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[Neonivek]

Not so weird.  Consider the few self-labelled "feminists" who think women should have all the power.  Is it useful to consider that a legitimate part of the feminist movement?  No, it discredits the movement, and dilutes the message - contradicts, really.  Legitimate feminists don't owe anything to people who try to piggy-back unrelated or absurd ideas on the movement's success.

Well if we go back far enough you could probably consider people who believe that women achieve equality when they achieve their different yet equal status quo so to speak.

Which I guess I am not making it clear enough (after all "Equal yet different" can be good)... I mean more like "Women shouldn't work because their ability to raise a family is their true calling" and stuff like that.

The reason I don't really want to go TOO far down the "illegitimate feminism" hole is because... well... apparently, as I had the displeasure to find out, the different factions (for lack of a better word) of feminism are kind of at odds with each other. I do not want to see Liberal Feminists and Marxist Feminists start brawling in this thread... I already seen 2nd and 3rd waves duking it out and it was ugly.

That's still definably "feminism", though. As in, furthering women's rights, even if it furthers them beyond equality.

It is part of the whole "feminism is a loaded term" thing since STRICTLY by definition being a female supremacist means you are one of the two opposites of feminist.

[Phmcw]

That's still definably "feminism", though. As in, furthering women's rights, even if it furthers them beyond equality.

I was going to say something among the lines of "the original aim of feminism is equality", but then I'd talk about an ideology as monolithic and that's bad. So "a lot of peoples suport feminism as the pursuit of equalit between men and women". Some are for equality of right, and some want to abolish gender-roles, other want to enable peoples that don't want to follow gender roles to do so. There are also female supremacists, peoples that want revenge against "Straight able bodied white males",....

As usual you can only define those groups to an extend.

[Bauglir]

Look, that claim was so obviously horse shit hyperbole that I stopped myself from replying to it the first time. But, seriously, if we ARE going to talk about it, this guy fucked it up for an entire country. Might not've done any damage to feminism's reputation, but I'd say that by my understanding of how things go over there there's been more damage done to the actual pursuit of equality than by all the critical-thoughtless videos posted online in history.

[Neonivek]

And my statement was mostly a joke that frankly... Its pretty tough to really pinpoint anyone who hurt "legitimate" feminism's reputation at all. So analyzing the clear exaggeration as "fact" was mostly a joke because it could actually work.

And sure Bauglir we could probably list a lot of people who damaged the goal of feminism. Yet that is sort of a separate category.

I'd say that by my understanding of how things go over there there's been more damage done to the actual pursuit of equality than by all the critical-thoughtless videos posted online in history.

Well yeah of course.

The most recent blow to feminism I can think of in western countries would possibly be... Child protective coddling if my teacher is to be believed. Yet that blow was dealt in the 1980s-present (actually I don't know when the start was... I KNOW it was after WW2 and unlike most it wasn't the 1950s)

[SomeStupidGuy]

Woooow, k33n's post was a lot closer to what I was really worried I'd see when I started checking this thread.
So uh, k33n... thanks for meeting my expectations, I guess?

[Graknorke]

Woooow, k33n's post was a lot closer to what I was really worried I'd see when I started checking this thread.
So uh, k33n... thanks for meeting my expectations, I guess?

Wrong thread?

[Cheeetar]

Woooow, k33n's post was a lot closer to what I was really worried I'd see when I started checking this thread.
So uh, k33n... thanks for meeting my expectations, I guess?

Wrong thread?

Doesn't look to be AFAIK.

[Reelya]

That was my point, yeah.  They decided that including some female models would cost more than it would increase sales.  It's just that two of their reasons were ridiculous fabrications, because the truth (that including women isn't worth some extra textures, even as a paid DLC or something) reveals how male-dominated they know the market to be.

The companies aren't *evil*, they're just serving a sexist market.

