The Big Picture: Boy's Own Adventure

[theApoc]

Social change should come because of a change in how SOCIETY thinks, feels, behaves.

The society is not some kind of magic entity. It's made up of people.
And this is a huge group of people, a subset of the society, saying they're ready for a change.

If this was a "HUGE" group of people this wouldn't be an issue. And as someone else pointed out, most of the "outrage" is coming from the people reporting how much outrage there is over this nonsense.

The people who shout the loudest, don't generally represent the "majority".

 

[jaymiechan]

Bob kinda glossed over the fact that LGBT issues, especially these days, tends to leave the B and T behind, as well as the concerns for LGBT youth, focusing purely on assimilation theory and gay marriage.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion that bisexual and transgender parts of the community are getting left behind. They are fighting the same struggles as gay couples for things like marriage equality. If anything it's only that transgender individuals have more to fight for, because they have it harder than probably any group on Earth, likely being the least accepted people alive.

And don't take this as combative, I'm honestly curious. I'm an activist for LGBT rights, and in college wrote all my English and Philosphy papers on the subjects, along with feminism.

Because the fight isn't only about gay marriage. it is about LGBTQ youth being bullied and made homeless by closeminded or bigoted parents. It is things like the HRC pushing for a non-trans-inclusive ENDA or telling a trans sign holder at the display at the Supreme Court to take their sign down (to the point of one of the heads saying they will support trans rights "over her dead body"). It is Bi people being told they only need some time to find out they are actually gay. It the fact that most people call marriage equality "gay marriage", and only fighting for marriage right now, instead of protection or hate crime laws that would've protected people like Matt Sheppard or Brandon Teena. It is that there is a single-mindedness for marriage equality that it actively undermines legal precedents for trans folk who identify as straight being allowed to marry the one that they want. It is a good deal of people still following Janice Raymond or thinking transfolk are misguided gays who are mutilating their bodies, or will ruin the LG attempts at getting what they want. It is something that is so bad to the point that Stephen Colbert pointed it out, saying that the LGBT agenda is moving so fast he doesn't even know what the B & T stand for (Bacon and Tomato?).

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/423359/january-30-2013/coming-out-benefits---gay-rights

 

[TrulyBritish]

And I'm going to cut short any jokes about "bending over" in a conversation starting with issues of bisexuality here

You don't have to worry about bending over.

[sub]....It's what happens next that you have to worry about![/sub]

Hey now, you haven't even offered to take me to dinner yet...

 

[maximara]

Oh this is where we get into this huge thing where the forum posters bombard you with many many examples of Fox News and conservatism as a whole being all about straight, white, christian, and preferably rich, men while throwing all others under the bus. Well, throw is such a strong word. More like shove. We might need their votes some day. And you defend them because they're conservatives and everything they do and say is right and thinking otherwise is blatantly Un-American. And then, when that fails, resort to personal attacks.

Hold on. Let me get some popcorn.

Sadly this is the result of the FCC getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine (1949-1987; it was on the books after 1987 but not enforced and the FTC finally got it off the books in 2011) It required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission's view, honest, equitable and balanced.

There has been some talk about restoring the Fairness Doctrine from 2003 on but give the nature of media now it is doubtful it would go anywhere as it only applied to those who had a broadcast license...something that doesn't really apply to Internet based radio or TV as any Tom, Dick and Harry with a camera and a mike can broadcast.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

shit goes here

Except Conservative views are themselves by and large, harmful and phobic. Asking "liberals" to play nice with the people spewing hate speech is rediculous. And i'm a none of your business.

The Escapist isn't a "liberal slant" media outlet, it's a Media outlet lacking in the traditional Conservative bias blasted across TV by Rupert Murdoch. Most of the internet would qualify as a "liberal slanted outlet" by this bias.

N.O.
I'm sorry; I will not get into a debate with closed-minded individuals who consider me inferior for my beliefs. Either you speak on an even, respectful basis, or don't speak at all.

