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[Loud Whispers]

They are acted upon hence why they are unrealistic and unhealthy.

How do you get from 'act upon' to unrealistic and unhealthy? It has to be unrealistic and acted upon to be harmful, not the other way around.

It is not an inert ideal but an active ideal.

And what would an inert ideal be?

[Neonivek]

They are acted upon hence why they are unrealistic and unhealthy.

How do you get from 'act upon' to unrealistic and unhealthy? It has to be unrealistic and acted upon to be harmful, not the other way around.

It is not an inert ideal but an active ideal.

And what would an inert ideal be?

Yes

[Loud Whispers]

Well it that case it seems we have no free will, we are slaves to yes... Yes?

[Reelya]

Last I checked it's more societal than anything Soad, yeah (which isn't to say there's no other influences, but that's the big one). Exactly what parts of the developmental process we start picking up on stuff like that I can't recall if I ever picked up, though.

You can see some pretty easy examples along those lines going backwards, though, checking what was considered highly attractive figures during times of plenty and paucity (weighty figures tend to be more attractive in low-food societies and vice versa... stuff like that). Basically the majority of what you consider attractive is, well, learned preference. Insofar as I'm aware, anyway, but it holds up pretty consistently when I bother paying attention to it.

Not just in specific societies, but in our own society, whenever there's an economic downturn, "weighty" figures become more sexually attractive. But it seems to be gender-specific. Only works if the target of gaze is female. And this steers completely in the face of prevailing marketing towards skinny figures, which I'd argue hasn't improved one jot during the current downturn.

Here's some research: stressed me are attracted to larger women. This explains everything, and quite plausibly a biological reaction, with indirect feedback from the environment. And this isn't some long-term social programming. This effect can be caused in the immediate short-term, by putting male test-subjects under high stress in a laboratory setting, then getting them to assess model's attractiveness.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9461799/Stressed-men-prefer-larger-women.html

Researchers from Westminster University split 80 volunteers into two groups, with half undertaking a series of stressful activities such as mock job interviews and mental arithmetic tests to make them feel tense.

Both groups were then shown pictures of a range of different female body shapes ranging from emaciated to obese, and asked to rate them in terms of how attractive they were.

The results showed that men in the stressed group rated their "ideal" figure as significantly larger than those in the control group.

While both groups gave broadly similar ratings to slimmer women, the stressed men were also much more likely than men in the control group to find women who were of normal weight or overweight attractive.

Dr Viren Swami and Dr Martin Tovee wrote in the PLoS ONE journal: "While there was no significant difference in the lower end of the range, the [stressed] group appear to have shifted the maximum cut-off for attractive bodies at higher BMIs (body mass indices)."

That could easily be a biologically programmed imperative. e.g. do people really "rationally" decide on optimum mates? Mating with a fat lady during a famine had enormous biological survival potential, yet I doubt people are making this as a rational judgement. Also, I've seen no research that says women are more attracted to fat men during recessions. Which makes sense, as an over-eating male is a liability during a famine, not a bonus.

To the idea that sexual attraction itself is a social construct, i just say "pfft" to such absolutist theories. The theory makes no scientific sense whatsoever - considering that we are descended from animals, we are still animals, and all the things people are predominantly attracted to aid in the biological survival, or are indicators of sexual maturity. If there's one thing that can be clearly said to have an explanation in the realm of evolutionary psychology (regardless of how the specifics work out), it's sexual attraction. Any other species, if you were to say sexual attraction was a social construct, you'd be laughed out of town. Just because it's politically correct doesn't make it scientifically correct for our species. We should apply the same rigor and objectivity to studying our own species that we do to others, without sociopolitical baggage coloring our findings.

[Neonivek]

Well it that case it seems we have no free will, we are slaves to yes... Yes?

No, it is just that there was a circle made in the argument. By saying yes I close the circle and create a circular argument... but with Loud Whisper's own words.

[Loud Whispers]

Well it that case it seems we have no free will, we are slaves to yes... Yes?

No, it is just that there was a circle made in the argument. By saying yes I close the circle and create a circular argument... but with Loud Whisper's own words.

