Vault101's guide to gender debates

[Thaluikhain]

You heard it folks, "feminists" are gonna start exterminating Jews.

I'd better get back to my bunker then.

It would be interesting to see how many posts that would get, if everyone agreed to stop talking about games for the duration.

 

[Syzygy23]

tl;dr: Curious why the emphasis is on feminism while racism seems much worse.

There's a term for that. "Appeal to a greater problem" or something.

Or to put it another way:

Someone walks up to you, spits in your face and then walks away.
You call after them, "Hey, fuckwit, what the hell was that about?" A reasonable response in the circumstances.
They turn and reply, "Geez man, don't you know that there are homeless people dying of hypothermia every winter? And all you care about is some saliva on your face? Get some perspective and focus on what matters!"

The existence of a greater problem does not diminish a lesser problem. Especially if the two are unrelated. Also, caring about a lesser problem does not automatically mean that one does not care about a greater problem.

Lastly, people tend to be more concerned with that which is in their face and relevant to their own lives than that which is not. For example, most people would get more distressed over, say, losing their job than over the fact that hundreds of people are dying of ebola right now.

Several thousand now, actually.

Also, the human brain is estimated to be able to actually care about 217 (might be 271, I can't quite remember the exact number) human beings maximum (not including itself) You can't expect the brain to process the appropriate emotional response one would ascribe to a dead grandmother to several thousand, million, or billions of other human beings in similar circumstances. It just isn't physically possible unless you were immortal, and even then you would never get a break from mourning everyone that passed.

So if anyone accuses you of being a heartless bastard for not caring about the millions of dead orphans in Africa, it's not your fault you don't care, you physically can't.

 

[entelechy]

Feminists adopt a "moral guardian" and "thought police" stance which is starkly different from a critic.

A critic says "This game is bad because of X, Y, and Z. Don't buy it."

A feminists says, "This game is misogynist because of X, Y, and Z, therefore it should not be made."

The feminists goes on to say that X, Y, and Z are widespread social ills which must be expunged from all games everywhere for the good of society. This is not "criticism," it's social engineering, and it's why gamers are sick of feminists.

No feminist critique of games that I have seen (not even the great and horrible Anita Sarkeesian) has ever framed the argument in that way. Rather:

A feminist says, "This game contains some sexist material which really didn't need to be there to make a fun game."

I think what's so appalling about many instances of sexist material in videogames is that a lot of it is non-essential to the games tone, narrative or gameplay -- i.e. if it had never been there, no one would have noticed anything was missing. Educating designers about these issues would change the kind of games that get made in the future, but so will any cultural trend.

As for "social engineering," the gender tropes that you are defending are themselves a product of social engineering -- Bronze Age social engineering -- but nonetheless the patriarchy is not a biological phenomenon. Strict gender roles and treating women as objects to be prized by men is purely a product of agricultural civilization. You can't escape living in an engineered society. That ship sailed long before any of us were even born.