Recently, a friend sent me this image. It had been passed on by her boyfriend; it had reminded him of me. One might expect that connection to fill me with satisfaction, that I, a game designer and writer, am instantly associated with forward thinking and feminist ideals. Instead, I felt humiliated.
This is a great article that does a good job of explaining exactly why arguments excusing ”sexy armor” are invalid and altogether ridiculous.
This awesome article not only thoroughly explains why there’s no way to logically justify sexualization of female characters in video games, but also highlights the struggles that women in the industry go through:
The thing is, in this industry, you don’t want to be “that girl.” The world has communicated very thoroughly, with Anita Sarkeesian’s death threats, with so many comments on Kotaku, and with comments in the hallways of the workplace and the podiums of conventions, that being “that girl” is bad. Real bad. Potentially end of career bad.
But it’s not just dangerous for potential ramifications on career trajectory. There’s also a social component of how “that girl” is insufferable, annoying, and should be punishable by shaming.
Many female game designers, anonymously and publicly alike, confess how they have to deal with sexist standards of the industry, just so they can keep their jobs. It’s a legit problem that men, especially the ones chanting “sex sells!” or “it’s intended for male gamers!”, are either blissfully unaware of or willfully ignorant (my bets are on the latter option, though).
Please guys, read the whole thing.
~Ozzie
People are often quick to dismiss arguments against the conventional wisdom that “sex sells” as “politically correct” idealism. But one of the most compelling argument against the slogan comes from the other side of the political spectrum.
David Ogilvy was one of, if not The great iconic Ad Men of the 1960’s. Unsurprisingly he was deeply invested in the idea of gender roles and claimed “I am less offended by obscenity than by tasteless typography, banal photographs, clumsy copy, and cheap jingles”. He also (literally) wrote the book on how to create effective advertising and measure the effectiveness of your advertising.
He was, amazingly, admantly against introducing sex to sell any product that wasn’t inherently sexual in itself for one simple reason:
All his research and experience in advertising told him it would not work.
What did Ogilvy very sincerely believed was the first step in creating effective advertising an massive sales? To create a high quality product.
That way all that was required was to sincerely show the customers why it was a great product and the rest would take care of itself.
So when developers distort their products (comics, books, movies, video games, etc) by cramming sexualised imagery into them with the mentality of “sex sells” so “more sex will sell even more” they are actually sabotaging their product’s reception, reputation, sales and it’s marketing campaigns.
At least according to an old white man from the 1960s who always assumed women should be house wives… and also happened to be one of the greatest thinkers in advertising.
Bringing it back particularly because it mentions how it is a professional suicide
for women in the industry to call out sexism in game design and narrative. And, in light Jessica Price’s of ArenaNet firing, we learned how even talking back to a male gamer community member can lead to the same.
Sadly, we still operate firmly in the reality where “sex” (or rather: erosion of female self-esteem) is considered a marketing booster and women speaking out for themselves in any way get shoved aside, so we don’t have to have the uncomfortable conversation that maybe they have a point.
~Ozzie
Couldn’t help but make this joke out of the accompanying image from the Jessica Price article linked above.
Don’t know if the writer did it on purpose or not, but thanks!
Right Wing Men: women can’t be trusted with political power because they change their minds and are overly emotional and weak
Left Wing Men: of course women should have political power! It’s just that this particular woman has changed her mind on some issues and even though I agree with her position now it shows that she lacks strong principles, so I don’t trust her. I also don’t trust this other woman for similar reasons. And this other one. And
y’know, the more I think about it, the more I feel that the real reason so many men object to women writing self-indulgently awesome, so-called “Mary Sue” characters is because deep down, they think that women ought to fantasise about being worthy of a powerful, exceptional, amazing man, and not about being powerful, exceptional, amazing themselves, so that even when those female characters do end up with spectacular dudes, they literally cannot fathom it happening in a context where the relationship is of equal or lesser narrative importance than the woman’s awesomeness, or where the guy is presented as being worthy of her, instead of the other way around
because there’s literally so much media where the beautiful, disinterested woman has to eat crow and realise she was wrong, that the boring everyman who secretly pines for her really is someone she wants to be worthy of, and even when the story frames it as “guy proves his worth to girl”, it’s never in terms of acknowledging what she wants and adapting his behaviour or approach to fit her desires – it’s always about some random event or lightbulb moment allowing her to realise that he was awesome all along, and him being gracious enough to forgive her for not realising it sooner
but stories where the woman is extraordinary from the outset, and knows it, and the guy has to show himself to be genuinely attentive and exceptional in order to earn her affections, only those affections were never guaranteed because we’re in her perspective and she doesn’t think of herself as the hero’s reward because she’s the hero? some dudes just cannot fucking handle it, and so they say it’s a bad concept from the outset because that’s easier than admitting that they don’t want to identify with an awesome male character if the female characters are still allowed to express preferences beyond him.