I don't have to engage demagoges that think the Holocaust never happened on a respectful basis, I don't need to engage loonies that think them gays are destroying america and austerity totally works guys lol on a respectful basis

 

[Mid Boss]

Oh this is where we get into this huge thing where the forum posters bombard you with many many examples of Fox News and conservatism as a whole being all about straight, white, christian, and preferably rich, men while throwing all others under the bus. Well, throw is such a strong word. More like shove. We might need their votes some day. And you defend them because they're conservatives and everything they do and say is right and thinking otherwise is blatantly Un-American. And then, when that fails, resort to personal attacks.

Hold on. Let me get some popcorn.

Sadly this is the result of the FCC getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine (1949-1987; it was on the books after 1987 but not enforced and the FTC finally got it off the books in 2011) It required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission's view, honest, equitable and balanced.

There has been some talk about restoring the Fairness Doctrine form 2003 on but give the nature of media now it is doubtful it would go anywhere as it only applied to those who had a broadcast license...something that doesn't really apply to Internet based radio or TV as any Tom, Dick and Harry with a camera and a mike can broadcast.

Now you seem like a pretty informed person. Our country is becoming increasingly politically charged. Personally, I blame the advent of 24 hour news networks who make huge issues over every imaginable thing just... to fill time.

What do you think the root of this problem is and will it ever end? Or is this just how our country is always going to be from now on.

 

[itsmeyouidiot]

I'm totally with you on the "Fox news is over-exaggerating about a cartoon" bit. Its a cartoon.

That said, you lost me at "Connected to men= good; independent=evil". Your white knight is showing.

Again.

Stop it.

What's so bad about being a "white knight"? He's pointing out a trend of female superpowered characters that has harmful implications.

Think about it: when was the last time you'd heard of a female superhero that wasn't either related to an existing male superhero besides Wonder Woman?

Compare that to the number of female supervillains that aren't related to other characters. Even if it isn't intentional on the part of the creators, it's still a harmful message.

 

[Sir Shockwave]

Wait... are you being serious? Have people tried to pin the "gay agenda" on ponies? I'm genuinely curious, I rarely go to the likes of 4chan and /mlp/ so if it originated there I wouldn't know.

That statement was purely speculative, given that I am not an American and normally out of touch with the news. It would not surprise me however if someone like Fox News started pushing this on them, like the Internet at large does.

Amen, brother. Transformers Prime is one of the best series I've watched!

It also knows when to end itself X3

 

[GamemasterAnthony]

I have one question...and it's a very serious one.

When can we finally sue/criminally charge Fox News and/or any of these other overly conservative groups for what basically amounts to harassment of the GLBTQ community and those that support them?

Seriously...this crap is getting out of hand and a line needs to be drawn.

Interesting questions. Would conservative groups be able to criminally charge CNN/ABC/MSN and liberal groups in return? Or would this only be for specifically approved ideologies?

It would be for ANYONE, liberal or conservative, who believe their ideologies give them any right whatsoever to either slander, mirepresent, or violate the rights of any group on the basis of their beliefs.

Trust me. CNN, Fox, MSN, WBC, One Million Moms, ABC...they would all be fair game if they go too far. Right now though...it seems the conservative side is more blatant in their behavior.

 

[DrMcCoy]

EG if Bob (and this site in general) weren't so blatantly liberal

As an European, let me say this to you: You have no freaking clue what "liberal" is.
Neither do you know what half the "'prospective' audience" of this site would look like.
Your US-centric viewpoint is nearly too precious.

 

[SlothfulCobra]

I think the key issue of this show is that it is really bad. I watched the first episode and every bad, lazy joke where they inserted "she" into a word made me die just a bit more inside.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I guess none of the guys at Fox ever watched Cybersix. Oh wait, that's because the morons banned the show in the US after its first run because of the crossdressing superhero.

Where else do you see an androgynous woman jump between being a male teacher and then fighting Nazi mutants with her "Brother reborn as a Jaguar"?

That looks like the most awesome thing ever, based on that intro. Is the actual show any good?

It's not bad. Collaboration between Canadian and Japanese studios, based on an Argentinian comic book series. It's got some good voice work, and really good animation. I think you can find it on youtube.

 

[Amgeo]

I haven't watched the show (yet) but I agree with Bob that representations of gender in the superhero genre are very problematic. One thing that's very cool is how the character of Batwoman has evolved from a bad joke about being a female Batman to one of the coolest characters in DC.

