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Also: did Sweden ever actually pass that one law where they threatened the government would seize assets of private corporations if they failed to fulfill gender quotas in their board of directors? I recall that being a pretty major news piece over in Finland several years back, as it was painted as "those wacky Swedes being at it again" over here. Since I haven't heard of it since, I'm guessing no.

As a Swede, I've never heard of such a law, but beware that there's been plenty of right-wing blogs spreading fake news about Sweden.

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.

Indeed, some of this debate on feminism  is starting to look a lot like those conservative Americans who'll equate any politics left of Reagan as pure Stalinism.

And yeah, I'm not talking about something bad people brought up once, I'm saying that that kind of reasoning has always been used by people wishing to restrict human rights to groups outside of  themselves.

[exactly]

Ever heard the saying; Your freedom to swing you fist ends where my nose begins?

And again, none of the attmpts to implement any such laws in Sweden has impacted anyones freedom in any significant way, and freedom to opress and discriminate isn't real freedom for the opressed, is it? Your last reply sounds like poor 1984 fanfiction.

Plus you know men used exactly the same arguments you used now when things like domestic beatings and outright barring female applicants for various jobs was outlawed.

Well, the problem is that people already are favoring men because of their gender, not consciously, but if somebody is setting up a school curriculum meant to represent a wide selection of perspectives, and all of them are male authors,
that is a bias in favour of men. And it's not like I'm suggesting we should replace great male authors with any female hack writing harlequin novels, you'd still have to choose female authors based on their talent in writing, having gender equality
in the school curriculum would merely mean replacing an proabably unintended bias with awareness and actively working to give students a chance to read a fair amount from both halves of the population instead of just one.

This looks like a whole new can of worms I'm not sure I want to get into (mostly because I haven't made up my mind - I can see your perspective but I'm not as convinced of it), but at least it seems we can agree on the core concern. You're not saying books should be picked based on the author's gender (maybe with some exceptions where it's directly relevant to the content), you believe that it's already happening and want to correct that. Do I get it?

Pretty much. I think many people have a blind spot on this because society treats men as the default in lots of situations, for example, an all-female cast with only one token guy in a film or book is exceptionally rare,
but stories with an all-male cast and just one woman are a dime a dozen and not treated as weird.

Now, I don't think there should be quotas on jobs requiring specific niche competencies, like say, bridge engineers or brain surgeons, where there are incredibly few qualified people to begin with,
but on school book curriculums, where the entire point is to get students to explore different perspectives and learn to analyze the works of an author, making them read diverse perspectives matter a lot,
and there are so many good authors to choose from so it wouldn't be hard to find a good sample size of female authors just as good as any of the male ones on the curriculum.

[homosexuality was forbidden by law until the 1940s]

And as for natural changes over time, the idea that people just naturally started accepting LGBT people is laughable. In my homeland, lauded as one of the most progressive countries, homosexuality was forbidden by law until the 1940s,
and legally defined as a disease until the 1970s, and it only became acceptable and legal because people actively fought to make people accept it as something healthy and normal, and constant activism, which was often met by the exact same
arguments you're been making against feminism in this very thread.

Same timeline in Finland. Why do you think those classifications changed over time? That funny 30 year time skip between the shifts in attitude? It's the natural change I'm talking about in action. New generations and new ideas replacing the old.

And what do you think changed the minds of the new generations? If it was just a natural shift happening every generation, there wouldn't be any oppression lasting for centuries or even millenia. Homosexuality was seen as a sin since
biblical times, for multiple generations with little change, and you think it's a coincidence it was decriminalized first when all men and women had had the right to vote and get a full education, and political movements for the masses had been allowed for a generation?
And there was multiple big activist movements in the sixties that brought about legal change, or did you miss the history on the gay rights movements, civil rights movements, women's movements and anti-Vietnam War movements campaigning at the time, and how they had a massive impact in changing public perception, and eventually the politics, on all those issues?

Welcome back in the game Blondbraid..... Looks good 

Thanks! 

[roughly 129 million books]

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.

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".

