yoda are screwed up enough to do things like use Luke as a weapon against his father or warn him against rescuing his friends from torture.

It’s the middle part of the explanation for why Obi-Wan and Yoda are screwed up enough to do things like use Luke as a weapon against his father or warn him against rescuing his friends from torture.

I work in the toys department of a Walmart and have seen a number of both boys who want the pink version of something and girls what want the non-pink version.

Usually, parents will let the girl have the non-pink one, but will tell the boy that the pink one is “for girls.”  I am hopeful that in the future, some of these boys will remember their disappointment (and some of them are really disappointed) and maybe the “for girls” versions of things will eventually disappear.

As for the “girl LEGO,” we sell them, and aside from the overwhelming pinkness of it all, most of the props are actually kind of unisex.  One of the sets is a cafe, so there are little LEGO cakes and pies and things, and another is a vet’s office, so there’s a little LEGO dog, and a horse, and a hedgehog (?). And one of the little girls, Olivia, has a treehouse, complete with telescope, and she also is an inventor that has a lab that comes with the pieces to make a little robot friend for her.  So they aren’t quite as sexist as I feared they would be.  There is a beauty salon, though.  Sigh.

I wish there were more boys’ sets with cats and dogs and cakes and pies.

I work in the toys department of a Walmart and have seen a number of both boys who want the pink version of something and girls what want the non-pink version.

Usually, parents will let the girl have the non-pink one, but will tell the boy that the pink one is “for girls.”  I am hopeful that in the future, some of these boys will remember their disappointment (and some of them are really disappointed) and maybe the “for girls” versions of things will eventually disappear.

As for the “girl LEGO,” we sell them, and aside from the overwhelming pinkness of it all, most of the props are actually kind of unisex.  One of the sets is a cafe, so there are little LEGO cakes and pies and things, and another is a vet’s office, so there’s a little LEGO dog, and a horse, and a hedgehog (?). And one of the little girls, Olivia, has a treehouse, complete with telescope, and she also is an inventor that has a lab that comes with the pieces to make a little robot friend for her.  So they aren’t quite as sexist as I feared they would be.  There is a beauty salon, though.  Sigh.

I wish there were more boys’ sets with cats and dogs and cakes and pies.

This has nothing to do with what I’m reading right now (which is all this stuff about a video game that I know nothing about), but I have to say that I love Tigress from Kung Fu Panda.  Why? Because she’s a tiger (and tigers are cool), she stands up for herself, and the animators didn’t feel it was necessary to give her boobs.

Also, WRT the now-defunct thread on t-shirts, the underside of my right upper arm is really sensitive, and “men’s” t-shirts are the only ones I can find that don’t irritate it.

This has nothing to do with what I’m reading right now (which is all this stuff about a video game that I know nothing about), but I have to say that I love Tigress from Kung Fu Panda.  Why? Because she’s a tiger (and tigers are cool), she stands up for herself, and the animators didn’t feel it was necessary to give her boobs.

Also, WRT the now-defunct thread on t-shirts, the underside of my right upper arm is really sensitive, and “men’s” t-shirts are the only ones I can find that don’t irritate it.

It’s real if all it does is support the top. Shaping is a whole ‘nother set of problems (and I wouldn’t want to wear one that was trying to change my shape, anyway). Mostly a corset because it takes the weight/stress off the shoulders and moves it to the hips, which are much better designed for that sort of thing. (I really doubt that most women were wasp-waisted in the 19th century: I’ve see patterns with measurements, and the waists on them are not smaller than now.)

About those children’s books and products marketed specifically to women/girls separate from males/”other people,” could not one also argue the opposite of what this blog asserts here? That instead of women being singled out because they’re abnormal in some way, they have their own classification because they’re considered more important in some way, and thus suggest women are themselves privileged to have their own category? It’s just interesting to assume one extreme without entertaining that another, opposite one could be true.

Just playing devil’s advocate here.

About those children’s books and products marketed specifically to women/girls separate from males/”other people,” could not one also argue the opposite of what this blog asserts here? That instead of women being singled out because they’re abnormal in some way, they have their own classification because they’re considered more important in some way, and thus suggest women are themselves privileged to have their own category? It’s just interesting to assume one extreme without entertaining that another, opposite one could be true.

Just playing devil’s advocate here.

