sexism

Dead Island’s developer Techland and their reaction to sexism – patch this misogyny

After the rockiest start a game has ever seen on Steam, Techland has brought out their latest in a slew of apologies, detailed over at 1up. Unfortunately, the discovery on the Steam forums is closed to the public, and it has become increasingly difficult to find out the manner in which the line of code had been found.

 

Instead, users have taken to blatant bashing on behalf of “come on, give me a break, it’s just a game” type of attitudes. To which I say, yes, it is a game, so why do you care that I care?

Techland has unwillingly brought back the giant elephant in the room of gaming: blatant female shaming. The sexism is something you get used to when playing pretty much anything, and after decades of said playing, there’s hardly been any progress. And, much like in society, if you dare bring it up, you better shut up quick because people might yell at you. Women don’t need to show constant skin.

They can be conservative in their choice of dress, and still it can be construed as sexist. Conversely, women don’t need to don heavy armor to prove a point either. They don’t need to have defined muscles, flaxen skin, long hair, or even perfect vision. They don’t need to be this weight or that. Women don’t need to be built (and in the case of video games, quite literally) to anyone’s standards except to their own characterizations respectively.

If you’re going to defend one kind of woman, there is absolutely no need to tear down another. Saying you like Portal’s Chell over Soul Calibur’s Ivy because one dresses “reasonably” and less like a whore only shows how misinformed you are. Because not only is Chell wearing an outfit designed for test subjects, but also, I don’t believe you’ve ever seen a prostitute. And more importantly, what exactly is wrong with dressing like a prostitute?

Characters like Princess Peach is deigned a whore and is subject to other terrible name-calling because she’s in constant need of saving and only wears a pink ball gown all the time. What’s most unfortunate is that her one foray into action and adventure was a solo encounter that hardly anyone got to see. What jumped to me though was not that it was impractical for her to save the world in a ball gown, but how awesome it was. It does the female character a disservice to bash her in her choices of clothing rather than her actions.

If you really want to put a perspective on the double standards in regards to brutal objectification, you have to look at it objectively. Presented are the male characters vs. female characters in commonly conceptions of physical form. One looks more pristinely angelic, almost, while the latter is put into a heavily sexualized or infantilized box. Take genitalia for instance. Women’s assets, from head to toe, are exposed. It doesn’t matter if she’s supposed to be wearing a lab coat or winter wear; for some reason or another, a woman’s entire figure is displayed in a skin-tight model. Men, on the other hand, are essentially stick figures. Give them muscles, some facial hair here and there, but in the end they’re two legs, two arms, a neck, a head, and a torso. in fact, I’m led to believe all my favorite male characters must be eunuchs of some sort. They were all at some point or another neutered, just like pets. Further, male characters may feature nipples, but in other regards, are missing the better part of their sex organs. I find it highly unlikely that many heroes in the workforce would lack those. If not, then I really need to take my high school biology classes over again.

Now, with that in mind, how should that relate to how women are viewed in gaming? And what really is so wrong about Feminist Whore anyway? Dead Island’s Purna is not a saint by any means. She takes to the more lascivious tactics and uses her own body to her advantage. That’s what is said in her own character bio. Considering this was after her own termination and loss of power, it’s a testament to the state of society she lives in. Not only that, but her termination was a result of her taking direct physical action against a sexual assailant. Nothing in her world has ever been fair, and she has already accepted her fate as a disenfranchised, nearly second class citizen. Racial and class implications aside.

And yet, a programmer wrote in code decidedly shaming her for it.



Maybe she is a feminist whore. After all, she deals more damage against male zombies (leaving aside the fact that they’re just zombies, of course) as you build the skill. Perhaps she uses her feminist whore skills to good use. What’s so wrong with that? Well, it wasn’t explained. It’s something we’re all supposed to assume is all right because she’s a woman who’s a feminist and uses her body. However, Purna never says she’s a whore. She wears a tight-fitting dress, adorned with accessories of her choosing, all in bright purple. But she’s never said she was a whore. She is admittedly a feminist. Don’t tell me feminist is a bad word when I just mentioned whore. She was a cop in a man’s world. If she wasn’t a feminist, then she wouldn’t have valued herself. It’s that simple.