Well, the problem is that people already are favoring men because of their gender, not consciously, but if somebody is setting up a school curriculum meant to represent a wide selection of perspectives, and all of them are male authors,
that is a bias in favour of men. And it's not like I'm suggesting we should replace great male authors with any female hack writing harlequin novels, you'd still have to choose female authors based on their talent in writing, having gender equality
in the school curriculum would merely mean replacing an proabably unintended bias with awareness and actively working to give students a chance to read a fair amount from both halves of the population instead of just one.

Well, some guys will interpret anything a woman says as nagging. Not pointing any fingers, just putting it out there.

Funny you think nagging, and pointing it out, are both gendered actions. I consider both acts gender neutral.

Well, I can't recall the last time I've ever heard a man being told he nags too much when complaining about something.

And secondly, glasshouses and all that. You're the one who's kept saying " but why don't women make your own games/books" several times now despite me and several others point out that even if more women do that,
they still won't have the money and resources as giant companies who have the money and manpower to mass-market their stories and reach a worldwide audience most can never dream of, and you keep painting any suggestion
of how to improve anything as a fool's errand, and seemingly keep arguing for the status quo for the sake of it.

This is exactly why I asked the question of what you suggest, and the sad outcome of that is that you, just like every other person I've talked to about the topic, has found themselves in the same dead end. No concrete actions that could be taken, so all people can do is nag other people around them and hope that SOMEONE comes up with a solution. Your only suggested action was dictating more closely what books children are made to read as part of their education based on a non-educational criteria, which does seem to be along the lines of ideas I've seen other feminists have in other areas, so that checks out.

To me it seems the only paths to solving this issue are:
1) A harsh authoritarian regime that strictly controls what kinds of entertainment, and most importantly created by whom, are permitted for public consumption and in what amounts.
2) A natural change of attitudes over time, as audiences change and grow and generational changes bring about changes in demographics and interests, much like we've seen in the whole LGBTTQQPPAA+ movements success in becoming mainstream in most of the civilized world in a few short decades.

Well, Sweden has been perfectly capable of starting several of the things I suggested without devolving into whatever dystopia you think would appear.
And schools already are dictating what kids read, I'm merely saying they should get to read and learn to empathize with both halves of the population.
And empathy is a learned trait and will be affected by what we are taught, so it is an educational criteria.

And as for natural changes over time, the idea that people just naturally started accepting LGBT people is laughable. In my homeland, lauded as one of the most progressive countries, homosexuality was forbidden by law until the 1940s,
and legally defined as a disease until the 1970s, and it only became acceptable and legal because people actively fought to make people accept it as something healthy and normal, and constant activism, which was often met by the exact same
arguments you're been making against feminism in this very thread.

There is not one single human right or societal improvement that's just been randomly appearing over time, and even what we today see as the most basic things like equality before the law and the right for every man and woman to vote
was scoffed at by conservatives as wanting too much too fast and horror stories about how society would devolve into a godless dystopia if people who weren't men from the elite classes were allowed to make their voices heard.

I've started, though the background is currently a placeholder:

As you see it will be about exploring an island whilst on a journey across the sea.

[Critique isn't censorship.]

I personally think culture would benefit from ... school curriculums requiring students to read books of an equal number of male and female authors...

Also: Critique isn't censorship. Stop treating people criticizing bad writing as equal to a book ban.

Your suggestion is, in effect, pretty much equal to a book ban.

How is it that? I don't get it.
Putting one book on the school curriculum instead of another book is not the same thing as banning a book and actively preventing people from reading it. It's already been discussed in this thread.

There is also a difference between criticising something, and nagging about something.

> 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.

- 10 minutes pass.
> The roof is leaking.
< Well what do you want to do about it!?
> I'm just pointing out the issue! I can do that without suggesting a fix, right?
< ...yes

- 10 minutes pass
> The roof is leaking.
< !!!!!!

---

Still, though. Critique away! I think you have every right to point out these issues and talk about them, just like I have the right to critique your critique and, occasionally, disagree with portions of it, or challenge some of your views.
I just tend to be the practical sort, and I feel that there is a point where repeatedly complaining about an issue while not being able to suggest any concrete actions that might actually resolve the issue, becomes counterproductive. Thus I try to challenge you on the topic, to try and see if we can think of concrete actions that could resolve the matter and put an end to the need to point out these issues, as they become resolved.