About those children’s books and products marketed specifically to women/girls separate from males/”other people,” could not one also argue the opposite of what this blog asserts here? That instead of women being singled out because they’re abnormal in some way, they have their own classification because they’re considered more important in some way, and thus suggest women are themselves privileged to have their own category? It’s just interesting to assume one extreme without entertaining that another, opposite one could be true.

Just playing devil’s advocate here.

I hate this kind of thing I just wanna say. I dislike the objectification of women in video games and comics and the notion that their gender is often their most defining characteristic, as if they’re a woman first and a character second somehow. Their outfits are always designed with sex appeal in mind and emphasize their sexual attributes moreso than males’ clothing emphasizes theirs. They’re also given a far more limited range of body types than males (i.e. almost always thin, placing a further emphasis that only pretty women are deserving of any attention whereas men are cut more slack in the looks department). It’s also subtly insulting to men in a way, suggesting we cannot and should not be objectified ourselves, but women can and should, which is ridiculous. Why shouldn’t we want to be presented as highly desirable? Sheesh.

One could argue that, of course, but one would be proving oneself laughably ignorant of the concept of ‘male privilege’ by so doing. You’re not laughably ignorant, are you, Bill?

One could argue that, of course, but one would be proving oneself laughably ignorant of the concept of ‘male privilege’ by so doing. You’re not laughably ignorant, are you, Bill?

One could argue that, of course, but one would be proving oneself laughably ignorant of the concept of ‘male privilege’ by so doing. You’re not laughably ignorant, are you, Bill?

One could argue that, of course, but one would be proving oneself laughably ignorant of the concept of ‘male privilege’ by so doing.

One could argue that, of course, but one would be proving oneself laughably ignorant of the concept of ‘male privilege’ by so doing.

One could argue that, of course, but one would be proving oneself laughably ignorant of the concept of ‘male privilege’ by so doing.

What were those rules, again? It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to feel desire, and it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be desired, I think.

What were those rules, again? It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to feel desire, and it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be desired, I think.

Ohmigawd, I went to Undercity for a facial…Have you seen those people?!

Ohmigawd, I went to Undercity for a facial…Have you seen those people?!

Ohmigawd, I went to Undercity for a facial…Have you seen those people?!

I’m unsure what to make of this. I was merely suggesting looking at it from another angle. But apparently, that makes me ignorant. I resent your implication.

I’m unsure what to make of this. I was merely suggesting looking at it from another angle. But apparently, that makes me ignorant. I resent your implication.

I’m unsure what to make of this. I was merely suggesting looking at it from another angle. But apparently, that makes me ignorant. I resent your implication.

Babydoll tees are specifically designed to make your breasts look huge and accentuate how tiny your waist is.  If you don’t have a tiny waist, then the shirt is either going to make you look fat, or it’s going to be several sizes too large so you’re swimming in it.

I have yet to find a cute babydoll that isn’t either too big to be worth getting in that style, or too constrictive for a C cup.  (Not even a large size!  A C!)

Okay, now I get it. I recant my devil’s advocate type suggestion from before. This actually explained it better than Fred did for me. I see what he meant now though and can agree it’s fairly distressing.

This SO much.  The American Girl books were the only “girl” books I enjoyed as a kid.  I loved Ratman way more than any Sweet Valley or Babysitters Club book.

This SO much.  The American Girl books were the only “girl” books I enjoyed as a kid.  I loved Ratman way more than any Sweet Valley or Babysitters Club book.

This SO much.  The American Girl books were the only “girl” books I enjoyed as a kid.  I loved Ratman way more than any Sweet Valley or Babysitters Club book.

I hate getting my oil changed, because, as a woman in her mid-20′s who can pass for a teenager, I may as well have “Sucker” printed on my forehead.  If some other repair is suggested, I have too little mechanical prowess to be able to tell if there’s a legitimate issue, or they’re just charging me the Woman Tax.  I really need to learn how to do it myself. :/

It’s worst in the South, where gender norms are so strongly enforced that my dad teaching me how to change a tire was probably an extremely rare occurrence.

I hate getting my oil changed, because, as a woman in her mid-20′s who can pass for a teenager, I may as well have “Sucker” printed on my forehead.  If some other repair is suggested, I have too little mechanical prowess to be able to tell if there’s a legitimate issue, or they’re just charging me the Woman Tax.  I really need to learn how to do it myself. :/

It’s worst in the South, where gender norms are so strongly enforced that my dad teaching me how to change a tire was probably an extremely rare occurrence.

