Can we please not let this slip into another feminism rant?srpilha said:Let me guess, you're a white cis-gendered heterosexual man with some reasonable (or even very good) education and no glaring financial problems, right? This is not an accusation, mind you, just a description. You're certainly not entirely responsible for most it, so no blaming here.KingsGambit said:It [feminism] is a poisonous dogma that's irrelevant and outdated in modern society and today does nothing but harm. I'm glad to note that its fading slowly and losing popularity as more and more people are alienated by its nonsense completely at odds with real life.
I don't wish to enter a debate about it anyway. I don't care about it at all, I hate that it's encroaching into sites I used to enjoy visiting regularly and would be glad to see it gone so we can get back to the real issues of games sucking and why. (snip)
But notice that you're doing quite exactly what U-238 was criticizing in games and in society at large: you're dismissing serious issues as not being the "real" problem, mainly because they don't affect you directly and you can't see any relation between them and other problems which are closer to you, and/or because those issues haven't become so violent and clear-cut as to warrant immediate condemnation from you.
(In other words, and as it was present in Yahtzee's text, you're position is equivalent to "homophobia/misogyny as active hatred is a real problem, but just not considering gay people/women as equals, "passively" as it were, is not". BTW, the latter is homophobia/misogyny too.)
I get it that you may not at all be touched by sexism against women in all of its forms. Lucky you. It's still a very real problem and yes, minimizing it DOES make it worse.
"Why do feminists often fight more for women's rights than men's rights if they're about equality, then?", you may ask. That's because men *already* have lots of rights and humongous amounts of privileges. Many, many of these privileges oppress women and make our society a worse place for them than for men. So yeah, balancing things out does mean cutting some of those privileges back a bit. Tough luck.
If activism is about equality, you could also ask why there isn't a "straight pride parade", for instance. Except there is. On every other street, every day of the year.
So yeah, let's check our privileges, hm?
Let's be real here: if people wanted equality, there is this movement and school of thought called equalitarianism. It's all about accepting that no form of segregation or bias is needed, as we are all fundamentaly humans and are all potentially capable of doing any job no matter our race, religion, sex or anything.
Feminism gets rejected by me simply because of it's name. The name itself does not make me think "group fighting for equal rights for women" but rather "group that wants women to be the rulling power". Basically replace one form of discrimintaion with another. Just read some of the jewels of today's feminists and you will see they have long since moved beyond equal rights into "men are all inferior pigs and women should rule the world". That is the majority voice of the movement now, and even the original starters of the feminist movement have called out this bullshit and have effectivly broken off from feminism. Because my dear missguided friend balancing things out never means to take away from some, but rather to give to all the same privileges and powers. Feminism today is no longer about that, it's about vengence on men because of past privileges by taking them away and giving them to women. Equality activsm itself is a retarded concept, since activism is inherently about imposing a particular set of views over another, while equality means acceptance of all points of view (so long as they conflict with common sense. No one will accept eating babies). Common sense tells us any form of activism about equality is a hypocritical concept due to the conflciting natures of activism (imposing a particular set of views/beliefs) and equality (accepting different sets of views/beliefs). And sooner or later that shows.
Also the "let's check our priviliges" line is the most retarded straw man and discrimintating argument one can make in a situation like this. So what, just because a particular category has not been the victim of some form of opresion they can;t voice their opinion? freedom of speech? Fact of the matter is most of today's movements for social equality are bullshit. They have been started by people with the best intentions, but now the mases have devolved them into "you had privileges and we were opressed, time to switch places and for us to opress you". And the whole politically correct game that has been going on hasn't helped at all ... today we are sitting on a powder keg of social conflict and everything that isn't as bland and unoffensive as posible imediatly sets off an explosion, when equality is about acceptance, not demanding everything conform to the same set of rules or morals.
And what is the most idiotic thing here is that the backlash against gay marriage/no female character wasn't even done by gay gamers/female gamers. It was done by the same heterosexual white male gamers. So it's not even a question of a group fighting for it's rights, it's an issue of overcompensation for past discrimintaion (like we are somehow handing gay's and women a gift saying "see, we are really really sorry for all that") which all of a sudden changes this from geniune desire for equality (aka a natural tendency to be more acceptive and inclusive) into a rather unplesant "see, now you can join the privileged club too". The truth of things is most gay people or well adjusted women won't react with this sort of bile and rage over these issues. They would resort to rational discourse, as would any actual firm supporter of equality. It's heterosexual white guys brainwashed by the political correctness machine AND/OR false equalitarians (the so called "radical feminists" are a good example) that react like that out of some retarded notion that if anything is left out it automatically means discrimination and should be purged.