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[Loud Whispers]

Also Iron Ladies (or men, for that matter) don't make good fictional rulers unless you're going for the evil type authoritarian type.

Ftfy. The benevolent ruler rules with a kind iron hand. Iron is also a good description:
Hard and strong but also willing to bend. Opposed to gold, which bends easy yet is soft or steel that is stronger than both but would shatter before bending.

[kaijyuu]

Ah, I forget not everyone thinks that "authoritarian" is simply a subset of "evil."

[Loud Whispers]

Ah, I forget not everyone thinks that "authoritarian" is simply a subset of "evil."

Well to be an authoritarian you would have to believe your governing body is incapable of evil, or at the very least is not evil in itself. So basically you're ruled by Aragorn.

[palsch]

How do you equate ending a woman's suffering or "fighting what used to be a person" to domestic abuse? The heroes aren't fucking smacking down women because they're drunk or she didn't cook a roast. They aren't trying to tear the woman down psychologically or manipulate them, and 9/10 they only fight the now corrupted damsel as a last resort/because they have to. Is a fucking non sequiter.

Looking at what she actually said (yay for transcripts);

These stories conjure supernatural situations in which domestic violence perpetrated by men against women who’ve “lost control of themselves” not only appears justified but is actually presented as an altruistic act done “for the woman’s own good”.
Of course, if you look at any of these games in isolation, you will be able to find incidental narrative circumstances that can be used to explain away the inclusion of violence against women as a plot device. But just because a particular event might “makes sense” within the internal logic of a fictional narrative – that doesn’t, in and of itself justify its use. Games don’t exist in a vacuum and therefore can’t be divorced from the larger cultural context of the real world.

It’s especially troubling in-light of the serious real life epidemic of violence against women facing the female population on this planet. Every 9 seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States and on average more than three women are murdered by their boyfriends husbands, or ex-partners every single day. Research consistently shows that people of all genders tend to buy into the myth that women are the ones to blame for the violence men perpetrate against them. In the same vein, abusive men consistently state that their female targets “deserved it”, “wanted it” or were “asking for it”,

Given the reality of that larger cultural context, it should go without saying that it’s dangerously irresponsible to be creating games in which players are encouraged and even required to perform violence against women in order to “save them”.

Even though most of the games we’re talking about don’t explicitly condone violence against women, nevertheless they trivialize and exploit female suffering as a way to ratchet up the emotional or sexual stakes for the player.

Despite these troubling implications, game creators aren’t necessarily all sitting around twirling their nefarious looking mustaches while consciously trying to figure out how to best misrepresent women as part of some grand conspiracy.

Most probably just haven’t given much thought to the underlying messages their games are sending and in many cases developers have backed themselves into a corner with their own game mechanics.  When violence is the primary gameplay mechanic and therefore the primary way that the player engages with the game-world it severely limits the options for problem solving. The player is then forced to use violence to deal with almost all situations because its the only meaningful mechanic available — even if that means beating up or killing the women they are meant to love or care about.

One of the really insidious things about systemic & institutional sexism is that most often regressive attitudes and harmful gender stereotypes are perpetuated and maintained unintentionally.

I think that she is simply pointing out a fairly obvious fact; that games - time after time - inadvertently create situations where common domestic violence tropes are present, justified by the plot or not. This is a trap of game mechanics and bad writing, not deliberate justification of violence against women, but that doesn't stop it being present and a potential problem.

[Vector]

The highest cause of death for pregnant woman is spousal murder~

Just to add on another statistic.

[Max White]

Ok so I'm not saying that isn't true, I just really want to know where that figure came from. That very well may be the most interesting statistic I have heard all week, I require a source.

[palsch]

Also worth noting that one of the relevant resource links is broken, so I'll just copy that here;

The normalization of violence in heterosexual romantic relationships: Womens’ narratives of love and violence by Julia T. Wood

Essentially it looks at how people use story narratives to justify and understand relationships. In this case women who were victims of domestic violence using fairy tail or dark romance narratives to justify the violence done against them.