I hate getting my oil changed, because, as a woman in her mid-20′s who can pass for a teenager, I may as well have “Sucker” printed on my forehead.  If some other repair is suggested, I have too little mechanical prowess to be able to tell if there’s a legitimate issue, or they’re just charging me the Woman Tax.  I really need to learn how to do it myself. :/

It’s worst in the South, where gender norms are so strongly enforced that my dad teaching me how to change a tire was probably an extremely rare occurrence.

If the girl-targeted books were showing girls doing things that girls traditionally didn’t do[1], then one could argue that they were promoting equality – but most emphatically not “more important in some way” because that’s a dog-whistle for “put on a pedestal and not allowed to do anything non-girly”.

[1]Still looking for a techy YA girl protagonist written anytime after 1957.

If the girl-targeted books were showing girls doing things that girls traditionally didn’t do[1], then one could argue that they were promoting equality – but most emphatically not “more important in some way” because that’s a dog-whistle for “put on a pedestal and not allowed to do anything non-girly”.

[1]Still looking for a techy YA girl protagonist written anytime after 1957.

If the girl-targeted books were showing girls doing things that girls traditionally didn’t do[1], then one could argue that they were promoting equality – but most emphatically not “more important in some way” because that’s a dog-whistle for “put on a pedestal and not allowed to do anything non-girly”.

[1]Still looking for a techy YA girl protagonist written anytime after 1957.

Wait–you have to have a Facebook account to change your avatar in Disqus?

*shrugs* Being recognized as female isn’t worth getting a Facebook account, to me.

Wait–you have to have a Facebook account to change your avatar in Disqus?

*shrugs* Being recognized as female isn’t worth getting a Facebook account, to me.

One of my friends promised last night that if I ever have a son, she will buy him a nice, pink dump truck.

The_L1985: no, I have an avatar, and this Disqus account has never been near my facebook, ever.

One of my friends promised last night that if I ever have a son, she will buy him a nice, pink dump truck.

The_L1985: no, I have an avatar, and this Disqus account has never been near my facebook, ever.

One of my friends promised last night that if I ever have a son, she will buy him a nice, pink dump truck.

The_L1985: no, I have an avatar, and this Disqus account has never been near my facebook, ever.

Because we live in what has been referred to as “rape culture.”  In rape culture, there is the myth that women never actually want to have sex, so consent is meaningless.  In rape culture, a woman who accuses a man of rape is assumed by default to be lying until she can prove otherwise.  In rape culture, women cannot commit rape because their sex organs don’t stick out (rape in many countries, including the US, is legally defined as the unwanted penetration of another person).

The fact that you, as a male character, are forcing a female character to participate in a sex act (voyeurism) against her will, and suffer no repercussions, is why it’s too controversial even for an obviously evil character.

Because we live in what has been referred to as “rape culture.”  In rape culture, there is the myth that women never actually want to have sex, so consent is meaningless.  In rape culture, a woman who accuses a man of rape is assumed by default to be lying until she can prove otherwise.  In rape culture, women cannot commit rape because their sex organs don’t stick out (rape in many countries, including the US, is legally defined as the unwanted penetration of another person).

The fact that you, as a male character, are forcing a female character to participate in a sex act (voyeurism) against her will, and suffer no repercussions, is why it’s too controversial even for an obviously evil character.

Understood. And I never suggested girls shouldn’t be allowed to do anything non-girly. As a boy I played with dolls so I’m against gender stereotypes.

Understood. And I never suggested girls shouldn’t be allowed to do anything non-girly. As a boy I played with dolls so I’m against gender stereotypes.

Understood. And I never suggested girls shouldn’t be allowed to do anything non-girly. As a boy I played with dolls so I’m against gender stereotypes.

Oh believe me.  while I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism of including the whole slave-forced-voyeurism thing in there, I had a hard time, er, thinking objectively. >.> And it’s not because I would want to be the Sith in that situation, either.

Oh believe me.  while I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism of including the whole slave-forced-voyeurism thing in there, I had a hard time, er, thinking objectively. >.> And it’s not because I would want to be the Sith in that situation, either.

Boys are much less likely to read a book with a girl as the protagonist. There is a sound economic rationale for marketing to “kids/everyone” a book with a boy in it, but only marketing to girls a book with a girl in it. (The publishers are reacting to the reality of how society buys books – it isn’t accidental or values based. Unless the value you’re talking about is money…)

How much of *that* is cultural? (FWIW, I went through a phase where I would *only* read books about girls.)