But there is no end to a circle's sole line.

[EnigmaticHat]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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_genders

Basically, 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.

The whole "death and rape threats" thing was poorly (ok, not) thought out and explained, but I wasn't comparing anyone in this thread to that.  Or anyone to that.  What I didn't say properly but was on my head, was that the reaction to Anita reveals a problem.  I believe the criticism to her is overblown for what her kickstarter and youtube video ultimately are.  To me this indicates is that A video game consumers are more sexist than people would care to admit and B people find this shit way too normal.  What I was trying to say was "that those people care so much reveals a problem", but I can see how you got to Godwin.

It's not about making heavy duty shooters female friendly, its changing things so that those games that DO have women portray them properly*, or at least not awfully.  As far as I'm aware, CoD doesn't even have female characters.  It doesn't have a significant female audience.  There are no women to objectify in CoD, and their absence is largely justified by the subject matter.  It is basically irrelevant to the conversation, except to say that male characters in heavy-duty shooters are not female fanservice.  They are non-sexual male fanservice.  Thus it is ridiculous to point at them and say that men and women are equally objectified.

I don't think you understand what I'm getting at here with the conversation about smut.  All smut implicitly gets a pass, within reason, to be stupid or even offensive because its about appealing to sexuality and nothing else.  I wouldn't fault male-focused internet porn for having cardboard female characters.  Thus I wouldn't fault a romance novel that portrayed a man in a similar way.  On top of that, there's an understanding the smut tends to be low quality in certain respects, in the same way that say horror isn't exactly known for its deep characterization.  Borderline nonexistent characterization is a genre convention for most smut, one that makes sense.

Video games are not primarily smut, and thus do not get that pass.  As such, comparing the two is meaningless.  Part of the reason smut gets that pass is that no one is going to watch "hot lesbian make-out action" who isn't into girl on girl**.  Women aren't going to watch that shit, so it doesn't need to clean up its act.  Videogames, at their most basic, have the largely gender neutral appeal of gameplay.  Designers should expect at least some women to play the game, and thus there is a reasonable expectation that they be presentable to a female audience.  Because of all this, I think its ridiculous that romance novels be part of this conversation.  If I linked you to "Two Girls One Cup" as an example of how women are objectified, you would similarly dismiss my argument.  Yes, I know, that goes way further on the offensiveness than romance novels, but its the same concept but less extreme.

Also, no, its not about creating diversity or whatever.  In general media, bad female characters are bad female characters are bad female characters.  Regardless of whether the majority of the expected audience is male or not.  The day a significant portion of video games start handling female characters properly, is the day everyone starts calling the videogames that don't on their shit.  The only reason people don't notice how bad they sometimes are is because its currently normal.

*which means a whole host of things, many I've already mentioned in the previous walls.  I could elaborate if you want.

**I'm not talking about lesbian porn, but transparently male focused porn involving two women.

[Frumple]

evolutionary psychology

makes no scientific sense whatsoever

Unless there's been recent changes in the field that turned it into something besides unmitigated just-so bullshit, anyway Which, hey, maybe. It's been a couple years. State of the study was so mindbogglingly terrible last time I looked into it I haven't bothered checking in occasionally. Pretty stories, no science. But if that link is representative...

Beyond that, I wouldn't say that there's no biological aspects involved... but it's pretty clear that if there are, they're highly conditional based on environment (i.e. society/learned behavior, in this case). Chicken, egg, etc. I mean, beyond the incubation aspect necessary for hatching but whatev'. There's also plenty of attraction factors (whatever the more formal term for that is, hum) that are/have been pretty completely divorced from biological aid/sexual maturity stuff (ankles, why the ankles, what is this madness). But evo psych definitely isn't where I'd be looking for answers, hum. Mostly because I wouldn't be looking there for anything but a good yarn, but still. Maybe see if neuropsych (or whatever it's evolved into while I wasn't paying attention) manages to pull anything up at some point.

[Reelya]

evolutionary psychology

makes no scientific sense whatsoever

Unless there's been recent changes in the field that turned it into something besides unmitigated just-so bullshit, anyway Which, hey, maybe. It's been a couple years. State of the study was so mindbogglingly terrible last time I looked into it I haven't bothered checking in occasionally. Pretty stories, no science. But if that link is representative...

