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What I've seen of that essay looks interesting. If I were being generous about the standard conservative perspective on affirmative action, I'd say it seems to be rooted in the misanthropic view that there are very few great books and very few great people. And of the few greats we have, most are men. And great men (we tend to imagine) are society's engines of progress (winning battles and being captains of industry and whatnot).

So prioritising the voices of women, especially women of ethnic minority groups, is seen as profound risk. Because society already is pretty much fair, and great men are at the top because of their greatness. So raising up a woman means casting out a Great Manâ,,¢, and what are the chances that she's really up to the job?

The tiny flaw in this understanding of reality being - to paraphrase Blackadder - that it's bollocks.

Ah, so you seem to advocate for either some expansion of current law so it can control people more strictly, stripping them of freedoms to make personal decisions, or some other kind of extra-legal manner in which equality is enforced.

For the record: No. Thinking the Bechdel test is a useful critical tool != advocating for government mind control. This is the kind of hyperbole I'm talking about.

Also, saying than argument is bad because it can be used to justify terrible thing is not the same as saying that an argument is bad because it's used by bad people. Good people use bad arguments, and vice versa. I believe Blondbraid is saying that argument is bad in itself, because the same chain of reasoning has been used to justify things we all agree are unacceptable.

The fact that women can be equal before the law and still face social and structural barriers to equality is, arguably, what this entire 24 page thread is about.

Yes, Ali, I was making a hyperbolic joke. Well done for pointing that out. Good job.

I'm not absolutely clear on what makes that a joke, but perhaps you know more about comedy than me.

The point I would make is that critics of feminism (and Blondbraid) in this thread and beyond frequently resort to hyperbole and exaggeration and that makes a reasonable conversation difficult. Especially when those overstatements are partnered enormous understatements like claiming women are not "actively oppressed" outside of religious communities.

It's a lens that turns reality on its head, dismissing real-world inequality and painting progressives as totalitarian tyrants. (As a JOKE, I'm sure.)

This wasn't about anyone suggesting a book, it was about (hypothetically) judging and selecting all books based on the gender of their author, and I tried to explain why I think that's a bad idea. Let's not dwell on the hyperbole - I already conceded nobody is banning books and I'm not "outraged".

The thing is, you're not the only person dealing in hyperbole - Blondbraid has been accused of censorship once already in this thread, and it's a common refrain in this debate. I'm glad you've acknowledged it, of course.

I think gender-based quotas aren't a neat solution - I suspect it would be hard to study classics with a 50/50 gender split. But there are no neat solutions for complex social problems. Either way, calling for better representation of female authors isn't passing a judgment on men's writing. I'm not sure why selecting books based on gender would be more troubling than selecting based on language or nationality. In English Literature class we studied English Literature - is the implication that other nationalities write bad books?

I don't understand the issue, unless we believe that men have written better books than women, and that equal representation would mean replacing good books with worse books. Which, I think, is what people are actually afraid of.

Women who create entertainment aren't being locked up for daring to act outside of their assigned gender roles (well, except by other women who think they did it wrong. Hi, J.K. Rowling!)

Needless to say, the billionaire author JK Rowling has not been "locked up". Can we, for a moment, talk about the real world and not some paranoid conservative fever dream?

[roughly 129 million books]

Well, I may have overstated that a little bit . You are not suggesting banning books, you are just actively discouraging children from reading some of them.

I feel like we're re-treading the argument Blondbraid linked to about "banning" books, but I honestly find this baffling. Curriculums are limited by necessity, so anyone advocating for any book is calling for that book to be studied at the expense of roughly 129 million books. It's bizarre and wrong to compare it to banning books. The standard conservative stance seems to be that a highly selective reading list is perfectly acceptable - unless someone suggests an addition - at which point a selective reading list becomes an unconscionable Orwellian nightmare.

The hyperbole also obscures the fact that lots of books already are actually banned from curriculums across the world. Which is, for some reason, a cause of much less outrage. Last year, British schools were told not to accept teaching resources from anti-capitalist groups. A book called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin caused so much outrage in the UK that schools were still forbidden from promoting homosexuality or "teaching... of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" when I was in school.

> The roof is leaking.
< I know, but we have no ladder and the roofing company won't open until Monday. I put a bucket under the leak.
> Well that's not good enough. This is all taking far too long!
< Nothing we can do at this very moment.

A better analogy would be:

> The roof is leaking.
< It is in the roof's nature to leak. I don't like it any more than you do, but roofs have always leaked. Efforts to fix the roof are worse than leaks. Maybe one day when we are all dead the roof will stop leaking on it's own.
> Well that's not good enough. This is all taking far too long!
< AAAARGH! STOP NAGGING MEEEEEE!

If you are not a woman, it seems very unwise to risk treading into the territory of even trying to write female characters, for no matter how hard you try.

By this logic, authors would be limited only to writing about themselves. It's an absurdly reductive interpretation of "write what you know".

Women have been writing novels for as long as the medium has existed. If pervasive sexist tropes persist, it's not because female writers aren't trying hard enough.

I'm not in the habit of plugging podcasts, but I think a prime example of this is in this episode from the loremen podcast, wherein 1800s London, a number of women on the streets were non-fatally stabbed by a man who'd run away afterward, nicknamed "the London monster" by the public.

Thank you for the plug. One of the most revealing things about that story is how ready people were to believe a single monster, or a co-ordinated team of monsters were responsible for a spate of attacks. Because the unpalatable alternative was that men - in general - were in the habit of harassing and assaulting women in the street. (Of course, the podcast doesn't pass the Bechdel test, unfortunately.)

https://adventuregamespodcast.com/

This is a podcast, so not quite what you're talking about, but Seoirse has interviewed quite a lot of developers (some AGS), so it might be worth looking at for inspiration / reference.