And, no, the idea that the free market only pursues money is a myth. Here’s a comment from Patrick Nielsen Hayden — one of the top editors at a major publishing company — talking (briefly) about publication bias. If anyone’s going to know about it, it’s him.

Boys are much less likely to read a book with a girl as the protagonist. There is a sound economic rationale for marketing to “kids/everyone” a book with a boy in it, but only marketing to girls a book with a girl in it. (The publishers are reacting to the reality of how society buys books – it isn’t accidental or values based. Unless the value you’re talking about is money…)

How much of *that* is cultural? (FWIW, I went through a phase where I would *only* read books about girls.)

And, no, the idea that the free market only pursues money is a myth. Here’s a comment from Patrick Nielsen Hayden — one of the top editors at a major publishing company — talking (briefly) about publication bias. If anyone’s going to know about it, it’s him.

Boys are much less likely to read a book with a girl as the protagonist. There is a sound economic rationale for marketing to “kids/everyone” a book with a boy in it, but only marketing to girls a book with a girl in it. (The publishers are reacting to the reality of how society buys books – it isn’t accidental or values based. Unless the value you’re talking about is money…)

How much of *that* is cultural? (FWIW, I went through a phase where I would *only* read books about girls.)

And, no, the idea that the free market only pursues money is a myth. Here’s a comment from Patrick Nielsen Hayden — one of the top editors at a major publishing company — talking (briefly) about publication bias. If anyone’s going to know about it, it’s him.

What’s your definition of “techy” because it didn’t take me that long to scare up a half dozen titles with girl mechanics as protagonists.  

No, but if you create a Facebook to log into Disqus (which I did, for this purpose) your Facebook avatar replaces the Disqus one automatically.

I have yet to find a cute babydoll that isn’t either too big to be worth
getting in that style, or too constrictive for a C cup.  (Not even a
large size!  A C!)

Good grief….of course, my SGF suggested I’d prefer her as a “nice B,”¹ so I guess it’s all relative, somehow, though.
My best friend loves Coheed and Cambria, but doesn’t do many band shirts, and most of my other female friends don’t do much in the way of popular music at all (SGF: perfect pitch. Gets headaches from off-key singing…), so I’ve never had anyone who could tell me what directly dealing with ‘em is like before. That is good to know–I mean, I figured it was “emphasize breasts,” but it never seemed like it would work properly to me. Apparently I was right…

Wait–you have to have a Facebook account to change your avatar in Disqus?

I don’t think so…I do have a Facebook account, and it WAS tied in here (I actually undid it to hide the fact that, in the discussion of tipping I was the one notifying a website of the language *cough*) but I removed it. My avatar here is *not* from Facebook, but uploaded independently. It is, in fact, my favourite painting ever: The Arsonist, by Clive Barker. Definitely required registering though…maybe that requires Facebook now though?

¹I would just like to point out that, leaving my personal taste aside, this mystifies me, as I thought it was common knowledge that probably a majority of men prefer larger. Or at least, I thought that was the common stereotype. Me, I have preferences, but it doesn’t determine whether I find a woman interesting in the least. The fact that my past bears this out does not help my SGF, who saw my last ex and decided this was proof I like tiny women…exclusively.

The hardest part of an oil change is finding someplace to take the used oil. Otherwise, it’s pretty simple. (Yes, I’ve done it. I didn’t understand ‘warm oil massage’ until I did an oil change. It is, um, a sensual pleasure.

Science, engineering, math, mechanics – please do list them, because they need publicity. The paranormal romances are getting all the press, and I’d like teenage girls to have the same “omg, a story that says it’s OK to be an engineer and *not* change for a boy?!” reaction I did when I was 12 – to a 20 year old story, when all the *contemporary* stories were romances with makeovers. It was depressing.

Also I get my avatar because I logged in with OpenID, and if anyone needs a mechanic in the Silicon Valley area who won’t condescend, I’ve got one. 

The Young Wizards books (by Diane Duane) have a secondary protagonist (a couple of the books are written largely from her perspective) who’s a computer hacker and really good at math. First one was published in 1985, most recent one came out a couple years ago. There are now 10 in the series, I believe. 