Well, some guys will interpret anything a woman says as nagging. Not pointing any fingers, just putting it out there.

Plus firstly, this is a thread dedicated to media analysis, so is it so weird that this is what gets focused on here? And I believe raising awareness and bringing up info does make a difference,
and looking from the earlier replies in this thread, there are plenty of people here who honestly want to learn new perspectives and have a decent space to discuss them. And at least in Sweden,
a few cinemas started marking which of their films passed the Bechdel test exactly because people were discussing it and arguing for more films that passed it, so these things do make a difference.

And secondly, glasshouses and all that. You're the one who's kept saying " but why don't women make your own games/books" several times now despite me and several others point out that even if more women do that,
they still won't have the money and resources as giant companies who have the money and manpower to mass-market their stories and reach a worldwide audience most can never dream of, and you keep painting any suggestion
of how to improve anything as a fool's errand, and seemingly keep arguing for the status quo for the sake of it.

[already are]

The thing is that when you don't know about the subject, you do research, and find what people who have lived through those things say about it.
Good historical authors read history books, people writing war stories read testimonies of veterans, etcetera.
And what does it say about an author's view of women when they think 50% of humanity isn't worth speaking in depth to, empathize with, or learning enough about to portray believably?

Precisely, you do research if you want to portray something in an accurate and realistic manner. Or you don't, and you work on well known stereotypes to make something less serious. The latter is, obviously, also far easier to do, and thus more popular.
You also seem to portray this as purely a male problem, the failure to know how to write characters of the opposite sex well. I do wonder if that really is the case, though.

Well, there are plenty of examples of male authors who fail to write any good female characters and still considered good authors,
but I can't think of a single female writer who gets lauded as a good author and praised for interesting female characters while simultaneously being completely unable to write decent male characters.

I've already spoken about this in this thread before; most women here already are telling their own stories in AGS games or the Fortnightly writing competition, but that still can't be compared with the vast entertainment networks that dominate the public and the broad market, all of which are strongly male-dominated. Heck, just buying a full computer plus most of the Adobe and Autodesk licenses that AAA game developers use costs more than I make in a month!

Plus you shouldn't have to be a chef in order to be allowed to say if the food tastes bad, should you?

So what do you propose, then? Some kind of government mandated balancing of power in the media industry, slashing male jobs until we have 50-50 representation? Or forced education of male artists, to ensure they create art with the correct balance of genders in a manner that accurately depicts the lived experience of women? I'm sure you're a smarter person than that, so I am genuinely curious: what do you, Blondbraid, personally believe should be done?

I suggested before that we need a slow and steady change over time, but you rejected than and demanded a faster change.
I suggest that women should create more, even on the small scale, and await for their eventual breakout successes that allow them to hit it big in the mainstream, but you shot that down as well.
All I can see is a demand: "I want change and I want it now!", but I cannot recall seeing any concrete suggestions on steps that could be taken to correct the issue, and I can't really think of any that wouldn't trample all over the freedom of artists to create what they want, how they want.

Again, you should be able to criticize societal trends without having an expert solution on hand.

I personally think culture would benefit from more grants and sponsorships to female artists and directors, and school curriculums requiring students to read books of an equal number of male and female authors to teach kids about multiple perspectives, and I think open criticism and discussion of media from a wider sociological perspective needs to be encouraged, and the scientifically proven effect media has on our values and beliefs acknowledged by the public, and hopefully one day the "it's just a movie/game/comic, it doesn't matter" argument will be seen as on par with anti-waxers.

Also: Critique isn't censorship. Stop treating people criticizing bad writing as equal to a book ban.

But even if you dislike these solutions I've suggested I ask, how on earth do you think anything in the world could ever change for the better if nobody ever criticized the status quo?
Do you just think that everything will just get better by itself? Had you lived 200 years earlier, would you have told the suffragettes and abolitionists to just wait everything out?

Speaking of things that disturb me that shouldn't.
These things are at the top of that list:

I don't find the LoL dolls much worse than your average moe anime, but then again, I don't like the average anime face aesthetic much in general.