I think Blondbraid is was right to give KyriakosCH the benefit of the doubt over "females" (initially), because he's writing in a second language and these sensitivities are culturally and linguistically specific. It's not semantically or grammatically wrong to say "a female", but there's more to communication than being technically correct.

We're talking about using adjectives as nouns, which can be an issue because it reduces a person to a particular characteristic. "A blonde woman" seems more neutral than "a blonde," which carries greater cultural baggage.

In my experience it's more offensive to say "a black person" than to say "blacks".

I'm not sure how "a black person" would be offensive, but "a black" sounds extremely iffy to me. It seems reasonable to follow an adjective up with a noun like "person" to make it clear that you're talking about an individual with a particular quality - not someone who is defined by that quality.

[I don't recall ever saying that female characters aren't sexualized]

Hey, I don't recall ever saying that female characters aren't sexualized. I said that this seems to usually be due to bad/lazy writing. Lara Croft, for example, obviously was sexualized in the game's box art
I also don't care about sexualized male characters - I played Gabriel Knight 1 and 3. I never claimed that such (Gabriel) are sexualized to comparable degree to female ones. Are you actually reading my posts? 

In the spirit of actually reading what the other person posted - I said you gave examples of female characters who you felt weren't sexualised (Grace Nakimura, and the Munch painting). I didn't accuse you of saying that female characters - in general - were not sexualised.

As I've said several times by now, my objection was that you seemed to be presenting cherry-picked examples as some kind of counterpoint, rebuttal or gotcha. If that wasn't your intention, I sincerely don't understand what point you've been making. It's convenient to dismiss sexist writing as bad, but that obscures the fact that what you consider bad writing is popular and influential, and that lots of good writing reproduces sexist tropes.

KyriakosCH has repeatedly given examples of female characters who he doesn't think are sexualised and male characters who he thinks are sexualised. The point he's making, I think, is that stereotyping and objectification are bad writing and affect both men and women. Deliberately or not, this rejects the reality the Bechdel test is based on - that male and female characters are not equal victims of stereotypical and sexist representation.

The Bechdel test is premised on the idea that political critique of media is valid. So when you insists that videogames are mere fripperies "made to amuse and entertain and distract", you reject that premise. That's something you're entitled to do, but it turns a conversation about the Bechdel test into a tiresome argument about the necessity of feminist critiques in general.

This is what seems to me to be a determination to defend the status quo - arguing either that the problem does not exist ("men are sexualised too!"), or that attempts to address the issue are themselves worse ("Oh noes! Anita Sarkeesian").

What you seem to be saying is, "Well WE thought it was funny to diminish Blondbraid and other feminists' experience, and repeatedly derail a potentially interesting conversation about the gender politics of games."

Of course humour is subjective, but when your jokes target other people and only amuse you and your mates - you're a bully.

I have simply tried to make light of heated exchanges that have taken place between members of the community.  It is not my fault
that nobody on here has a sense of humour.

I don't want to set myself up as a comedy expert, but when you keep making the same joke ("You people shouldn't take this serious issue so seriously!") over and over again and people don't laugh - it might not be a great joke.

That's quite right, Cassiebsg. However, I don't seem to be getting any. Whatever I say is wrong.

It's not disrespectful to disagree with someone. It is disrespectful to repeatedly troll this conversation, try to shut it down and close off avenues of discussion as you have.

It's a sign of how infantile conversations around video games are that Sarkeesian's unsensational, entry-level feminist takes on the medium cause people to flip their lid. Feminists have been writing like this about media for decades, and society has not collapsed, but macho crybabies can't handle a woman making mild observations on YouTube.

The Batman/Catwoman video is funny, but mostly because men and women have different body language, so it looks silly when you swap the models.

There are plenty of women who walk the way catwoman walks in that video, and I've honestly never seen anyone walk the way batman walks in the clip. It's extremely exaggerated, highly sexualised, and by no means a reflection of the way men and women walk.

There's a difference between being sexy/sexual on the one hand and sexualised/objectified on the other. An obvious example would be the way players mod games to make Lara Croft and other female characters naked, or more sexually appealing to them. I'm sure we're all aware of jokes about female characters' skimpy armour. These are aesthetic choices that make no sense if you treat the character as an individual.

I totally agree. I speak English with a heavy accent and that should be fine. Native Anglophones should be more tolerant with people speaking with an accent. The fact that a character speak with an accent means they can speak several languages so they are not intellectually inferior. A "non-white" should not have to be a perfect Anglophone to be seen as successfu - neither should a "white" from a non english speaking country.

I think it's perverse that a Bechdel-style test should require actors to speak "unaccented English" because there's no such thing. And it wrongly centres a particular accent (almost certainly an accent associated with white, middle-class speakers) as neutral. One of the things I try to appreciate about conversations on this forum is that I'm often speaking with people who are writing in English as a second language, which is enormously impressive given how bad we English speakers are with foreign languages.

It's true, of course, that southern Europeans (and/or Catholics) have faced discrimination in Northern Europe and the US. But it's also worth acknowledging that social hierarchies have gradients. In Jim Crow era America, Italian Americans could face overt discrimination, but still benefit from a status that excluded African Americans.

This is purely speculative, and I apologise if it's off-topic. But I wouldn't be surprised if the US occupation of Japan had some influence on the development of (seemingly) western character art in Manga and Anime. I know that the American occupiers were very concerned with propaganda in the Japanese film industry - not just censoring but deliberately promoting American values and, perhaps inevitably, western aesthetics. Pigs and Battleships is a terrific Japanese film satirising the period.

On topic, Blondbraid isn't the first woman I've met who absolutely loved Lara Croft. But that doesn't mean Croft wasn't designed to be sexually objectified. We don't have to take the binary view that everything is either good or bad.