So why go out of your way to namecall? And did she ever turn tricks for pay? Or was that implication determined once you saw the clothes, the hair, the makeup, and the color of her skin? If that’s the case, you look like someone who downloads porn endlessly and your hand is tired. Though my point is not to shift vitriol from one angle to another. If anything, I’m trying to understand why the immediate response is either apathy or misplaced anger. Purna is an ex-cop-turned-bodyguard who now kills zombies at an island resort. What right does anyone have calling a fictional character a feminist whore? And more importantly, why write it as a skill?

In truth, some of the weirdest habits are bound to pop up from writing line after line of code. The popular blog site Tumblr utilizes the terms “menu_nipple” and “forever alone” for their home page. There are weird things to find in code because it’s always been built by individuals and the work is almost always invisible. And after working so hard, who’s really going to supervise hundreds of lines of words and letters? I’m sure it was a bit more of a shock, since modders have been looking at any given build’s code for years, and this was set apart from the rest since so many have taken notice. And I for one, am glad this has been unearthed. It’s a bit more cathartic knowing I didn’t log in hours of gameplay only to be utilizing such a gross misogynist sentiment without ever knowing the wiser. At least now that I’m aware of it, that though at some point someone might have thought that of her, whoever she is, she wholly isn’t. She may be fictional, but she sure isn’t going to stand for insipid degradation.
 
Man Sues London School Of Economics For 'Sexism' 

The esteemed London School of Economics (LSE), home to the largest gender studies program in Europe, has been hit with a lawsuit by a former Masters student claiming it teaches “systemic sexism.”

The man, 39-year-old Tom Martin, based in London, began pursuing an MSc degree in gender, media and culture at the LSE’s Gender Institute in October 2009. He withdrew six weeks later, citing “anti-male discrimination” in the coursework.
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“Its programs actively block men’s discourse and perpetuate the men-bad, women-good dialogue,” Martin told me by phone yesterday. “I want gender studies to be more inclusive for men.”

The university says it found no evidence of discrimination in an internal investigation, but as a “goodwill gesture” offered Martin a full refund in January 2010, which he accepted.

Now Martin, who is representing himself, has filed over 200 pages of “evidence” with the Central London County Court and is seeking 50,000 GBD (or about $80,000) in damages for his claims of sex discrimination, breach of contract, misleading advertising, misrepresentation and breach of The Gender Equality Duty Act, a 2007 law meant to promote equality between men and women. An LSE representative said via email, “We emphatically reject the complaint made.”

Martin, who calls himself a “feminist” and a “men’s rights activist,” said he did a line-by-line analysis of the core texts taught in the gender classes and decided they were “overwhelmingly negative on men, blamed men for women’s perceived inequalities, and complained about misogyny but never spoke about misandry [which is defined as the hatred of men].” Martin declined to provide me with a list of the texts.

“Course content and core readings are reviewed annually,” said a statement from the university. “They reflect the Institute’s concern to give as broad as possible account of some of the key debates that structure the field–debates about sex and gender, nature and culture, production and reproduction, how power should be theorised and so on.”

According to Martin, issues facing men today that require more attention include: the gender gap in college graduation rates, unequal parental leave and pay, shorter life expectancies, uneven conscription practices, more and longer criminal punishments, a greater risk of execution and “no acknowledgment” of men’s particular health threats in scientific research and major media outlets.

He’s not the only one voicing these concerns. In the U.S., the newly formed Foundation for Male Studies aims to add more interdisciplinary courses in major universities that examine men in society.

However, in an op-ed in UK publication The Guardian, author Jonathan Dee all but laughs at Martin’s claims. “The dominant ideas, approaches and insights of the vast majority of academic disciplines are produced by, for and about men,” he wrote. “Gender studies is an attempt to critique this entrenched male bias… It strikes me as utterly bemusing that one would want to direct one’s ire towards one of the few academic spaces in which the implications of biases that go largely unchallenged elsewhere are explored.”

While Martin claims he’s after egalitarianism only, some of his views may raise eyebrows. “I don’t buy that women were oppressed by men historically,” he said. “There’s a perverse incentive in gender studies to preserve the inequalities that women face.” He also believes that men are the “victims” of prostitution, that women “volunteer” into sex trafficking and that women’s “hysterical” fear of rape damages equality