The most disturbing thing with that doll brand for me is that they thought a child's toy looking like Michael Jackson was OK, considering the allegations against him.

[already are]

this is what lots of men fantasize about

That is absolutely fair enough, Blondbraid. I'm sure there are (but certainly nobody I would associate with long enough to become my friends).

With respect, however, you are proceeding from 'lots of men fantasise about this' to 'every man must read this to check their fantasies'.

I'm not saying every man wants that, but I think everyone should read the quote because it's a good and thought-provoking quote.
I've tried to criticize broad structural trends and not individuals personally, and I hope this clears it up.

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.

Well put! If you could only write about what you have lived through, no one would be able to write any historical novels ever for a start.

The thing is that when you don't know about the subject, you do research, and find what people who have lived through those things say about it.
Good historical authors read history books, people writing war stories read testimonies of veterans, etcetera.
And what does it say about an author's view of women when they think 50% of humanity isn't worth speaking in depth to, empathize with, or learning enough about to portray believably?

All of this seems to come back to the basic concept: women should create more, and be the change they want to see, rather than try to squeeze water from stone in the form of forcing established male writers to write outside of what they know.

I've already spoken about this in this thread before; most women here already are telling their own stories in AGS games or the Fortnightly writing competition, but that still can't be compared with the vast entertainment networks that dominate the public and the broad market, all of which are strongly male-dominated. Heck, just buying a full computer plus most of the Adobe and Autodesk licenses that AAA game developers use costs more than I make in a month!

Plus you shouldn't have to be a chef in order to be allowed to say if the food tastes bad, should you?

But alas, what is a fun trope or stereotype to one, can be disgusting to another. Like most jokes that target a type of people, whether it be blacks, whites, gay, motorcyclists, gingers or cat owners, it's often the least entertaining to the people who are the butt of the joke, or in this case, the subject of the trope or stereotype.

You've actually hit the nail solidly on the head there.

Good discussion everybody.

I think this paragraph should be required reading for every man trying to write a female love interest

Funnily enough I watched Gone Girl very recently (great movie), and this scene / passage from the book just confused me.

What is its purpose? I understand that the monologue has become iconic for some feminists (see here and here).

But to my mind it is just the words of a character in a novel (an extraordinarily evil and vengeful character). This interview with Flynn in The Guardian suggests to me the evilness of Amy was the primary feminist motivation of the book. Flynn says that feminism is 'also the ability to have women who are bad characters… the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing'.

For me, the 'Cool Girl' monologue is owned entirely by Amy's character, and it certainly does not reveal any real-life wisdom on how 'men' actually think, or how 'women' perceive they should be. Flynn's 'lurid plots make no claim to social realism: to interpret her evil female characters as somehow representative of their real-life gender, you must willfully overlook hundreds of pages of other people and events that you'd almost certainly never encounter in reality, either.'

So I am absolutely on the same page as Danvzare here:

Having read that paragraph, all I can say is that no guy wants a girl like that.

I will add that some men probably do, but at least no man I've ever met in my life.

My overall point is that I don't need to read the Cool Girl monologue in order to write a female love interest. It is a monologue that is a work of fiction in itself.

Well, plenty of authors have used their villains as a way to highlight faults in society for ages, and as for whether men who want a girl like the dialogue describes exists,
there are enough droves of stories written by male authors featuring female love interests who do nothing but orbit the male hero and/or is willing to drop all of her previous goals and connections to elope with him to give many women the impression that well, this is what lots of men fantasize about.

Simply put, it resonates with a lot of women because men keep writing and idealizing such characters in fiction and commercials, not to mention all the memes and social media posts.
(I still remember how popular this post got.)

I'm also confused by how the "cool girl" trope can be interpreted as sexist. I can read it uncharitably it as a self-serving fantasy of guys who expect a woman to cater to their selfish needs without having needs of her own. I can also read it charitably as wanting a partner who shares your hobbies and interests. I can even read it as a statement that a woman acting masculine (eating chilly hot dogs, playing videogames) is cool. I don't think any of this is gendered - women have shallow and selfish fantasies too, and they also create tropes which frame partners as service-providers rather than real human beings. It's a general human tendency that's hardly exclusive to relationships and gender. It's dumb, but I'm failing to see the sexism in it.