“Samantha, I noticed that your “fun-o-meter’ is stuck in the middle. Why is that?
“Well the robots are cool, but why aren’t there any girls?”
“Why couldn’t the long lost brother be a long lost sister?“
“And how are all their disparate technologies able to connect to each other?”
“Doesn’t like boys!”
“Doesn’t understand robots!”
“That’s”
“That’s not what I said!”
Damn.
Cartoon Network is getting too damn real
That’s pretty goddamn ironic from a network which cancelled a superhero show because it was watched by too many girls, due to belief that it’s impossible to market superhero merch to girls
I’m fairly sure that’s the joke.
(Also the network doesn’t make the show – people may not realize that Cartoon Network isn’t a giant conglomerate cartoon factory and actually consists of tens of thousands of individual creators, many of whom spend a significant portion of their day wondering what can we sneak past Cartoon Network?)
At least that’s what I’m like when I write for them. Zing!!
I think one of my least favorite types of responses to people speaking up on sexual harassment and sexual assault is are articles like “in wake of weinstein, men wonder if hugging women still ok”, and comments like “this is why men don’t pursue women anymore”, “i don’t wanna work with women cause i don’t want a lawsuit”, or “i don’t even look at women anymore cause everything is sexual harassment”. this is a particular brand of rape culture, men acting as if women are overreacting, as if men don’t have the basic social skills to know the difference between wanted and unwanted advances, as if women simply setting boundaries is “cramping their style” and “emasculating” them, as if the rules of respecting women are super confusing, so confusing that they’re supposedly forcing men not to interact with us altogether.
this is an act they’ve been putting on for decades: playing stupid, pretending not to know better and then getting upset when we tell them what “better” is. if that doesn’t show you how emotional and emotionally manipulative they are, i don’t know what does.
“Countless studies have since shown that exposure to pornography desensitizes men to violence against women, often shaping their sexuality in such a way that they become unable to experience arousal without some element of dominance or violence. The evidence has been so damning that, at times, universities have refused to allow further research on the topic. When a study shows detrimental effects that cannot be reversed, ethics boards will often refuse similar studies to go on. This has happened repeatedly with research on the effects of pornography.”
men: *decided women weren’t allowed attend schools, study sciences, or have access to higher education*
men: well if women are so smart then how come there aren’t many contributions from women in history huh
This post means well, but still erases women’s contributions in the same way men have. The truth is that women have made so many contributions to history and science despite men denying them access, but that men have either taken credit for those accomplishments or, when they couldn’t, completely divorced that accomplishment from the woman so that no one remembers them.
In fact, this happens so often that there’s even a name for it. It’s called the Matilda Effect which is defined as “the systematic repression and denial of the contribution of woman scientists in research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues” but which applies to other fields as well and goes doubly for women of color. How about just a few (certainly nowhere near all) women who contributed to science? And this is just science, not even history in the larger sense.
Margaret Hamilton – Lead programmer on the Apollo project, wrote the code to take us to the moon
Hedy Lamarr – actress and inventor of wifi
Annie Jump Cannon – developed first stellar classification system and classified nearly 400,000 stars, more than any other person ever
Lise Meitner – research paved the way for the discovery of nuclear fission, colleagues refused to credit her help, she received no credit while they were given a Nobel prize
Grace Hopper – computer scientist who created the first compiler
Rita Levi-Montalcini – Italian neuroscientist who won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor
Melba Roy Moutan – mathematician who led a team of
mathematicians at NASA, nicknamed ‘Computers’ for their number
processing prowess
Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman – the primary programers of ENIAC, the first general purpose computer
Joyce Jacobson Kaufman – chemist who developed the concept of conformational topology
Vera Rubin – co-authored 114 peer reviewed
papers. She specializes in the study of dark matter and galaxy rotation
rates.
