Assuming this stat is true (and if it is, I assume it’s based on porn produced by professional production companies), I bet the reason is the gender gap in wages in porn. Males get paid less than females. Or it could just mean more about bwv812’s porn viewing habits than I want to know. 
I play games, I don’t visit gamer websites.
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I agree with much you have to say, but I feel like much of it confirms what I said.
You list Beautiful Katamari (which I own and agree is awesome) as a game you’re playing - a game in which the protagonist is next to irrelevant to the gameplay itself… it doesn’t even say anything, short of adorable meaningless sounds. It is also one of few modern video games my girlfriend has ever wanted to play.
You also said that ‘You don’t have to start making “girl games” with glitter and dating to attract women’ which is directly contradicted by what happened with The Sims - the first ever video game to sell more copies to women than men. It’s not glittery, but it sure as hell contains dating.
Finally, there has been female soldiers in Call Of Duty for a couple of the last versions. They wear military gear and are in no way sexualised. I’ve not noticed any change in the number of women playing COD.
I agree that there is a chorus of assholes online but hey, this is the internet and they’re par for the course. That’s why I recommend you just mute all, it’s what I do purely so I don’t have to listen to some pre-pubescent turd’s “comedy” act.
You list Beautiful Katamari (which I own and agree is awesome) as a game you’re playing - a game in which the protagonist is next to irrelevant to the gameplay itself… it doesn’t even say anything, short of adorable meaningless sounds. It is also one of few modern video games my girlfriend has ever wanted to play.
What exactly does this confirm? Yes, the protagonist is indeed pretty irrelevant to the gameplay and the characters are there to be weirdos. But you could argue that a lot of triple A games that attempt to have a story really don’t have one that makes any difference. There might be cutscenes every now and then which attempt to give motivation to the character - enemies are attacking these villagers, help them! - but it’s not at all interesting or engaging, and you could take them out of the game and still enjoy it just as much. Most games where I couldn’t give a rats ass about the protagonist have been generic FPS titles.
If your point is that women like games like Beautiful Katamari because it doesn’t have an actual, meaningful protagonist and not because it’s fun and easy to pick up and start playing even if you’re not an avid gamer (my boyfriend only ever plays stategy games, but loves playing Katamari with me every now and then - so I guess we’re in the same boat)? Because my experience has been to the contrary. Most women I know are big fans of japanese RPGs and adventure games (the click-and-point type), which are the games with the best stories around, on top of the engaging and challening gameplay.
[quote=“teapot, post:124, topic:18429”]You also said that ‘You don’t have to start making “girl games” with glitter and dating to attract women’ which is directly contradicted by what happened with The Sims - the first ever video game to sell more copies to women than men. It’s not glittery, but it sure as hell contains dating.
[/quote]
I never said women couldn’t want that, just that it’s not necessary. I don’t deny that many women like games like the Sims, but it’s not a “girl game” in the sense what I was talking about (I suggest you google the terrible, terrible games some misguided people have made because they thought that what we need is “games for girls”, which apparently means eliminating fun alltogether). Though I don’t much care for Sims, I’ve understood that dating is just a small part of it and it’s more about the fun of creating a whole life and then just doing whatever the heck you want with it.
Finally, there has been female soldiers in Call Of Duty for a couple of the last versions. They wear military gear and are in no way sexualised. I’ve not noticed any change in the number of women playing COD.
But CoD didn’t really have any overly sexualized women in the game to begin with, did it (I wouldn’t know because I don’t like WW2 type of FPS games - I’ll take sci-fi stuff like Halo and Dead Space over it anyway)? My point was that the games that only have women there to be eye candy aren’t exactly welcoming women into this stupid “macho culture”. If you changed that kind of characters into interesting, three dimensional characters, everyone would win. It’s not taking anything away from men.
Of course, the first step would be to change the men into interesting characters, too. When the macho protagonist might as well be made out of cardboard, it’s hard to have female characters who are anything else.
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I don’t know if that’s possible in Call of Duty / Battlefield because are women even in front-line combat in modern armies? Is that even done?
That said, both current versions of CoD and Battlefield do portray women as reasonably natural part of the single-player stories, but not multiplayer. I was actually impressed with the number of good female characters in the (blessedly short) Battlefield 4 campaign.
That’s good. Yay for progress!
But you know, if you looked through all FPS war combat games that have been made, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found a game where they had managed to put in a female soldier character that was for some reason wearing skimpy clothing. Reality be damned, we need tits!