Not that there aren't a lot of unhealthy fantasies to criticize in female-centered romances, but the difference to me is that such things tend to be confined within the "trashy romance book" genre, and widely mocked from all parts of the spectrum (most people I know of either think they're trash, or a guilty pleasure but acknowledge they're still bad and unrealistic), whereas the shallow female love interests by male authors exist in every genre, and some of them even in works that are considered great classics.

Secondly, I also think romance books are chock full of sexist stereotypes and that two wrongs don't make a right.

In other words Teenage Mutant Ninja Birds. In that case their creepiness is intentional, but no matter what, they never match the creepiness of the Micheal Bay produced TMNT.

What's really worse, Michael Bay turtles or the live-action Sonic?

Something I've always been weirded out by is the feet of coots, they just don't look right to me, they look like absurdly long claws with some leftover skin scraps haphazardly attached to them;
Anyone else find this creepy-looking?

Not so much creepy-looking, but odd.
These leftover skin scraps do give them the ability to run over water, which is awesome 

Huh, I've seen them about in different ponds and rivers for years, but I've never seen them run on the water surface before! 

That chimp T-shirt...

Agreed.

Keeping your mouth shut or even laughing at said jokes you're supporting that kind of behavior. Those guys just feel reassured and validated, because they'll never be confronted about their sexist or racist views. If anything they need to keep their mouthes shut.

Plus it's not just validating bad guys, if you don't see anyone else speaking out, you have zero way of telling the gross bigots apart from "nice guys" who don't want to be bigoted but just don't want to "kill the vibes",
and it gets easy to believe that every one of them is nodding along because they genuinely agree with the bigotry, and you are weird and alone and should just stop caring.

It's that kind of stuff that leads to cases of schools simply expelling bullying victims to get rid of the "troublemaker" complaining rather than taking the work and effort to show the bullies that what they're doing isn't accepted.

One thing that changed me were game jams. I had a bit of spare time in 2020 and took part to two 14-day game jams, and I found out that my main problem was that I was too focused on making something "perfect". With the time limitation of a game jam, I had to make compromises with myself and accept that what I was doing was "good enough", and in the end, I'm pretty proud of the games I published.

I second that, AdvXJam helped me finally push a game out and it felt really good at first... but in a weird way, it's backfiring now. Seeing how forgiving low-res can be and how it's actually possible to finish a game if you set reasonable goals, I've been having trouble returning to the endless, impossible, stupid overreach my bigger game seems to be compared to that. I still have plenty of extra time on my hands thanks to covid, but I haven't really touched Truth be Trolled since Christmas, and the procrastination guilt is piling up :/.

Don't beat yourself up too much, I haven't done a non-Mags game since 2018, and I still haven't found the energy to restart something more ambitious yet. I think the most important thing to try to do is to find a small sub-task to start with to get back to contributing to the bigger stuff, though I'm not exactly following my own advice right now... 

It's rare to see a thread where every single reply feels immensely relatable to me personally, but this one sure is.

Also, of course they were all laughing at the same sexist and homophobic jokes, it's called reading the room. Trust me, you don't want to be the one guy to point out that this joke (or comment) is sexist, homophobic, or racist, in the middle of a friendly conversation. You aren't going to change them, you're just going to piss them off, and probably even make them worse (I'm not kidding, it's a psychological effect that happens).
I mean sure, if it goes too far, step in, but otherwise keep your mouth shut. 
You don't stop that stuff by highlighting it every chance you get.

You don't need to do it every chance you get. Most people are normal enough that if you say it once, they won't repeat it in front of you specifically. And if just a second person from the same group says it again, then they'll usually be "Oh, I guess I shouldn't publicly make these sort of jokes".

I say this is why standing up for others is the most important thing you can do in your daily life, because if somebody is willing to risk ruining the mood and be labeled a killjoy prude for calling out a mean joke,
chances are it's really that bad, and while I can agree that one person calling it out mighrt not change anything, those who do often do so exactly because they hope to bring it to light to decent people who might have missed the severity of it.

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.)

Just goes to show not everything has to pass the test in order to be a good commentary!