My babydoll-style tees were never band tees anyway–they’re pretty much all you can find in the juniors section some years that isn’t uber-revealing.  On the rare occasion I get a band tee, I go for men’s T-shirts, simply because they’ll last longer without ever making me look fat or pregnant (I am neither, but you’d be surprised what form-fitting shirts, and nearly ALL dresses, do to my not-as-toned-as-I’d-like stomach).

But yes, unless you have tiny breasts, babydolls will be rather tight in the chest.  Again, this is supposed to be a feature, not a bug.

I need to go back and finish that series–it was very well-written, and dealt with a lot of issues that teens and pre-teens tend to worry a lot about.  For example, it emphasizes, over and over, that it is OK to have a friend of the opposite sex without sex or romance getting involved.

What syfr said. I have a Disqus account and only a Disqus account and my avatar is not the default as you can see

Well, the recently released Cinder has Cinderella as a mechanic (and cyborg!)

The Beetle and Me: A Love Story by Karen Romano Young where the romance is between a girl and a car.  Dream Racer by Jacqueline Guer.  

Green Glass Sea is about an 11 year old inventor and is set in Los Alamos around the time of the creation of the nuclear bomb.

The Freak Observer where a girl uses her love of physics to deal with her PTSD.  

I also found a couple of series that sounded amusing The Specialists where kids who would be criminal masterminds are recruited to fight crime.  Some of the books focus on a female computer hacker.  There’s also a series about spies that are undercover as cheerleaders.  The main character in that one is also a hacker.  

Say, FangsFirst – you probably explained this somewhere and I just missed it. But – SGF? *curious*

they’re pretty much all you can find in the juniors section some years that isn’t uber-revealing.

I’ve had many discussions of the stupidities that exist in the majority of women’s clothing with my female friends.
It used to mostly center around me mocking my coworkers at Borders when they had to go get money for a purchase out of their locker (“Ha ha! Pockets!”). All in good fun of course–they knew (and I said) I thought it was dumb for pockets to be nonexistent or rendered useless. Having a lot of short female friends also “helped” that, as it feeds the info about the juniors section stuff. No one mentioned much about shirts, but most of the short ones are disproportionately chested, so I guess it was kind of moot…if it’s tight for you, they just aren’t going to fit in them. At all.

But yes, unless you have tiny breasts, babydolls will be rather tight in
the chest.  Again, this is supposed to be a feature, not a bug.

Sigh. Guess that’s just back to the “Let’s help out the poor ‘breast-less’ women so they don’t look unattractive!”
Though I suppose some of them feel that does make them unattractive, thus creating the market…but the feeling comes from…Sometimes, I think we should take off and nuke the place from orbit. Start over. I don’t know how we’re supposed to untangle all this crap.

But – SGF?

“Schrödinger’s Girlfriend”

We haven’t had direct contact in almost seven months.
The last time I saw her, she stayed with me at my parents’ for about a week straight (it’s one of the places she just feels safe). When I drove her home at the end of the last night, she asked me in and told me she needed to go away for a while because the triggers around me were getting so severe that any contact from me was setting her off. I’d seen evidence of it, but she doesn’t like “troubling” others with her problems, so I left it to her to decide if the severity was a problem.

She had started talking to someone who understood some of her experiences in life, who advised her that, as much as she might love me, she needed to sort herself out away from me, because said person had been away from her fiance for a lengthy period of time to do the same.

She spent the night trying to make sure I understood she loves me, showing me all the things I’ve given her, or my parents have given her, that she surrounds herself with and would have around her while away from me. She asked me what in her home would make me think of her instantly and deeply, and I was a bit too taken aback and couldn’t answer, so she gave me the corset I mentioned, a rather elderly book of poetry because she’d learned them in her youth and knew all of them by heart, (so that, if ever I read them, I would know those words were “in [her] head at any given time”), and a silly stuffed animal her younger brother had rejected (all the rest she’d sold/given away/trashed during a phase of getting rid of everything she owns, and the others left were two from me to replace the ones she’d told me about after I met her,¹ and one from her best friend).

She told me that she was starting to think that, while she could never bear a child–her lifelong goal–sharing a life with me might be enough. She told me she only had the strength and the reason to try to put her life in order because of me, and that she needed me to be there to come back to² on the other side of it.

So, I wear a claddagh she gave me (she’s Scottish/Welsh, takes it as a Celtic tradition and I think it may be one from her family that is still over there, but I’m not sure). She may or may not wear the one I gave her first, because it might be triggering as well (think “anything related to relationships”), but I know she nearly lost her mind when she almost lost it once.

