GET READY

Let me preface this.
There's this thing called Jump Start and it's basically a website devoted to begging. People beg for money to do something, like make a video game, then people give them money and the product turns out shit because people have already paid for the product.
Some woman named Anita (something or other) raised 150,000 dollars to "raise awareness of sexism in video games". Quite why this takes six figures is anyone's guess and why she's choosing to raise awareness in a niche audience instead of tackling a larger aspect of the issue is a mystery as well.
At this point the denizens of the internet are basically calling her a thief because she just robbed people of 150,000 dollars which is a good enough point but if people are dumb enough to give her money in the first place to make Youtube videos then fuck them.
And now people are butthurt-- especially ontd_feminism.
THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY GAMERS ARE UPSET THIS BULLSHIT FINDS ITS WAY INTO VIDEO GAMES.
Gee probably because they get enough of this bullshit in their daily lives. They don't need to be reminded it.
ontd_feminism is awesome in its own way but I found a blog through it instead.

Let me preface this: I'm straight. I'm not vanilla, and I'm probably not entirely heteronormative, but for all intents and purposes, there has never been a question of the legality around my being able to marry whom I wish.

k.
Even straight people online have to be special snowflakes by prefacing it by saying "BUT I'M NOT VANILLA, GUYS" whatever that means.

I feel so ridiculously full of love and happiness for all the strangers who had their love legally legitimized last night by this decision. I really wish I could be there. It isn't my fight, and this decision doesn't change my legal rights in any way. Even if I was gay, I'm Canadian, so it _really_ doesn't affect me. That I feel so profoundly moved by this is strange.

It really is. You need a hobby.

Some have pointed out that Canadian politics isn't something to be proud of these days and so who cares. But I refuse to be apathetic about it. Apathy solves nothing. It only serves to let assholes get away with treating people like shit. Apathy is a luxury only the privileged can afford. Even if this doesn't affect me on the surface of things, it does affect me. At the risk of getting into slippery-slope arguments, if one group of us takes a hit without any response, then who's next? Women, children, First Nations, the poor, the elderly?

Shut up, Jesus Christ.
Also your eternal crusading solves absolutely nothing either and meanwhile my apathy has gotten all sorts of other shit done.

So today, even though I'm a straight white woman who's allowed to marry who she wants, who can move with relative freedom in this country, who can vote, own property, pay taxes, buy birth control and have an abortion if she wishes, I'm celebrating for those who won the right to marry the person they love. I don't care if this makes me naive or an optimist--even if it does, I'll own that proudly. I never want to become a person who doesn't care. And I will fight side by side with strangers to defend their right to live and be happy.

Together, we're stronger. Happy Pride.

Oh brother.
Don't come into my store today, incidentally. It's going to be rough and I can't hold your hand through the organic section.
I really should have paid more attention to this blog because it ends here.
That is, after I skipped four or five entries about knitting.
KNIT A BEAR FOR STARVING AIDS PATIENTS IN AFRICA.
DOES IT HELP?
NO BUT AT LEAST WHITE WOMEN CAN FEEL LIKE THEY DID SOMETHING!
That is 90% of all charities in the West. "At least white women can feel like they did something."
I'm sure there's some dubious argument about providing comfort to people who have nothing and I guess I'll allow it but I hardly doubt a knitted bear is going to be much comfort when you're dying in the jungle of the fucking Motaba Virus.
Anyway let's wander incoherently through ontd_feminism.

*~*I'm not like other girls*~*

Says one poster.
That's not an exact quote because she messed up her HTML tags and I had to fix them or I'd never be able to post this due to HTML errors (Blogger is especially fussy) so I cleaned it up.
Anyway:
"I'm not like other girls"
- most girls

There are some people who don’t want to have kids. Then there are some people who really don’t want to have kids. As we learned in a recent Double X series of essays exploring this choice, some men and women never heed (or even feel) the tick of the biological clock. But others are more proactive. Monica Trombley is in the latter camp. As described in her piece, Trombley decided at the age of 26 that permanent sterilization by tubal ligation—a procedure colloquially called “getting your tubes tied”—was the right choice for her.