You can find overly sexual characters in the strangest places. In the other thread about this issue, I told about the female characters in Civilization Revolution (which I recently bought because it was on sale on Xbox Live and I wanted a game that me and my boyfriend, who only plays strategy games, can play together). There are four female characters that you can choose, and three of them have very obvious cleavage hanging out. Catherine (of the Russians) has a very big rack, but Cleopatra is the worst - it’s not just some discreet touch of sexiness, believe me. The characters are supposed to be great leaders!
Now, I don’t want to start repeating myself, so I’ll summarize my argument: The point is not that if you add a general character who happens to have boobs but is not overly sexualized in a game, women are suddenly gonna flock to play it. But creating more beliavable characters not only makes better stories, but also works towards dispelling the sexist athmosphere where woman are only sex objects and background noise. When more games start to be something else than just macho male fantasies, women can feel that they are not outsiders in this culture. As a result, we all get better stories as well!
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Dude, I’m pretty sure you’ve been able to select a female character in multiplayer since Black Ops 2. Granted, it doesn’t change much since you’re just looking down the sight of a gun the whole time. The only difference is the screams when being shot are feminine.
@Raita fair points… I am not the right person to talk about RPGs because (as previous stated) I couldn’t care less about a game’s storyline… so you can imagine I don’t play many games where the storyline is a major part of it. I think you also hit on something interesting that goes a long way to explaining part of the male-centric attitudes of game devs and gaming culture: Japan. Have you been there? Its objectification-of-women² and otaku culture, while now slightly more evenly balanced, is extremely male-dominated (as is Japanese society in general). Tokyo Game Show is a great example of this… most every stand had stunning Japanese girls in manga-esque outfits, even if it had nothing to do with the characters or products being marketed.
Perhaps someone could explain why there needs to be gender quotas for art. Representation doesn’t matter except to those who determine the quality of media based on gender; to wit, sexism drives the demand for representation. Gender swapping is not the answer to protagonists as Sarkeesian has posited, and meeting some nebulous requirement for equal representation will always be an exercise in subjectivity as not everyone can be represented equally, or rather, to their satisfaction. When someone touts statistics like these, the outpouring of vitriol distracts from the truly pressing issue: no one has an effective solution that will appease everyone. Sarkeesian’s video game example in her gender swapping video failed the Bechdel Test. If one of the most prominent pop culture media critics cannot meet the requirements she herself claims to be necessary for equal representation, how can anyone else follow by example?
Again: representation means nothing except to those who maintain prejudice. The larger issue is that gender-feminists like Anita Sarkeesian (and myriad others) are demanding a nebulous requirement be met–regardless of the presence of women. Representation is not a matter of simply having a female protagonist but having a female protagonist that meets an ambiguous representation of women. However, that’s still irrelevant: we’re discussing fiction. And for media of which Sarkeesian does approve, she will still find ways to criticize it as patriarchal or white-supremacist in the subtle style of bell hooks.
The demands of third-wave/radical/gender- feminism are taking place on two fronts: reality and fiction. Any demands for the latter are fatuous at best: they inhibit freedom of expression, and assume feckless and callow women are the audience–women so weak that a lack of representation in fiction is keeping them from succeeding and reinforcing “the patriarchy.” The former is where we should all be fighting for equality: in the real world. This ranges from reproductive health-care rights to sex-positive culture to equal pay to paid maternity/paternity leave.
Israel is the most obvious modern example I know of.
Your worldview must be very small if you only accept information that you have personal firsthand knowledge and experience with…
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Interesting…thanks!
I was involved with the push for ERA passage in the 1970’s and I can remember Phyllis Schlafly’s argument that the reason we shouldn’t pass it was because:
- there would be public unisex bathrooms;
- women would have to go into combat roles;
- it would promote gay marriage;
- abortions would be legal and publicly-funded;
- widows would no longer get Social Security.
Makes me wonder when the Republican party will prohibit widows from getting their mite, since that’s the only outstanding issue left. Turns out you can’t blame all those social “evils” on the ERA after all. And we still do not have the following idea added to our Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Good god. WTH? I wonder if this might be a breach of contract for previously-covered hetero married couples. Hopefully some straight-but-not-narrow National Guardsmen and their spouses will file suit against the state.
It always pisses me off how hypocritically awful these “conservatives” treat families, children, and our military.
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I would think that some straight and very narrow families would want to sue if they had a case. I mean, it’s one thing to disagree with gay marriage and it’s another thing to agree that you personally are willing to give up financial security just to spite gay people.
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The US allows women as officially recognized frontline combatants. <a href=“http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/24/us-military-lifts-ban-women-combat"target="_blank”>Here’s a citation, in case you missed daneel’s link above.
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