Final encapsulation: she is and isn’t, I have noted my fear of coming off as a stalker/obsessor/whatever (and I’ve been accused of it by her friends who never met me) so I’m wary of claiming she “is my girlfriend,” because of how things are right now. But at the same time, out of respect for her efforts to convince me that she loves me and trusting her on that front, as well as, well, all of the above and plenty more, it seems like “isn’t” is wrong as well. So…I came up with a term to cover both, without giving weight to one over the other.

(And that, in general, is why I hang around here and make obnoxious comments: it’s a distraction to keep my brain working on something other than her being gone. I know it’s worse for her, but I can’t even be there to listen, let alone dissuade the notion or comfort her, so I try not to think about that. Or other things.)

I haven’t explained this before, per se, but there you are. It’s awkward because I lack boundaries and she has very strict ones, but she told me that night that anything of her life she had given to me and it was thus mine as well and I should treat it as such. I try not to, as I know it still freaks her out…but it’s harder trying to figure out how to act/be/talk when this informs almost everything I do and am.

Sidenote: this also roundabout explains my previous notion about knowing “people” I’d like to see burn for all eternity.

¹A sheep and a goat, in tribute to her youthful (seven years of age) shepherding gig, back in Scotland. Named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which she thinks is embarrassing and I think is awesome, so there.

²Uh…at all. If you catch my drift.

Ah! *is enlightened* And thank you for the long back story. If it helps I think you do genuinely care about her and that it is entirely correct to be cautious of one’s own behavior, especially around someone who has friends who might have reason to wonder about the motives of men around her.

But good luck with you and the SGF (may her eigenstate collapse in YOUR favor! )

And thank you for the long back story.

You’re welcome, though I have no idea why you would thank me

If it helps I think you do genuinely care about her

any time I wonder, I think back on various things that distill my emotions and reactions to concern for her, and not of a “she’s weak and needs protecting” variety. My mother once said, “Good lord. It’s just like a fairy tale, the way you talk about her.” Had to re-evaluate my cynical but optimistic definition/interpretation of love. Constantly vigilant to be sure I’m not some creepy cretin just trying to protect the weak womankind, but it hasn’t ever turned out that my actions or reactions are motivated by this.

and that it is
entirely correct to be cautious of one’s own behavior, especially around
someone who has friends who might have reason to wonder about the
motives of men around her.

Alas and alack, I know this one for a fact already.
I’ve been harassed directly and indirectly over the past two and a half years. That’s (they have past reason) the lens through which she views and apologizes for their actions. Even as I say, “Um, there’s nothing for you to be sorry about when someone steals your phone under the pretense of friendship and harasses people by pretending to be you,”¹ or “When you tell your ‘friend’ that their behaviour of using your Facebook account to delete all reference to me from yours AND mine is unacceptable and they do it again, that’s really an indication that that isn’t your friend, as they won’t even respect your wishes enough to follow them when they are stated explicitly.”

It also annoyed me as I thought, “Either you know I’m not really a threat, or you are so concerned with awesomely beating up on the guy you see as bad, you haven’t considered that going after someone you see as bad for her might make him, I don’t know, flip out and take it out on her? So your end goal has nothing to do with protecting her and everything to do with being seen as the protective friend?”

¹Pro-tip: if you are pretending to be someone who went to Scottish public school (enough that she speaks the Queen’s English), watching your spelling and grammar via text is kind of a necessity. Also, understanding the variance in word choice (I worked in a book SHOP, not a book STORE) is pretty key.
Also: “Then let me talk to her,”
“She says she doesn’t want to talk to you,”
“Then hold up the phone and let her say so,”
“She’s shaking her head ‘no,’”
Might work on a seven year old…but…

They’re all available as an e-book bundle here: http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/

and you can get a discount; see here: 
https://plus.google.com/101086882349363163093/posts/Mvzkc3ubjac
which will also help them out since their bank account got wiped out by card-skimmers.

Now, see, authors? Making electronic copies of old books available for anyone to read at a decent price? THIS is how you combat piracy.