I'd argue "gendered market" is more apt. If 95% of players of a specific game are of a specific gender and want to play a character of their same gender, that isn't proof that the audience or the game are "sexist". You can have targeted media, that doesn't mean it's biased against people who aren't the intended audience. I mean, I hate professional wrestling, but I don't for a minute think that professional wrestling games are "biased" against me, they're just not my interest and I wouldn't expect them to change to cater to people who don't like that stuff, it would just defeat the purpose of serving their target audience.

[Rolan7]

and want to play a character of their same gender

Nothing would be stopping players from doing that, of course.  There would just be other options, unless they specifically didn't want to play against women teams (which could be a toggle).  Players actually avoiding a game for offering female characters as an option would certainly be sexist of them.  Players being utterly disinterested in the female half of their sport is... arguably so.  It's sexist in the passive, "Everyone knows women's basketball is a joke" sort of way.  Not malicious or misogynistic, just a self-perpetuating group opinion.

It can cost significant resources to add models for both genders, I guess.  I was arguing that it's a relatively tiny cost, and I think I'm right about that, but I'm not backing that claim up very well.  My argument was not that

[Reelya]

Can you argue the same thing about e.g. Mirror's Edge? Is it and it's fans inherently sexist against men because there's no male option?

Players actually avoiding a game for offering female characters as an option would certainly be sexist of them. 

That sounds like a real grasp at straws there. Is it that common to say e.g. "I'll never play Mass Effect because there's the option of playing FemShep". Not to my knowledge, they just played MaleShep and ignored the other choice.

Mostly, the single-gender games don't offer you a "choice" at all - there is only one main character and the entire story is built around that character. Its majority rule in those situations - if 51% of your potential audience respond better to making the character male, then you make the character male. Adding options to a game that isn't built to support options has more costs than just throwing in a new model or skin, you have to create whole new dialogue and situations to support it. Female Kratos for example, you'd need to do more than just make a new skin, you need to create a whole load of extra dialogue to support the option. Plus, any time there are a lot of animations / movements for the main character, you'd need to recreate and test all of those separately for a new model.

"Team" games and multiplayer games are a lot different to games where there's only one character and it's built around a single-player narrative. Those multiplayer and team-focused games make up a lot of the games in the 50% of games that offer choice of protagonist / gender.

[Rolan7]

Can you argue the same thing about e.g. Mirror's Edge? Is it and it's fans inherently sexist against men because there's no male option?

No, because it's hard to add a multi-gender option to most games.  Obviously.

You're also making a huge leap there.  The fans aren't sexist for liking a game with no females.  They're (marginally) sexist because they don't have enough interest for the companies to justify expanding the roster with existing, female, people.  Maybe they'd even be upset if the roster was expanded?

Again, this isn't "raaargh women!" sexism.  It's just disinterest in women being in their games.  Even though women do exist in their sports.

That sounds like a real grasp at straws there. Is it that common to say e.g. "I'll never play Mass Effect because there's the option of playing FemShep". Not to my knowledge, they just played MaleShep and ignored the other choice.

I never said it was...  I was speaking hypothetically, or at best about a specific genre of games (sports games) where something like that MAY be a factor.

[DJ]

Publishers generally need to pay to put real sports teams into games. If it doesn't increase the profits more than it costs, it won't get done.

[Rolan7]

Definitely.  Which is why the fans are to "blame", not the company (though the company did mildly lie about the reasons, in my opinion).  There wasn't interest among sports game fans.  Which, to be honest, is exactly what I'd expect from the sports fans in my own family.  Yes, it's sexist, in a "Taking some man time away from the women-folk" way.  Not malicious, not very problematic, but very real.

[Neonivek]

Sure... because they suck. Which is really what it just boils down to.

There is a reason why almost 50% of all professional sports fans are women... rather then it being that each gender prefers their engendered sports team.

I am not quite sure why "not liking an inferior product" makes someone even slightly sexist.

[Rolan7]

Really?  What makes female sports teams less entertaining to watch than male ones?  I assumed it was just momentum.

I don't really see the entertainment value in most sports anyway, though.  Not saying it isn't there (that would be absurd) but I can't evaluate women's basketball VS men's basketball because both are uninteresting to me.