Ok so I'm not saying that isn't true, I just really want to know where that figure came from. That very well may be the most interesting statistic I have heard all week, I require a source.

This looks like the most recent report.

[Max White]

See that is annoying because it doesn't tell me the break down of murderers. Are the majority from their spouse or do pregnant women have a higher risk of death from a mugging or angry family? This is a pretty serious topic, and I'm a little intrigued.

[Loud Whispers]

The highest cause of death for pregnant woman is spousal murder~

Just to add on another statistic.

Third highest, with 1/5 of deaths homicide.

[Soadreqm]

The highest cause of death for pregnant woman is spousal murder~

Just to add on another statistic.

That kind of makes sense, since most other causes of death are presumably fairly low for pregnant women. They usually get regular medical checkups, and need to be young enough to get pregnant in the first place. Anyway, I think quoting statistics like that without any context is kind of misleading. :/

Same goes for the numbers Sarkeesian gives. Neither adjusted for population nor compared to other numbers, the only thing they tell us is that sometimes women are assaulted or killed. That violent crime exists. It just feels like an emotional appeal to behold the evils of patriarchy. A beating every nine seconds gives 3504000 beatings per year, or an annual beating rate of 2232 per 100 000 people. I could only find numbers for aggravated assault, so no idea how this compares to men. Three murders by boyfriends, husbands or ex-partners per day gives 1095 murders per year, or a rate of 0.7 per 100 000 people per year, and amounts to a little less than a third of all murdered women. Men are about 3.8 times more likely to get murdered than women.

As for trivialising female suffering, I'm not convinced that is happening, either. Kind of the opposite, actually. Female suffering is put on a pedestal as a whole different kind of suffering. After slaughtering hundreds of nameless monsters and uniformed enemy soldiers, the player is so jaded to fantasy violence in general that to push him out of his comfort zone, the game has to make him hit a girl.

By the way, I got my murder counts from this CDC report based on 2010 data.

[Vector]

Sorry about the statistics.  I've been quoting them bare because I can't frickin' remember where I found them, but it's become clear that that's working for no one but me; so I'll put more effort into finding citations.


Yeah, that's the problem.  You don't beat up female grunts, so when you beat up your girlfriend for her own good, it feels like we're putting violence against women on a pedestal.  It's supposed to be violence against that particular woman that is motivating, but when there's only one of them, it seems like it's violence against all womanhood.

And why do we write it this way?  Because it's not okay to hit a girl or kill a woman when she's an enemy soldier (no one wants to do that, and women can't be soldiers anyway, aren't strong enough to fight back--I think that's the argument), but it is okay to hit or kill a woman if she's emotionally significant enough to you and vulnerable.

[Mephansteras]

Interestingly, that's a facet generally missing from strategy/tactical games. Where you often have sides that have female soldiers in them (both for the player and enemy sides - AI or player) and the violence against women is pretty much ignored entirely since they're just another unit to be commanded or fought.

[Dutchling]

Spoiler: I feel like this is semi-relevant (click to show/hide)

[Neonivek]

Because it's not okay to hit a girl or kill a woman when she's an enemy soldier

That is odd... I've never seen this. I've played a lot of games where you beat up female soldiers or even kill them.

Including one where... the way you defeat them is pretty cruel (What with the pulling their hair until they are off balance... Then smashing them left and right by their hair until they are dead... DANG Battletoads vs. Double Dragon)

[Vector]

Yeah, Neonivek, but I think that's only more recently become widespread.  The numbers on female combatants used to be very disparate in video games, especially in stuff that has a particular focus on killing.

It's still a shock to me playing ME2 when the enemy leader is female (inevitably Asari, because the only gender-dimorphic species where we've knowingly seen women is the Quarians, but whatever) and I hear a lady on the comms.  It's honestly pretty unusual to have women show up in those sorts of things outside of women-only races.