*gets off soapbox, goes to see if he can view the books in PDF or if he needs an ereader*

EDIT: epub or mobi, and I don’t actually use handheld ereaders. *Looks for a program to view these things*

I also saw a really great article on, I think it was Slate, about the
trend of manufacturing pink electronics (such as laptops, smartphones,
etc.) and how, contrary to the stereotype, more women then men are
buying electronics right now, and only a relatively small portion of
them actually want bright pink gadgets.

A few years back, when the model of cell-phone I wanted happened to come in pink (or black or … silver, maybe), I got it in pink.  But “pink” would never be the reason I settled on a particular phone.

A bionic purse would be cool.

I want that bag Hermione packed…  Of course, I also want that tent that was bigger on the inside.

That said? I know at least two women who *specifically* got pink electronic items. O.o

SGF’s favourite colour is, I kid you not, “pink with sparkles.”¹

None of her electronics are pink. At least…*thinks*…yeah, not phone or laptop, at least, which I think are the most common things that would/could be? My best friend is proudly “girly” as well (though she’s the one who insisted I start playing BioWare games) and…actually, I think her phone might be pink…but she moved to MN a while ago, and has replaced it since then. Last time she visited, I didn’t stop and say, “Wait, let me look at your phone and see what colour it is!”

¹My favourite colour is “iridescent” so I can’t say a thing. It’s my way of cheating into every colour all at once. Yes, I’m aware “iridescent” is not a colour.

The problem with looking at it from another angle is that the angle you propose is one I might try to “sell” to my daughter if she asked me why there are regular Lego bricks and then there are girl Lego bricks – but based on my experiences in my life, I don’t think there’s any chance that the “girl” versions of pretty much anything are meant to designate girls as better or superior or special. 

At *best*, it means that a company has realized that they haven’t successfully marketed to girls – and rather than figure out why (whether it’s a marketing problem, or a design problem, or what), they figure that they can paint “it” (whatever it is) pink, slap a “for girls” label on it, and … hey, easy profit!  (If it were that easy, girls would already have been buying it.)  But then when the new “pink” line doesn’t sell, they don’t take another look at whether there was some other issue, they just decide that girls won’t buy their product, and consider girls’ needs even less in future.

If the product in question was Lego bricks – well, it’s not the end of the world.  But if the product was a bike, or roller skates, and the result is that girls get the message that being athletic is for boys – that’s a dangerous message. 

It’s a real problem, it affects real people – and “well, let’s think about other reasons this might happen” just lets certain people keep denying that it’s real.  Which delays (or worse prevents) it from being acknowledged and addressed. 

Wowsa.  I know this isn’t really my business, and I wouldn’t ask if you weren’t discussing this fairly publicly, but…. 

While these “friends” are “protecting” her from people like you, who’s protecting her from *them*?

I mean, you say you’re careful not to give off stalkery signals to them, but they sound straight out of Single White Female!

That said? I know at least two women who *specifically* got pink electronic items. O.o

Hmmm….  I can see doing it if I’m picking out something that’s a luxury and I don’t know enough to really judge differences.  Like the first time I picked out an MP3 player, and didn’t really know enough to know for sure what I wanted.  I went based on cost and what looked good – specific colors, or shades of color, might have had more impact there.

If I expect to really *use* something where efficiency are usability matters, the color just isn’t going to cut it.  Especially if I can just buy a shell or cover for it anyway.  

Holy crap not watching that movie. O_O

While these “friends” are “protecting” her from people like you, who’s protecting her from *them*?

Me, as best I can by being respectful. Which is obviously a pretty limited method. I had to simultaneously assuage her feelings of guilt every time, while trying to not freak out myself¹ and trying to evaluate the risk to her. The first time, she was led to believe that some random stranger randomly grabbed her phone while she was at work in a restaurant and started texting people, and she called me upset and said it creeped her out that some stranger had touched her phone, and she didn’t know who they had messaged.

So, in addition to putting her at risk (there are some people who definitely WOULD take it our on her), they had done something that made her feel violated, and they had screwed with a relationship that is very important to her.

They were, however, cool with the racist [I'm going to omit the other words I use to describe him, out of politeness] who liked to puts his hands on her without her permission (I can think of at least three extremely upset phonecalls I got about him), who once broke into her personnel file to find out where she lived because he was “worried” that she was rapidly losing weight, and thought that somehow made that acceptable. Many people suggested they should date. Her own mother did, actually. Her own opinion, well… she once kicked him so hard she broke her foot, because he put his hands on her unsolicited. Oddly, this was while I was at her house for the first time–invited as a stay-in guest so that she wouldn’t be alone while her family was on vacation (that’s what you do with stalkers, right? invite them to stay at your home when you’re alone?).²

She got angry when I called that guy a stalker–because she’s actually been stalked, and that was apparently all tame. No one did anything about them, that was before I knew her. Nor the abusive ex’s. Nobody ever did that. Nobody stopped any of the awful things I know about.

