...and Terry stops are in no way racist, because the law itself says nothing about race. =)Kahunaburger said:
What the law says, how the law is actually enforced, and the narratives used to construct cases are often very different things.
Kickstarter Video Project Attracts Misogynist Horde
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
What the law says, how the law is actually enforced, and the narratives used to construct cases are often very different things.
"Are Terry stops racist?" is not a legal question. "Can a person impaired by alcohol consent?" is. This is not hard.Schadrach said:
The short answer is controversy -- no one is going to argue against 'threatening someone with rape is vile', but they will argue with 'swarm of internet trolls is representative of the gaming community' or 'women are incapable of deceit, therefore an accusation by a woman is the same as guilt' or 'sexist and discriminatory views only effect women or are only important when they effect women'.Hollyday said:
I can certainly hold the positions 'threatening someone with rape is vile' and 'an accusation in and of itself does not demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; *people* are known to engage in deceit in some cases, therefore not all rape accusations are true' at the same time without a hint of cognitive dissonance.
Yeah, because the "point you were trying to make" was irrelevant to the "question" of whether people impaired by alcohol can consent.Schadrach said:
And so you should. Those two points of view are ones I hold myself (and are therefore obviously correct *smug smug feminist smug*). And I won't deny that a small amount of women lie about being raped. That kind of miscarriage of justice, where a person is sent to prison on a charge of rape when they didn't do it, is horrific. However, reading the above posts really made me angry. I was going to quote some stuff from them but now I'm not, since I've just read them again and decided that my problem with them is on a purely personal level. There's just something so vehement about the way it's being spoken about and it scares me a bit. Rape, more than any other crime, relies so heavily on believing one or the other party. To have a closed mind on the issue - either believing strongly that women (or men)often lie about being raped or believing strongly that women (or men) never lie about being raped is really dangerous. Innocent until proven guilty is a no-brainer, but so is supporting victims and not making them feel like liars just because of the nature of the crime they may have been subject to.Schadrach said:
Again, I'm not sure where this thread jumped from discussing the threats against a feminist pop-culture critic, and a general discussion about the portrayal of women in the media, to miscarriages of justice against men in rape cases. I'm not saying that it's not a topic worth talking about and I take on board the 'controversial' comment but I just don't see the thought process, I really don't. I'd love to be able to say that a discussion about females in video games leading to a discussion about women lying about rape charges is a total fluke but I have a nasty feeling it's not. And that's really really scary.
So women shouldn't report rape?Trekkie said:
All women should be blamed for the few that falsely report rape?
All rape isn't really rape but women feeling bad the next morning?
Rape shouldn't be investigated because the women may be making a false accusation?
Mate, your attitude is more than a little disgusting. If a person is raped and the report it to police they deserve, nay, absolutely must have their claims taken seriously.
If you want to have a go at someone have a go at the predatory nature of US prosecutors who instead of simply presenting the facts have an almost psychopathic drive to win at all costs.
It's not just rape defendants who get the hard end in the US justice system. Prosecutors often go for the highest possible charge regardless of whether it may fit the crime. Usually it is to cow the defendant into taking a plea bargain because nobody is sure that they can "win" a jury trial. But sometimes I have to wonder at the ethical landscape that prosecutors live in.
Possession gets turned into trafficking, lending a car to a mate gets turned into a murder charge, completely innocent accidents turn into manslaughter charges, miscarraiges get turned into murders.
It's fucked.
BUT IT IS NOT OKAY TO BLAME WOMEN FOR RAPE.
Yeah, that's what I meant. People get complacent sometimes, especially when deadlines and shit are involved. Plus, sometimes the more eyes you have on something, the more watered down it ends up getting in the end. Too many cooks spoiling the broth, so to speak v:Grahav said:
Eating cheese on toast and reading this thread is incredibly interesting. Just thought I should let you guys know.
Point 1: Rape is very very bad.
Point 2: False accusal of rape is bad, even if a conviction isn't sent through, a social stigma, and a very powerful one at that, is forever over the man's head.
Point 3: Rapists lie about not being rapists.
Point 4: Women can (and indeed do) lie to discredit others. Case brought to mind is where after a messy divorce, a woman complained her ex-husband had threatened her with a shotgun. He'd sold all his guns 6 weeks before the date she mentioned and had reciepts and the gun shops sold to to prove it. Summed up, an accusation is not always true.
Point 5: Just because the above is true, does not mean rape accusations are false.
Point 6: I've learnt some very interesting things through this thread.
Point 7: Femenism is the belief that women should have equal rights to men.
