Feminism redux - please read first post of thread

[deleted01]

That's absolutely awful, Er Rn. I totally agree with you. We, as women, need to stop blaming ourselves and other women for the treatment they receive from men.

At the risk of this discussion possibly taking over this thread, would a separate YesAllWomen thread be more appropriate?

[protar]

protar,

In line with your comment earlier on "better representation in fiction", I found this gem not long ago (last paragraph, I responded somewhat further down)! Check it out. :lol:

I was just reading through the comments in that thread, yeah. It's that rather crucial difference between a misogynistic setting and a misogynistic text. I mean I'm sure you would agree that Westeros is an incredibly sexist setting but that's why ASOIAF is arguably a very feminist text - it provides an avenue for Martin to explore the issue and find ways to show women in major roles and positions of power despite that.

Kind of sort of related: I was thinking about that distinction between sexist setting and sexist text today about World of Warcraft (which I know you've played and had issues with in the past.) and about how meaningless having "21st century values" in a text can be. There's pretty much no sexism within the setting at all - there's equal gender recruitment in armies, no one bats an eye at women in power - but jesus christ does WoW have some of worst written female characters I've seen. Count the number of times that Blizzard's idea of a "strong female character" is an emotionally unstable zealot who is probably getting told to hush up by the men. It may surprise you to know but I'm pretty much the resident feminist over at MMO-champion at least when the topic comes up.

[Prince Alexander]

I must have conveniently pushed it out of my memory.

Why is this shit happening? And why is it socially acceptable?

It's not socially acceptable. The guys doing it would not talk about it in any kind of intelligent/civilized setting.

Why is it happening - that's what we need to figure out and resolve.

[1918me]

I was just reading through the comments in that thread, yeah. It's that rather crucial difference between a misogynistic setting and a misogynistic text. I mean I'm sure you would agree that Westeros is an incredibly sexist setting but that's why ASOIAF is arguably a very feminist text - it provides an avenue for Martin to explore the issue and find ways to show women in major roles and positions of power despite that.

Kind of sort of related: I was thinking about that distinction between sexist setting and sexist text today about World of Warcraft (which I know you've played and had issues with in the past.) and about how meaningless having "21st century values" in a text can be. There's pretty much no sexism within the setting at all - there's equal gender recruitment in armies, no one bats an eye at women in power - but jesus christ does WoW have some of worst written female characters I've seen. Count the number of times that Blizzard's idea of a "strong female character" is an emotionally unstable zealot who is probably getting told to hush up by the men. It may surprise you to know but I'm pretty much the resident feminist over at MMO-champion at least when the topic comes up.

Yeah, although I don't play them much anymore, MMOs don't seem to be shining bastions of gender equality. Even without taking a single glance at the in-game text, the "bikini mail" armor would probably tell you everything you need to know. Although, I think I read somewhere that the player base for MMOs is growing steadily more female, so I have to wonder if that's going to encourage developers to think more critically about how they portray women in their games.