So they think they will make up for it by going after the guy she texted day and night, called at least daily (usually multiple times a day–we’d talk in any downtime either of us had), and saw at his workplace once a week or more, nevermind when the time for a movie could be squeaked out or when, with permission, I’d go and eat at her workplace. Okay, a few times I surprised her, but only after my being there was established as okay. The first time I went there was AFTER all these people harassed me–ie, they’d never even heard my voice before. They just decided I was the reason she had suddenly changed and become really sat and didn’t like people touching her.

One of her (other) coworkers once described me, she said, as looking at her like “someone who couldn’t believe how in love with her he is” and said she looked at me the same way. So, you know, I clearly looked like a stalker, and she really wanted me to go away.

¹Imagine you never make connections with people, but finally you find someone you get. Who gets you. You talk to said person daily, mostly by text. One day that person suddenly (seemingly) says things like: “Don’t be a pansy. Why don’t you have a real man’s job?” or “You should know who this is just by the fact that I’m talking to you at all. Get a life, loser.” or “No bitch she gave it to me and let me answer it too oh and she let me read ur 60 page letter too stalky mcstalkerson”–>so, throw in “breaking into her things,” too.

²Sidenote: I cheerfully slept in a guestroom. I also managed to show her Star Wars for the first time, and half of Empire Strikes Back (she fell asleep) while I was there, as she’d never seen them.

If the product in question was Lego bricks – well, it’s not the end of
the world.  But if the product was a bike, or roller skates, and the
result is that girls get the message that being athletic is for boys –
that’s a dangerous message.

One of the weirdly strong memories I have of childhood is actually going on a bustrip (or maybe a birthday party–the surroundings, obviously, not so strong) to a roller rink, and a bunch of us had learned/decided that there did not have to be “boy” and “girl” colours, at about 8 or 10 years of age. A guy said he wanted pink skates and we were like, “yeah, okay. No reason a girl can’t wear black, either!”
Yeah, for whatever reason, black was a “boy colour” in our minds–or rather, was supposed to be one and we were rejecting that.

I mean, you say you’re careful not to give off stalkery signals to them,

By the way: I am not so much avoiding signals as avoiding “telling” her whether she is or is not in a relationship. That’s up to agreement, not my statements. Which has surprised and confused her over the years. I asked her after our first date or two and our constant communication started if she would agree we were in a relationship and could use the ___friend terms¹–because I’d argue with anyone who called her my girlfriend, as I felt that was not a call for them (or me) to make without her input.

¹Which was most funny because I asked her when she would make an honest man out of me on that front, which made her blush and stammer for a moment (things were…easier then. Fun to make her blush and stammer. Not so much to clam up, look frightened and possibly throw up.), and I said, “No no no, so that I can say ‘girlfriend’ without putting words in your mouth, thus being honest.”

You don’t need Facebook – I don’t have one. You just need to create an account with Disqus themselves. I think they allow Facebook as an alternate login option for those who try to keep everything under one account.

Actually it’s probably wise to register with Disqus anyway. We had a rash of anons who would sgn in on the old Slacktivist Typepad site and appear to be like regulars. So I, among others, registered on Typepad and got properly uniquely identified so nobody could cause that kind of confusion again.

It’s sort of greenish, but with more dimensions.

Are you telling me iridescent is a colour? I don’t have to call it cheating…exactly…anymore? That is amazing!

…unless you’re actually my best friend telling me your new phone is green with more dimensions.

Having a lot of short female friends also “helped” that, as it feeds the info about the juniors section stuff. No one mentioned much about
shirts, but most of the short ones are disproportionately chested, so I guess it was kind of moot…if it’s tight for you, they just aren’t going to fit in them. At all.

5’2″ here.  I shop in Petites now pretty much exclusively.  The shirts are far more flattering, and for the first time in my life, I can be reasonably sure of finding pants that fit.  Everything in the juniors section was always too long, too loose in the waist, too tight in the butt, or both.  It’s like teenage girls are only allowed to be one shape!