Well, i think some things can be clearly said to be evolutionary even if we don't know the specific mechanism. To state otherwise - that a gap in knowledge means it must be non-biological / non-evolutionary, is basically to make the same general argument of the "God of the gaps" - that is, any gap in science isn't science - it's caused by God. Or in this case, society.

I'd actually argue that almost all of evolution theory is "pretty stories, no science". We have an outcome, and we infer from evidence what happened. Ev Psy is not much different, except psychology doesn't leave fossils.

[Loud Whispers]

The whole "death and rape threats" thing was poorly (ok, not) thought out and explained, but I wasn't comparing anyone in this thread to that.  Or anyone to that.  What I didn't say properly but was on my head, was that the reaction to Anita reveals a problem.
  I believe the criticism to her is overblown for what her kickstarter and youtube video ultimately are.  To me this indicates is that A video game consumers are more sexist than people would care to admit and B people find this shit way too normal.

1. Anita used trolls as a straw man representation of everyone who buys games. Halo alone was sold to over 45 million people in its prime om one year, and that's just one game. What could come about such misrepresentation I wonder... Ironic isn't it?
2. It's not a reaction to her. It's their behaviour on the internet, universal to all.
3. She deliberately fanned the trolls for media attention, this is known, and we also know she did this for money.
The last point honestly wouldn't matter... If she actually made something good out of it.

It's not about making heavy duty shooters female friendly, its changing things so that those games that DO have women portray them properly*, or at least not awfully.  As far as I'm aware, CoD doesn't even have female characters.  It doesn't have a significant female audience.  There are no women to objectify in CoD, and their absence is largely justified by the subject matter.  It is basically irrelevant to the conversation, except to say that male characters in heavy-duty shooters are not female fanservice.  They are non-sexual male fanservice.  Thus it is ridiculous to point at them and say that men and women are equally objectified.

Go buy the games that interest you. Seriously. All you're doing is repeating the same points over and over again without ever getting close to justifying them.

Video games are not primarily smut, and thus do not get that pass.

Why? We have had examples where that is literally the case, and in all others, why not?

  As such, comparing the two is meaningless.  Part of the reason smut gets that pass is that no one is going to watch "hot lesbian make-out action" who isn't into girl on girl**.  Women aren't going to watch that shit, so it doesn't need to clean up its act.  Videogames, at their most basic, have the largely gender neutral appeal of gameplay.
  Designers should expect at least some women to play the game, and thus there is a reasonable expectation that they be presentable to a female audience.

...
Screw audience appeal. Audience appeal to the LCD is the cancer that is killing the game industry. Spreading it around isn't 'fixing it.' If the issue is that too many studios refuse to expand into new ideas, making sure characters are only represented in the way you wish is just going to damage things even more. Just look at the Hollywood backlash. All male casts for movies like At the Mountains of Madness are torn apart whereas cookie-cut heroines are freaking everywhere.

Yet this is still not a matter of gender, as it never has been.

  Because of all this, I think its ridiculous that romance novels be part of this conversation.  If I linked you to "Two Girls One Cup" as an example of how women are objectified, you would similarly dismiss my argument.

The argument was not 'you also.' It was that the idea of what women find makes a woman sexy is also what men find makes a woman sexy, and vice versa.

[Frumple]

I'd actually argue that almost all of evolution theory is "pretty stories, no science". We have an outcome, and we infer from evidence what happened. Ev Psy is not much different, except psychology doesn't leave fossils.

... most modern evolution science (especially re: the mechanisms behind it) is based a fair bit (primarily? I couldn't say by the numbers, hum.) on studies done with species that have very short lifetimes, observing what happens over many (dozens, sometimes hundreds, probably sometimes even more) generations. We have both starting point and ending point, and have observed what's happened in the interim. From that we project what should happen if the system we create based on those observations holds true for slower breeding species or data we've managed to pick up from preserved samples (and when it does or doesn't, adjust appropriately.). So, ah. No. Evo psych is quite different. From methodology on up.

