Fortunately there are a lot of games to choose from on smartphones / tablets. And a burgeoning indie game scene. Choice is always good. If big-budget popular isnāt your thing (and even then, not all big-budget and popular is necessarily violent 18+, consider something like The Sims) there are plenty of other places to go.
Fortunately there are a lot of game critics to choose from on the Internet. And a burgeoning YouTube game critic scene. Choice is always good. If TIME 100 popular isnāt your thing (and even then, not all TIME 100 popular is necessarily feminist) there are plenty of other places to go.
āvideo gameā journalism is awful and has been forever. If you have a pulse, and an opinion, and a like of āgamesā, the world is your oyster.
(note that my twitter comment predates any controversy, specifically any controversy that might have started in say, August 2014)
āDominationā is hardly any more real than any other philosophy, itās not the universal that many people make it out to be. I think the concept has relevance to this discussion, but should not be assumed generally.
Depends what you think of as ājournalismā. If you means reviews and PR hype, Iād agree. But for the internals of game technologies and asset creation, I think itās fairly good.
There have been studies showing that newborn baby boys are treated more roughly and not spoken to as much as newborn girls by delivery room nurses. Socialization starts a lot earlier than in a classroom or even at the toddler phase.
Do you have a citation for these studies? Are they modern? Babies are pretty universally loved by most people, and visible gender differences are quite minimal at birth.
Other than the enormous scrotums on the boys, and blue tags saying āBaby Boy [family name]ā and pink tags saying āBaby Girl [family name]ā.
I mean, seriously. Whatās up with that. They were HUGE.
No, I know why. No need to bio-splain!
I dunno, when you have a baby, you get a lot of āboy or girl?ā questions. Unless you introduce the baby with a very gender specific name. I donāt recall color coded bracelets, but our kids were all born in Berkeley where I am sure that kind of stuff goes over like a lead balloon.
This is our baby Sue. Itās a boy.
You also donāt tend to introduce babies by shoving their genitalia in peopleās faces, but different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Must be an East Coast thang.
But socialization begins far before kids are in school. It can be both obvious in some cases or subtle. My overall point is not that there its all nurture, but rather itās far from a settle question, and unless you can take kids, and raise them in a completely neutral way, with no outside cultural stimuli, weāll likely never know the answer. We can probably make inferences by looking at different constructions of gender across cultural lines. Nor is gender socialization necessarily a bad thing, in general. Itās part of being able to navigate our society. But it can be constraining, and it can be destructive, and it can be especially hurtful to those who donāt conform to social expectations around gender. Again, the reality of gender dismorphia (am I spelling that correctly?) throws a monkey wrench into our understanding of gender from all angles - nature and nurture, etc. What causes someone to feel as if they are in the wrong body? We just donāt know.
And I donāt think the link you posted really gets down to the answer to that question, either. It does illustrate one of the many ways that women are hemmed in by the culture we live in.
My point was that culture is mutable if nature is not, hence itās something we can talk about and even work to change. Itās a cultural question to ask why to men (and yes, women, too) like to view violence or act out violence? Does it have positive or negative social effects? If men are more prone to violence, is that nature or nurture, some combination of both?
I think the core question is what are the roots of misogynistic behavior. Are games? Or are the some of the people who play these violent, misogynistic games already angry towards women? Iām inclined towards the latter - maybe those types are drawn towards these games for precisely these reasons - they want to hurt women and this is an outlet for them. So, I donāt know where that leaves us other than to say itās complicatedā¦
ETA: Just causeā¦
Thor is pretty? Didnāt we discuss this before? Itās Loki thatās prettyā¦
Well, there doesnāt appear to be any practical benefit to it that I have ever witnessed.
Well, it does give people a sense of belonging and helps them fit into the social structure of our society. But then there are the many, many, MANY people who just donāt fit into their assigned roles. So, yeah, Iām inclined to agree with you.
Heās even prettier in that vampire film with David Bowie
The data says nature.
In a 2004 mathematical synthesis of 196 studies (known as a meta-analysis), psychologist John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire in England found that men are more physically aggressive (by various measures) than women across all ages, with the difference peaking between the ages of 20 and 30. This sex difference extended to all 10 countries Archer examined, which included the U.S., Finland, Spain, India, Japan and New Zealand. Interestingly, researchers have found men to be more physically aggressive in their mental lives as well. Compared with women, men harbor more frequent and enduring homicidal fantasies, more often think about enacting revenge against their enemies, and report more physically aggressive dreams.
Personally I would much rather get that kind of stuff out of my system by playing violent (and fun!) games. Why does it have to have anything to do with women?
I suppose there is a relationship in that the testosterone driven sex urges men have, as you can see from the porn stats I quoted upstream, have a similar outlet in porn, as our testosterone driven aggression urges have in violent gamesā¦
I feel like when we say āyes, well, some women view porn and like violence tooā it is kind of a ānot all womenā argument. They do, but at vastly lower rates, orders of magnitude in difference.
Considering that in the referenced study, nearly 70 percent of men had viewed porn multiple times in the last week, compared to 18 percent of women. And 20 percent of women had never watched porn compared to a mere 2 percent of men. These are not small gender differences. They are huge gender differences.
Or as Louis CK put it, āyouāre a tourist at sexual perversion, Iām a prisoner there.ā
Citations are recent, yes, but Iām going to have to search my files for them.
Itās not that boy babies arenāt loved, but itās engrained in us to treat boys more roughly and girls like delicate little flowers, so the fact that even nurses in the delivery room follow this pattern is a great example of how pervasive the problem is.