And she's mad no doctor would do it because holy fuck the insurance.
I'm sure all the doctors came up with some bullshit "but you might want kids!" excuse but the real reason is because every time a doctor performs surgery now it's basically a gamble against himself where if he wins he gains your welfare money and if he loses he loses everything he owns.
Or to put it another way: winning isn't winning big but losing means losing huge.

But as Trombley quickly learned, many gynecologists disagreed. After consulting a number of doctors who tried to dissuade her for what she describes as “paternalistic” reasons, Trombley finally became so exasperated that she actually considered inventing dangerous and unavoidable family members in order to convince a doctor that she could not live in an environment fit for children. (In the end, she found a specialist who required less cajoling.) 

Or you could buy condoms which are basically free.

“Why should an adult woman be forced to lie to her doctor about why she wants to be sterilized?” she asked.

Trombley’s article inspired many, many readers to write in with similar tales of medical odysseys. Often, these women complained of being referred from physician to physician, only to receive a version of, “You’ll change your mind” or, “You’ll regret this later in life.” While some were ultimately successful in their tube-tying quest, others simply gave up, settling for a partner’s vasectomy or contraception. 

"I couldn't get my tubes tied so I need you to get a vasectomy."
That's a compelling argument. How about I dump you and find a girl who knows what birth control is?

When I first wrote about the sexist abuse of women online, collating the experiences of nearly a dozen writers, the response was largely positive. Many hadn't been aware there was a problem; they were shocked. Others had assumed that they were the only ones whose every word on the web was greeted with a torrent of abusive, threatening comments.

Recent exchange in my FFXIV LS:
"hey guys I'm a girl"
"shut up no one cares"
I've never been prouder.
In fact, that's largely the reaction women get online.
Who cares what you are in real life because in game you're a shitty white mage so please heal.
HEEEEEY-OH.
It was especially inappropriate that time because HOLY FUCK WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A SIEGE SITUATION I NEED YOU TO SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR TAMPONS AND DEAL WITH THE 10 FOOT TALL LIZARD MEN.

 But a few reactions stood out, among them that of Brendan O'Neill, the Telegraph blogs section's resident contrarian. He wrote that feminist campaigners pointing this out was a "hilarious echo of the 19th-century notion that women need protecting from vulgar and foul speech". We were, he said, "a tiny number of peculiarly sensitive female bloggers" trying to close down freedom of speech.

That's kind of a good point.
You wouldn't believe the insults I hear on a daily basis from my own friends in online games.
It's part of playing an online game.

That's because they're guys and don't hear the remarks you'll hear if you're a woman and have the audacity to speak. I do play with people online, but a) my name is the same as here, so my gender is ambiguous and b) where I do play online, I tend to have a male on my ID card and play as one, so nobody really talks to me. The fact that I feel safer for those reasons is a pretty huge sign that maaaaybe, just maybe, it's not just guys "trolling" us poor, insensitive feminists. 

Says one commenter.
I usually make female characters and I can't say I've ever run into a problem with sexism.
I mean by this logic if playing a male character shields you from sexism playing a female character should open me up to all sorts of horrific harangues and threatens of rape but it hasn't.
In fact it has opened me to the exact same threats and taunts as playing a male character.
In fact threats of violence were visited on me yesterday because I tried hamlet defense for, what, the third time and got the item everyone has been fucking grinding away at hamlet defense for literally weeks.
Did I let that bother me?
Fuck no because I'm +10 HQ find chance now, baby.

Pfffft, that Lego video is my favorite video and I don't think it's just a "fuss over nothing." Gendered toys just rub me the wrong way and I'm glad I didn't have to really grow up with them (probably because it was a money-saver to buy toys that both me and my brother could play with). 

GENDERED TOYS OH NOOOOOOOOOO.
 If I were a girl I'd be pissed about toys too, though.
Have you seen the girls section at a toy store?
Oh what do you want, a static pony statue with 0 points of articulation or a fucking Gundam with 800000 points of articulation?
SOMEONE GOT RIPPED OFF.

I know it probably doesn't change much or make the trolls go away, and I didn't get to donate any money to her, but after seeing all this I was compelled to write to her on her contact form. 