And no, it's not a statement that something is non-biological, (though it may be making a statement that it's non-evolutionary. Some stuff operates on a time scale evolutionary forces or influences don't quite account for, iirc. There's some interesting stuff regarding that, I do believe.) it's a statement that we don't know what the bloody mechanism is yet. At which point science shuts the blazes up and gets to work figuring that out, generally. Evopsych jumps the gun by making up stuff in an attempt to fill a gap (which hey, if you want a God of the Gaps equivalent...), generally the largely-irrelevant historical record, and then attempting to project outwards from their bullshit (which, miracles of miracles, tends to not work out very well.). The most "societal" says is that environmental factors/learned behaviors seem to play more of factor into it than anything cross-cultural (i.e. what would normally be called biological. Yes, we're aware that we're chemical sacks.).

At least, unless evo psych's seriously cleaned up their act in the last few years. Which I'm wouldn't preclude as a possibility, ha.

[Dutchling]

I'd actually argue that almost all of evolution theory is "pretty stories, no science". We have an outcome, and we infer from evidence what happened. Ev Psy is not much different, except psychology doesn't leave fossils.

Maybe you should try and do a little bit of research yourself about the subject before you embarrass yourself next time?

[Reelya]

It's not about making heavy duty shooters female friendly, its changing things so that those games that DO have women portray them properly*, or at least not awfully.  As far as I'm aware, CoD doesn't even have female characters.  It doesn't have a significant female audience.  There are no women to objectify in CoD, and their absence is largely justified by the subject matter.  It is basically irrelevant to the conversation, except to say that male characters in heavy-duty shooters are not female fanservice.  They are non-sexual male fanservice.  Thus it is ridiculous to point at them and say that men and women are equally objectified.

Stop strawmanning me, i never made that specifc connection at all, or said "men and women are equally objectified" in response to any line of argument. It's really personally offensive to have concepts ascribed to me which i never said to try and discredit me, when you haven't followed my line of reason whatsover. Otherwise, you'd reply to what i actually said, rather than a strawman i never said, especially not in relation to CoD.

What i did say that was vaguely similar was that the body-proportions in men in the female-targeted fan-service was similar to the body proportions in the male-targeted games. So the body-proportions in themself couldn't be used to say that one sex was objectified whilst another was not. This in no way magically leaps to "men and women are equally objectified", or that other forms of objectification can't occur, which I did actually state already in the previous posts.

---

Of course its ridiculous to "point at [CoD] and say that men and women are equally objectified" because, it's not something I said. Therefore, your only response is a blatant strawman argument. What I said was that no matter how much you morphed CoD, you wouldn't make a gender-neutral game. Or, at least it'd be so unrecognizable that you might as well have left it alone and made different games, hence diversity, rather than forcing everything into a gender-neutral palette. You comprehend? This argument has nothing to do with objectification of either sex.

What that was in response to is some lines of argument which say all games must become gender neutral. As in, not just fixing representation in some games, but ensuring every single game becomes "female-friendly". I guess to the point that every existing game has 50% female players. But of course, this reasoning is only ever applied to games guys like. You might not be calling for this. But some other people are. And that's who it was in response to. Wikipedia's relevant article even mention this debate within the industry, so it's a real debate that's going on:

Future outlook

In addressing the future of the medium, many researchers have argued for the improvement of the gaming industry to appeal to a more general gender-neutral audience and others have suggested that the appeal should be directed to females in particular. Producers and designers are split about how best to capture the female market with some pushing for a gender-neutral market and others pushing for a future with male-targeted games as well as female-targeted games.

So you see, there's a real, existing, division of opinion about whether to go for a future where different games serve different demographics, or whether to force everything into a "gender neutral" model. Some are actually calling the existence of "games that guys like" a part of the problem itself, even if they can't define what is offensive about a particular title, which is why I mentioned Call Of Duty. I guess, for these specific people, "it's got guys in it" is problem enough. My argument, is that in trying to make the entire industry fit a "gender neutral" mode of gameplay, it will end up in the long-run reducing overall diversity of titles, as would trying to enforce a "G rating" only game system to make things "age neutral". Hence, such an outcome would necessitate a reduction in overall industry sales.