Point 8: Thus follows that they should also have equal responsibilites to men. No first dibs on lifeboats by virtue of gender, etc.
Point 9: Can people please make more constructive and responsive comments and concede when someone you don't agree with makes a point well? Common couertesy and maturity is a good thing.
Point 1: Rape is very very bad.
Point 2: False accusal of rape is bad, even if a conviction isn't sent through, a social stigma, and a very powerful one at that, is forever over the man's head.
Point 3: Rapists lie about not being rapists.
Point 4: Women can (and indeed do) lie to discredit others. Case brought to mind is where after a messy divorce, a woman complained her ex-husband had threatened her with a shotgun. He'd sold all his guns 6 weeks before the date she mentioned and had reciepts and the gun shops sold to to prove it. Summed up, an accusation is not always true.
Point 5: Just because the above is true, does not mean rape accusations are false.
Point 6: I've learnt some very interesting things through this thread.
Point 7: Femenism is the belief that women should have equal rights to men.
Point 8: Thus follows that they should also have equal responsibilites to men. No first dibs on lifeboats by virtue of gender, etc.
Point 9: Can people please make more constructive and responsive comments and concede when someone you don't agree with makes a point well? Common couertesy and maturity is a good thing.
Hollyday said:
Actually the big muscles are a sexual fantasy along with a power one. That's considered to be attractive, women go gaga for "hunks", there is a reason why groups like the Chippendales are mostly bodybuilder types. A big part of the fantasy of having the huge muscles is getting the girls with them.
It's sort of like breasts, not every guy finds large breasts attractive, but enough do where it's a safe bet that if you have big ones your odds of finding someone you find attractive who wants you go up substantially.
Those guys who pump iron at the beach don't do it to show off their power. The whole thing is "hey ladeez look at thuse massive arm boulders and this six pack... watch me flex, oh yeah...". It's like the male version of swimsuit behavior.
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Your arguement about movie characters is inherantly loaded. You can take any list point to who isn't there and claim it's in some way biased, especially if one group dominated. It's like saying that a lack of white players on certain recent sports lists of best players is actually proof of some racist conspiricy to keep the white man down. I'm sure you could take a look at a "100 best characters list" which is pretty much an opinion piece, and probably find 20 or 30 groups you could claim it's bigoted against. In reality the most you can claim is that your taste in what makes a good character is differant from Empire's or those that care enough to have answered the polls.
That said, being an "all time" list also loads it, because while sexism is currently not an issue, and most definatly not within video games, in past decades it was an issue. Back when feminism actually stood for something valid in like the 1960s and 1970s the various "Bond Girls" were a big deal due to the way they were breaking stereotypes by not being demure and covered all the time. Women showing sexuality there and in control of it, and in things like Playboy was actually empowering. Things, and the flow of them changed, but if you figure it's only been a non issue for the last few decades it's less surprising. If you were to say limit the list to say "best 100 movie characters from the last 30 years" going back to say 1982 which is around where this battle had been more or less won and started to become more political than anything, your more likely to see more stand outs. Likewise when it comes to opinion pieces it depends on who you ask or is compiling the data.
Besides which, none of this has to do with anything, the discussion is about some Vlogger claiming that the tropes/characters in video games are sexist and offensive and campaigning to get people to fund a bigger platform for her, so she can spread the message of how wrong and male dominated it all is.
The kind of thing she's getting on is say asking the question of why a character like Bloodrayne runs around killing people in a leather catsuit. The answer is "because it's more fun that way" and that's not just from a male dominated perspective either. When women write their killer vampire characters they tend to also do a lot of their violence in exotic and sexy costumes, oftentimes irregardless of the period. There is nothing inherantly wrong, exploitive, or one sided about the character. Indeed Bloodrayne (which was a mixed success, it did get a sequel and a few B movie tie ins) was probably green lit because it's such a universally appealing image, and one which hadn't at that time been exploited much.
Take a bunch of popular characters from mainstream fantasy novels aimed mostly at women (many of which have gone successfully cross gender in their artwork) and think about how they would look if rendered as video game characters. On average, they would wind up being exactly like what we see now, in part because it's those kinds of characters that inspire the ones in video games and such. The gaming industry doesn't do it because they are "ignoring 50% of the potential audience" but because this is what women as a whole and want and create/read about on their own, and it also happens to have universal appeal.
If someone decided to make an Anita Blake video game, or one based off of Kim Harrison's "Hollows" series (which I read) ladies like this Vlogger would be screaming a proper representation of the characters would be "exploitive male fantasy", which is lulzworthy because of both the author, and the target audience they were created for.