Right - those crazy social justice warrior feminists are just out4chan-ing 4chan, what with all their doxxing, rape threats, stalking, address publishing and other forms of terrorism. Mmm-hmmm.
Speaking up and out against abuse and threats made against them is a symptom of their lack of empathy ? Dude, seriously ?
Yes, you are right about lazy writing. If the attacks were about the shit writing in general, I would be all for the cause, and would hold the banner high!
But this is a political battle, not an aesthetic battle. You have to admit that.
My bottom line is that I donât want to be the one to question or censor anyoneâs creative impulses, no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes. Would you tell Lars van Trier to stop making films because he chooses transgressive subjects?
Your stripper analogy is founded on exactly the same wavelength that ultra-right ninnys who want to protect us from the evils of the world. In this case, substitute âjiggly breasts make you uncleanâ for âjiggly breasts are politically oppressive.â Itâs like the animal rights activists who think that by letting animals go free, that all problems will be solved.
I think our responsibility as creators is to dig deeper, not censor our impulses.
I have known strippers and sex workers, in fact I believe Ms. Penny was a stripper as well in her past, and I doubt they would want to be on the cutting room floor! But even if there was a scene in a strip club, you could write a scene that was a kick ass scene with relatable characters. Even if those unsightly and unholy breasts undulate in the background.
Problem I have with Ms. Anita S. was that for all she have said and done, she seems to be wholly ignorant of or disconnected from the medium sheâs criticizing. She went to Dice (makers of Battlefield and my fav Mirrorâs Edge) and talked about how hard ME was for women because of the controls. I was like WTF. I didnât have a problem with it, my sister didnât have a problem with it either. The only person in the family who has problems with modern video games is my mother and father. I think Ms. Anita is too old for this shit, honestly.
I swear, if they Dice turns ME into âpress A to parkourââŚ
Thank God youâre not my editor. As I say, Iâm not interested in politics as a subject in my work. Others do, like Molly Crabapple, and thatâs great! I was just expressing my POV.
I donât think feminist thoughts are the problem, I only think that those thoughts enforced by a ratings system or âstandardsâ would be a problem for me creatively. See the difference?
Your suggestions are a blancmange of statistics, and Iâve never seen a compelling character that was created by statistics or good intentions. Most great characters are created by people struggling with mild forms of schizophrenia, and should be shunned in public.
I didnât accuse feminism of doing those things. I accused them of lacking empathy and being unable to even recognize facts outside their ideology.
Are you able to read my words as written or is there an ideological parasite eating your mind and predisposing you to fighting straw-men and attempting to ostracize people you perceive as unfriendly to your parasite?
Before she got in the cross hairs Zoe Quinn has been accused of doing some doxxing and address publishing of her own. Itâs a culture war and some people are not just lightning rods but are also divisive. She has a will and has been fighting for things she believes in. Fighting long before this.
I hate rape threats and I understand the need for personal safety but where did these millions of toxically angry men and boys come from? How do you think they got so incredibly disenfranchised and angry? Does the main article gloat about disenfranchising them? Howâs ostracism working for ya?
Um⌠I think the mysos are pretty obviously the ones who have demonstrated their lack of empathy on a grand scale. You canât be serious
Iâm sure that you can find angry young ranters espousing the notion that âempathy is ableistâ.
Context: http://boingboing.net/2014/08/28/death-threats-drive-anna-sarke.html
There is no amount of context that makes this OK. Donât try to pretend that both sides are equally right in this fight. They are not. The SJW âkidsâ (Aw, theyâre just kids. Donât pay them no mind.) are right. And you are wrong.
Right.
Because âTits or GTFOâ is every bit as valid a social message as, âWomen deserve respect no matter where they areâ.
Calling the female half of humanity a âsubcultureâ makes it sound as if âwomen doing things that only men used to doâ is just a passing fad, nothing to see here.
Others might call that, âfalse equivalenceâ
Yeah, well, everything is political, as the feminist slogan goes. I think that making that kind of an animated series is a highly political act, whether the makers acknowledge it themselves or not. I really really doubt that thereâs any clear-cut difference between the âhumanâ and âpolemicalâ levels that art can work on. Isnât there an element of polemics in everything we do, think and communicate?
Weâre talking about different kinds of people here, I think. Master trollies ultimately serve the cause of driving trollies. If theyâre temporarily on your side, be devilâs advocate for them. If theyâre not, ignore them. When the source of driving trollies theyâre using dries up, they wander onto the next one.