Mary Sherman Morgan – rocket scientist who invented hydyne, a liquid fuel that powered the USA’s Jupiter C-rocket.
Chien-Siung Wu – physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, as
well as experimental radioactive studies. She was the first woman to
become president of the American Physical Society.
Mildred Catherine Rebstock – first person to synthesize the antibiotic chloromycetin.
Ruby Hirose – chemist who conducted vital research about an infant paralysis vaccine.
Hattie Elizabeth Alexander – pediatrician and microbiologist who
developed a remedy for Haemophilus influenzae, and conducted vital
research on antibiotic resistance.
Marie Tharp – mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and provided proof of continental drift.
Mae Jamison – astronaut who holds a degree in chemical engineering
from Stanford University and was the first black woman in space.
Ada Lovelace – mathematician and considered to be the world’s first computer programmer.
Patricia E Bath – ophthalmologist and the inventor of the Laserphaco Probe, which is used to treat cataracts.
Barbara McClintock – won a Nobel prize for her discovery that genes could move in and between chromosomes.
Cecilia Payne – discovered what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is
made of (Henry Norris Russell is usually given
credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the
Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than
Payne—after telling her not to publish).
Yanping Guo – mission design leader and one of the women who made
up 25% of the New Horizons team. She configured the entire mission
trajectory, including Jupiter and Pluto flybys.
Agnodice – went to study medicine in Alexandria to help keep women from dying in childbirth, pretended to be a man when she came back because it was illegal for a woman to be a doctor in Athens, was so much better than her male colleagues they brought her to court and accused her of seducing her patients as an explanation for her popularity but since she was the reason so many of the court had living wives and kids they were shamed into changing the law instead of executing her.
Queen Seondeok of Silla – set up first astronomy tower in Asia
Jocelyn Bell Bernell – discovered first pulsar, Anthony Hewish took credit listiner her as an assistant despite having nothing to do with the discovery, he received a Nobel Prize
Nettie Stevens – discovered that chromosomes determined sex, sent her findings to a colleague for peer review, he published it as his own and named her his technician
Marie Curie – won 2 Nobel prizes and was constantly attacked by her male colleagues and barred from academic organizations because she was a woman, still managed to be better than them
Marie Van Brittan Brown – black woman who co-invented home security surveillance
Vera Rubin – discovered dark matter at Cornell after being rejected from Princeton because she was a woman
I’m too tired to keep going but how about Jane Goodall, Sally Ride, Rosalind Franklin, Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Dorothy Hodgkin, Shirley Ann Jackson, Kalpana Chawla, Maryam Mirzakhani, Flossie Wong-Staal, Alice Ball, Ida Tacke, Ester Lederberg, Mileva Maric?
The wage gap between men and women has been long-standing – with women
on average making 74 cents for every dollar of annual salary made by
men, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data – but research
from by PayPal Canada and consulting firm Barraza and Associates
suggests that this dynamic also applies to those who own small-and-
medium sized businesses as well.
Businesses owned by women generate an average of $68,000 less revenue
than men who run similar businesses, representing a gap of 58 per cent,
according to the online survey of 1,000 Canadian small and medium-sized
businesses between Jan. 26 and Feb. 28.
One barrier to growth for women-owned businesses is access to capital,
the survey suggested. Roughly 53 per cent of women-owned businesses with
an e-commerce component said it was “easy” for their company to get
business credit to grow their business, falling short of the 67 per cent
of men who reported getting loans with ease, the survey found.
The Liberal government has prioritized gender equality and increased
participation in the workforce. Among the many initiatives aimed at this
goal as part of its latest budget, Ottawa has allocated $1.4 billion
over three years from the Business Development Bank in new financing for
female entrepreneurs and $105 million over five years to help the
regional development agencies support women-led businesses.
my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.
CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW
Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons
most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs
one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no you didn’t go to med school and I did and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while
but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.
when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”
and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name
i'll apple your turnover 