I'd just like to point out we're making a fuss over trolls.
On the internet.
Not real life trolls that eat people and regenerate health and have to be set on fire to properly kill but people online who say mean things.
Know what you can do if meanie heads online get to be too much for you?
Stand up and walk the fuck away.

The fact that there is even this much uproar over a woman proposing a game that brings awareness to all the harmful tropes women characters are subjected to in gaming (and subsequently all other forms of media as well) and some guy even went as far as to create a game that encourages violence against a REAL person speaks volumes about the degree of misogyny that exists in the world and further emphasises why it's important to address these issues. 

 HARMFUL TROPES.
But it's okay because Edie Hart is an empowered womyn.
Oh yeah some of these feminists spell "woman" as "womyn" because it takes the man out of woman.
Because--
I have no fucking idea but anyway that's a real thing.

What the creator of the beat-up Anita game doesn't realise is that his game not just "fictional violence" done for "fun." Violence in any form is first of all NEVER funny and has real harmful consequences even when not directed at a real person. 

Sorry Edie, guess you're a violent psychopath then.
THERE ARE HARMFUL
CONSEQUENCES
IN REAL LIFE
TO KILLING IXALI.
Remember that time you killed that den of cultists?
Holy shit girlfriend. Those were people, not lizard men.
THAT GUY WAS MISGUIDED. YOU DIDN'T NEED TO LIGHT HIM ON FIRE AND CAVE HIS HEAD IN WITH A ROD.
I guess that makes me an awful person too because I'm the one guiding her to do all these horrific things.
I've dominated and manipulated a poor womyn POC (person of color!) into acts of murder.
I am basically Hitler is what I'm trying to say.

Games such as these have the harmful effect of both normalising and desensitising people to the fact that real violence does happen to real people and repetition even further encourages real violence to happen to real people (i.e., "she was asking for it").

Well to be fair they are trying to steer a giant satellite death laser into the planet.
Imagine if our own moon was pulled into our orbit.
The moon is in our orbit.
Never mind.
IMAGINE IF SOMEONE CRASHED THE MOON INTO THE PLANET FUCK YOU.

 Reiterating what Frogg said, encouraging violence against people who speak up against issues that negatively affect them is a bigger threat to free speech than someone who calls out the prevalence of hate speech on the internet. 

Yeah.
What about all that shit with Ala Mihgo anyway?
Those are irl refugees basically.
Even though they're fictional people in a video game--
from a city that doesn't exist on a continent that doesn't exist on a planet that isn't real--
Wait, what was the problem again?
Here's a post about someone who said tranny on Youtube and everyone is upset--
here's a post about some politician's wife--
Something about that new Tomb Raider game--
The part I find offensive about this is it's 2012 and people still think Tomb Raider is relevant.

How's this for timing? The day after the hoo-hah over Anita Sarkeesian's project to expose stereotyped women in computer games, and the makers of the new Lara Croft game are ready to assure you that she's not just a walking jiggle any more. Oh no, she is a sympathetic lady who will engage you emotionally.



How are they going to do this? By having her beaten and subjected to an attempted rape.

Didn't that already happen in Final Fantasy VII?
Wasn't that like 15 fucking years ago?
If you want the controversy points, Eidos, you need to--
hey wait, isn't Eidos owned by Square now?
What the fuck, Square? You didn't get any controversy points for this shit 15 years ago. What happened?
Oh right, women started playing video games.
But women love Final Fantasy-- I thought--
No wait, they love any Final Fantasy after the icky sci fi one. My mistake.
Also not including XII.
Or XI.
Basically they like the fan communities of Final Fantasy and not the actual games.

 Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch
Why is rape seen as a reasonable way to "strengthen" female characters?

A few weeks ago, a viral blog served up a refreshingly compassionate interpretation of privilege for the Portal generation. If life were a video game, the writer John Scalzi explained, "straight white male" would be "the lowest difficulty setting there is".

So a poor white guy living in a trailer has it objectively easier than a wealthy black kid.
K.

"This means that the default behaviours for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise," wrote Scalzi. "The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get."

My leveling up threshold comes easier--
meaning what?
It scales better?
XPs are easier to gain?
Isn't this implicitly stating white people are better?