[Rolan7]

The whole "death and rape threats" thing was poorly (ok, not) thought out and explained, but I wasn't comparing anyone in this thread to that.  Or anyone to that.  What I didn't say properly but was on my head, was that the reaction to Anita reveals a problem.
  I believe the criticism to her is overblown for what her kickstarter and youtube video ultimately are.  To me this indicates is that A video game consumers are more sexist than people would care to admit and B people find this shit way too normal.

1. Anita used trolls as a straw man representation of everyone who buys games. Halo alone was sold to over 45 million people in its prime om one year, and that's just one game. What could come about such misrepresentation I wonder... Ironic isn't it?
2. It's not a reaction to her. It's their behaviour on the internet, universal to all.
3. She deliberately fanned the trolls for media attention, this is known, and we also know she did this for money.
The last point honestly wouldn't matter... If she actually made something good out of it.

1: Talk about misrepresentation.  She didn't say all gamers were trolls, and she didn't say all Halo players were trolls.  Am I wrong, or are you using specificness to back up a bullshit implication?  There is a world of difference between "Sexism is a problem in video game culture" and "All Halo players are sexist".
2: Have they sent YOU rape threats and made face-smashing flash games of YOUR image?  Have they done so to *most* of the thousands of people more popular than her?  No, they targeted her because her views disturb them.
3: "This is known" to you, maybe.  And even if it's true, fair fucking game!  They're *trolls*.  Their disgusting efforts did cause a backlash in favor of Anita, and probably did help her raise money.  That's not her fault, that's terrorism backfiring.  If she helped it backfire, great.

It's not about making heavy duty shooters female friendly, its changing things so that those games that DO have women portray them properly*, or at least not awfully.  As far as I'm aware, CoD doesn't even have female characters.  It doesn't have a significant female audience.  There are no women to objectify in CoD, and their absence is largely justified by the subject matter.  It is basically irrelevant to the conversation, except to say that male characters in heavy-duty shooters are not female fanservice.  They are non-sexual male fanservice.  Thus it is ridiculous to point at them and say that men and women are equally objectified.

Go buy the games that interest you. Seriously. All you're doing is repeating the same points over and over again without ever getting close to justifying them.

So because you get to play as a woman for one half of one of the three campaigns in a 2004 CONSOLE-ONLY game, we aren't allowed to say there's a lack of meaningful female PCs in video games?
Your position could be completely true and your contribution would still be completely irrelevant!  I could argue your position so much better!  Maybe you keep seeing the same arguments because you're completely incapable of refuting them!

Video games are not primarily smut, and thus do not get that pass.

Why? We have had examples where that is literally the case, and in all others, why not?

Yes, there are cases where video games are literally smut.  Thanks Captain Irrelevant.  This is true of books, movies, comics, sculpture, and every other art form.  To answer your question: Some video games should not be smut for the same reasons not all books, movies, comics, and sculptures should be smut.

  Because of all this, I think its ridiculous that romance novels be part of this conversation.  If I linked you to "Two Girls One Cup" as an example of how women are objectified, you would similarly dismiss my argument.

The argument was not 'you also.' It was that the idea of what women find makes a woman sexy is also what men find makes a woman sexy, and vice versa.

But romance novels contain sensitive men with flowing hair who spend all their time paying attention to the main character, a woman.  Most male characters in video games are musclebound, emotionless, and focused on kicking ass.  The only real similarity is that they're muscular on the cover, but as someone else said, the publishers make the cover art - so it's more based on what men find sexy.

So no, what men find makes a man sexy is not what women find makes a man sexy.

[Reelya]

I'd actually argue that almost all of evolution theory is "pretty stories, no science". We have an outcome, and we infer from evidence what happened. Ev Psy is not much different, except psychology doesn't leave fossils.

Maybe you should try and do a little bit of research yourself about the subject before you embarrass yourself next time?

And Sociology is better, exactly how??

I bet if I came in here spouting about Carl Yung's "Collective Unconscious" 90% of people would "nod sagely", but that's on way shakier ground than any E.P.