Yet I'm not sure that She-Zow! is quite as helpful to LGBTQA acceptance as Bob made it sound, even with all the qualifiers he put on there. The joke still relies on a strict gender binary, and I can't imagine that it strains itself to teach the kids about the nuances of recognizing your own identity. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

Yeah, I think that ponies and Batman are really the only things currently keeping the Hub humming.

Speaking of, I'd like to thank Bob for taking what I feel is the best stance on the pony fandom, that since he doesn't care too much about the show the fans' existence does not affect him and therefore he doesn't talk about it except where it becomes relevant, and then only in passing. No lectures about how some fans take it too far, no discussions of how it affects the larger culture, he is just aware of it as a thing.

To be fair, there's also Animaniacs.

There is? Pardon me while I go relive my childhood.

 

[FireAza]

Eh, Is This a Zombie? already did this joke, with the added comedy of the male character still being subject to the fanservice that usually goes along with magical girl characters.

 

[Raesvelg]

Think about it: when was the last time you'd heard of a female superhero that wasn't either related to an existing male superhero besides Wonder Woman?

Compare that to the number of female supervillains that aren't related to other characters. Even if it isn't intentional on the part of the creators, it's still a harmful message.

There are a few problems here, and the first is two-fold: how do you define "unconnected", and how does that standard apply to the rest of a given continuity's characters?

If we're going to say, for example, any connection (team or romantic), to a character of the opposite sex, then very few heroes of either gender meet that standard. Particularly if we allow for a certain flexibility in when such connections are allowed to have occurred. A given character might be single and unaffiliated now, after all, but have been in a relationship or on a team at some point in the past. Wonder Woman included. That, incidentally, is the standard that Bob appears to be going for.

Now, the second problem is distinguishing between connections, and simple franchise branding. Sure, there have been several Spider-Women over the course of the past few decades. None of them has ever been all that connected to Peter Parker except through that franchise branding (well, the Ultimate Universe Spider-Woman is a gender-swapped Peter Parker clone). There are an enormous number of female mutants (X-men Franchise as a whole) or other team members (Team Franchise) who are themselves unique characters, otherwise unconnected in a franchise sense to any male hero.

Ignore franchise branding for iconic characters and teams, and it's not so much a matter of "good" female characters being connected to male characters, as "good" characters being connected to other "good" characters. Account for franchise branding and it's not a "patriarchal" requirement that good female characters be connected to male characters, but rather a cold truth that genuinely new characters generally don't have the draw to carry a book. So they're typically introduced as a part of a new team, a new member of an iconic team, or in connection to an existing character, which given the era in which most of those iconic characters originated, is typically male.

To flip the argument for the sake of argument: Villains are most often loners; unaffiliated with any teams, without personal connections, and male. What's the message we're sending there?

 

[Raesvelg]

Trust me. CNN, Fox, MSN, WBC, One Million Moms, ABC...they would all be fair game if they go too far. Right now though...it seems the conservative side is more blatant in their behavior.

To be fair, MSNBC has regularly gone too far, and been caught doing it. It really is the liberal equivalent of Fox News, which is why I don't watch either of those channels.

Then again, I don't watch "news programming" in general, come to think of it.

 

[Templar_Gamer]

Oh this is where we get into this huge thing where the forum posters bombard you with many many examples of Fox News and conservatism as a whole being all about straight, white, christian, and preferably rich, men while throwing all others under the bus. Well, throw is such a strong word. More like shove. We might need their votes some day. And you defend them because they're conservatives and everything they do and say is right and thinking otherwise is blatantly Un-American. And then, when that fails, resort to personal attacks.

Hold on. Let me get some popcorn.

Sadly this is the result of the FCC getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine (1949-1987; it was on the books after 1987 but not enforced and the FTC finally got it off the books in 2011) It required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission's view, honest, equitable and balanced.

There has been some talk about restoring the Fairness Doctrine from 2003 on but give the nature of media now it is doubtful it would go anywhere as it only applied to those who had a broadcast license...something that doesn't really apply to Internet based radio or TV as any Tom, Dick and Harry with a camera and a mike can broadcast.

Yeah, because I would so fucking want to return to an era where the News media refuses to cover ANY controversial issue due to fear of major fines.