Keep that in mind, because we’ll be coming back to it. For now, let’s talk about the shit storm broiling over the pre-release material for the next Tomb Raider game, in which the protagonist, Lara Croft, is retconned as a survivor of sexual and physical assault. This experience apparently made her the hypersexualised, mindlessly violent killing machine – sorry, "strong woman" – we know today. 

As opposed to all the men in shooting games who aren't mindlessly violent killing machines.
Does this article have a point to make?

This is a story, like so many epics, about being, and about becoming. What’s made pay dirt so far for the small horde of pop-gender-crit writers commenting on the topic is the question: why does Lara Croft, like so many female heroes, need to be re-imagined an assault survivor in order to be a strong character?

Rape is usually a difficult thing to overcome?
I dunno.
All right fine she's a mindless blow up doll like before.
Eidos apparently isn't winning either way.
NOW DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS A STORY OF TRIUMPH.
Also stars a mostly male cast.
By some sheer coincidence I'm sure.

frankly, the fact that Nerd Culture exists as a concept at all is what's wrong with it.  

How so?
Oh, someone vaguely intelligent even asks why as well and she responds.
A REAL DIALOGUE.

because a culture based around what people consume is fucked to hell, and makes it incredibly hard to critique it without a bunch of angry neckbeards in fedoras and N7 t-shirts sending you thousands upon thousands of death and rape threats.

Except--
nerd culture isn't really about what you consume, you know.
You have a very shallow grasp of the subject.
I mean ultimately we can break any subculture down to what the people buy.
That's what marketing is?
Never mind.

I clarified above. But to further elaborate, I feel like the concept of Nerd Culture has been this thing that allows people who otherwise have a lot of privilege in their lives (usually straight white dudes) to take their possible past alienation and make Nerd Culture something immune to critique, and calling them out makes you WORSE than a sexist.

it happens in all areas of my life to a certain extent? but never to the amount of hatred and bile I've seen amongst gamers, for example. 

You're telling a primarily hateful group of people to be less hateful then arbitrarily assuming it's because you're a woman and not because you're a whiny cunt.
Really?

I think the point the article was trying to make was how unrealistic the intended portrayal of sexual assault is. With that and mind, I'd just say that I wouldn't trust the gaming industry to make a game that dealt with the subject matter in a realistic or respectful (to the victims) way. 

AM I THE ONLY PERSON
WHO PLAYS THESE GAMES
TO HAVE FUN?
Oh new Tomb Raider game?
Oh Lara Craft was raped in it?
That's a tragedy. How's the gameplay?
Not to be too callous here but frankly what happens to the vagina of a virtual and fictional woman is really not something I'll be losing sleep over. How does it play?
Are the controls still awful?

Additionally, I'm not sure I'd see what the point of a game like that would be -- and would probably be wary of the person who wanted to...play it... 

Oh well I'm guessing it might be in the title somewhere.
Maybe about a chick who raids tombs?
I have no idea.
What's the point of playing a game?
I dunno. Fun?
No can't be that-- must be about the empowerment of marginalized groups. Fun?
What's fun?
I had fun once and it was awful.

Going to be honest: I love Lara and Tomb Raider. I have since I was 11. Lara has always been a hero to me--a strong, confident, smart person who goes for what she wants without apology and who happens to be the same gender as I am. Growing up, I wasn't exacted surrounded by strong female role models (none, if you want the truth), so having Lara in my life was important to my development, especially as a feminist. 

 Oh that's comforting. A woman who runs into other countries' sacred places and steals everything not nailed down and kills tons of people is a positive role model for a burgeoning feminist.

BTW: on the subject of "protecting" Lara....Eidos (now Square, I believe?) has tossed around that term concerning how male gamers feel about playing TR since the games first came out, and I've always hated it because Lara doesn't need anyone to protect her. Besides, I never feel like I'm protecting her (as that quote claims gamers do)--I always feel like I'm adventuring alongside her.

... Do people really feel like they're protecting a woman in a game?

Unless that's the mission, or something, I never felt like the women I was controlling in a game needed me specifically. Most of them shoot force lighting out of their hands. I think they have this situation under control.

 Anyway I gotta go now.

WORK AND SHIT YO

KEEPING THE WORKING MAN DOWN