You know Loud Whispers, you post everywhere and I lurk everywhere and I generally find your posts to be entertaining or insightful. But in this one thread the way you're arguing is bothering me.
First of all, you used romance covers as an example. That still bothers me. First of all, again, its smut. But not even that. Women are more objectified (and typically written worse) than men, not just in media at large*, but in books, already a negligible share of the entertainment industry. You took the one portion of an already small medium in which the normal objectification is reversed, and used that to argue that women and men are objectified equally. Its a dishonest debating strategy because it picks an exception and an extreme and presents it as the norm.
That's not even the argument - it's not saying "women and men are objectified equally", so debunking that is debunking a strawman. It's pointing out that the
form of objectification is the same. The claim made is that the physical form of males, the "conan" archetype is purely a male power fantasy, and not objectified at all in the sense that females are. What the romance novel covers show, is that the
physique of males objectified in the romance novels (which are a segment marketed directly to women, and often written and approved by women) is almost identical to the physique we are told is the male power-fantasy. This shows that that body-form for males is in reality a common female fantasy, which is the thing that was dismissed with the "power fantasy" theory. So, if you're going to debate it, debate that actual point. Also the "it is smut" line, is
not an argument, it's an
appeal to emotion.
Who really *honestly* cares about that though? Must we know strive to eliminate all that is deemed 'offensive' by any one persons?
This is literally just dismissing the people who make the argument without acknowledging the argument. People aren't saying "change video games because I don't like them." They're saying "change video games because they have problems".
As to who cares: feminists, female gamers, all the people who sent death and rape threats to Anita.
Basically it's a Godwin right there - labeling anyone who disagrees with your point of view as "death and rape threat" person.And you have the nerve to talk about how "the way you're arguing is bothering me"!
We don't need to change video games. We need to create alternative games. Reducing everything to "gender neutral" forms will only SHRINK the overall market, not grow it. For the sheer sake that many titles we have now couldn't exist in that Brave New World. It's the same as forcing everything to have a G rating so as to enforce "age-neutral gaming". You can see, while
individual titles may have a larger potential demographic if you did that, the overall industry sales would decline. But you could make the
exact same type of arguments against anyone who opposed your G-rated-only scheme, as are made against people who defend "guy games". Any, a solution which reduces total sales volume won't ever get off the ground.
e.g. how would gender-neutral Call Of Duty work? Diversity is the key, not forcing everything to conform to a set of guidelines. The research shows that that a large number women
choose to play a different type of game to the average guy. Now, should we "masculinize" the games women like and "feminize" the games that men like? Why only change one segment out of existence, if the goal is gender-
neutral games?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Differences_between_the_gendersBasically, it sounds like no matter how much you try and make heavy-duty shooters female-friendly they're still going to have a larger number of male fans. Should we turn every single shooter into an RPG with romance options to try and bring in more ladies? What about people who just wanted a shooter then? This is the wall I think will still be faced no matter how much we "sanitize" the existing genres.