?The decision to classify Fox News as satire has come after several years of evaluation regarding the sources of their reporting, and the bias of their programming. While much of their content is based on legitimate news, it is spun is a way that cannot not be deemed newsworthy to the viewing public. If Fox News so chooses to report actual news stories of legitimacy without skewing the content we may overturn our decision and reclassify the network to a valid news source once again.? (FCC 2012)

Well the FCC is clearly a liberal ran organization! They didn't get the memo that having all male panels discussing women's reproductive rights (how they shouldn't have them) and how evil it is that women are gaining economic ground on men qualifies as unbiased, fair and balanced news!

I can't get over what great lengths conservatives will go to to defend Fox News. I was arguing with one once about this audio clip Fox had edited. Took me several posts just to get the guy to listen to the original clip unaltered. Then I asked him if that pissed him off that his news source BLATANTLY lied to him. And his defense was that it was ok. They're conservatives so it's all ok.

And no "liberal" news outfit has ever done the exact same thing twic-

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/business/media/tv-news-corrects-itself-just-not-on-the-air.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


oh.....

 

[Aardvaarkman]

I said 'prospective' audience. EG if Bob (and this site in general) weren't so blatantly liberal, they would be able to interact with the population of conservative gamers you seem to think is a minority. Absolutely, it's a minority on this site... Because this site is liberal, and hostile to conservative views.

Hardly. I think it's more because the demographic skews younger (I don't have data, but it feels like much of the audience here is under 25) and nerdier. It's not a site that particularly caters to the CoD crowd and other players of militaristic shooters.

As for 'idiocy'... The idea that Fox News is somehow a less legitimate news source because of its worldview?

No, it's not a legitimate news source because of its blatant lies and misrepresentations. Regardless of political orientation, it is not a credible news source.

When (according to an independent study recently) CNN is equally biased and MSNBC is three times worse? Is exactly the problem.

CNN and MSNBC are hardly quality journalism. How does that excuse Fox? "those other guys are crappy too" isn't a very compelling argument.

Anyway, I'd be interested to see this study, because its conclusion doesn't sound plausible. You know there are a lot of bogus studies done for political or commercial reasons, right? Recent studies prove this!

My point is this: people who think gender is immutable and binary have just as legitimate a view as people who think it's a loose spectrum, and deserve equal respect.

No, not really. This is easily disprovable. Many people identify as a different gender from their biological sex. That's a fact. Saying otherwise is like arguing that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

 

[Ukomba]

...Are you sure nobody's stuck the whole "gay agenda" thing on the Ponies yet? Or is that just the Internet?

Also - The Hub for me is not the channel to watch Ponies. It's the Channel to go watch Transformers X3

Amen, brother. Transformers Prime is one of the best series I've watched!

It's a funny premise, and I consider myself a brony so I'm hardly a hardliner on gender specific things... but then I look as Sweden. Poor F***ing Sweden.

- Side note: Villains are cooler anyways, especially in DC. Guys love a bad girl , and who doesn't love a good villain songs?

I agree about villains having some more charisma than the heroes, to a point. If they're just a mass-murdering psychopath like in way too many superhero comic books, you just can't wait for the good guy to kick their ass, or, like in an issue of Superior Spider-Man,

Spoiler

give them a Reason You Suck Speech (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheReasonYouSuckSpeech) and blow his brains out.

Also, what's up with that Sweden remark? Is it about how they want to get rid of gender-specific pronouns?

OT, That's an interesting theory about gender relations nowadays. I probably won't watch the cartoon in question, but it is emblematic of the following trope:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealMenWearPink
And Adventure Time is the TITS!

Yes, but not just that:
- There's the forcing of gender neutral pronoun.
- There's the ability to sue the toy companies for showing a girl playing with girl toys.
- A school got rid of its toy cars because boys '"gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys.'
- A preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because when children play freely 'stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.'

A lot of it comes off as insanity. They can show a boy dressed as spiderman carrying a pink purse and pushing a pink baby carriage all they want, it isn't going to make them want play with baby dolls. They even know this, going so far as to take away the toys boys like to try to force them. It's sick. Call me what you want, but I enjoy the fact that Sexual dimorphism exists. Sweden seems to wish they could turn everyone mono-gendered like the Asari. How boring would that be?