Most of the people weâre talking about, though, are not master trollies. They are fail-trollies in the worst way. They try to use driving trollies to accomplish something, whether consciously or not. They care about the thing theyâre driving trollies on. Thatâs not how driving trollies works.
You use the inverted expectations against the fail-trollies. This will cause them to become frustrated, breaking the feedback loop. Thatâs when you can actually get through to them as human beings, because you can provide them an alternative to driving trollies that actually helps them cope with the thing they care about constructively.
One thing that we can do to help is fight the notion that socially awkward males are objects of contempt and that male virginity is a laughably pathetic state. Gender essentialism is overall hardest on women, but itâs bad for everybody. Teenage boys and men are under tremendous social pressure to get laid at any cost, and it should come as no surprise that their values and priorities sometimes deform under that pressure.
(I realize I run the risk of getting painted as an MRA here, but I hope my posting history speaks for itself.)
Nah. Itâs not like youâre making excuses for scum, just pointing out that society has got itâs priorities so screwed up that they feel the need to act like scum.
As a socially awkward podling, my teen-cycles were⌠damaging⌠It got a lot better when I checked out of a toxic society.
Thereâs comfort in finding any in-group who accept you and what better way to reflect that comfort than by espousing the perceived values of that group. Think of the newly born-again or the mad-keen just-started sportsman. We cover our insecurities in so many ways. 
True. However, one arrives at correct information by fixing your opponentsâ argumentsâ flaws, learning from them where appropriate, then defeating them anyway. If the conclusion is âSocial Justice Warriors are winning,â and the argument left out a caveat of âbut only where it is easy to do soâ or something of that sort, this is important.
While I get the point that the author seems to be making here, the article doesnât seem to be very well written at all, and in any case it it looks very similar to lots of whats been said many times before for various other causes with different protagonists & antagonists. Pick a social cause and you can find plenty of âwe are winning despite some of our own kind not being true scottsmenâ with a dash of âour enemies are poopyheadsâ.
In any case if this is a war, what are the strategic goals? If this war is indeed being fought âeverywhereâ is the goal to enforce a particular mindset globally? To impose a particular cultural view upon all? I certainly hope not. At the risk of sounding like a broken record and repeating why Iâve expressed in other threads, not all cultures work the same and most of the world is not like the USA. FWIW I like it that way, I donât think Iâd be happy in a global monoculture of any type.
As for âbecause freedom of speechâ, well of course because freedom of speech. Unless one wants to fall into the paradox of tolerance, the price of free speech is that views which unpleasant to some must be allowed in order to protect all. The legal structures which protect the KKK are the same which protect my favorite rabbis and of course the same goes for feminists vs misogynists, etc. The corollary to this is that if you express ideas which offend others, there is a potential risk that one may be on the receiving end of unpleasant ideas as well. Fortunately in legal territories which protect freedom of speech in some form or another also take death threats, harassment, etc. seriously. It is of course never pleasant to be on the receiving end of such social pressure, however when one goes looking for a fight, one is sure to find one. I consider myself fortunate to currently live in a legal environment where the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes are true: âThe right to swing my fist ends where the other manâs nose begins.â
Finally sadly I feel I must add that I do not count myself amongst âthe patriarchyâ, misogynists or other âenemiesâ of the New Culture War. If someone wants to reply, please donât bother putting words in my mouth or try to extrapolate from what I actually said.
Life is an infinite game, not a finite game. The goal is to continue the same and to game the game better. Some mindsets do this better than others. Tactics matter; killing the unbelievers would be counterproductive to that goal, in addition to all the other reasons not to do it. And I very much doubt our grandchildren will have the same mindset as the ones todayâs SJWs share. But I sure hope that we, globally, as a species, move generally in the direction the SJWs are pointing, and not the opposite.
Avoiding nastiness is good, no doubt. Asking people to avoid anger is more of a problem. Those who are the most unavoidably and honestly angry are often those who have suffered the most; they are the very people who we should least want to silence. But anger does not have to cause nastiness. My ideal would be to see people who a rightfully angry avoid low-road insults like neck-beard, lives in his motherâs basement, and all the rest.
Ta-Nehisi Coates had a great piece on his Atlantic blogâIâm not finding it just nowâthat discussed how, although much good art is not free of traditional biases, those biases always weaken the art. To the extent that your characters are written according to stereotypes and prejudices, they are not fully developed and living characters. This doesnât mean that you canât write/film characters who conform to stereotypes, but to fully realize that kind of character, you need to have an idea how that character got that way. If youâre just doing, say, into fashion because female, youâre missing a lot of the interesting inner conflict that many women have with respect to fashion standards.
ETA, I like your comment about going deeper. On the other hand, if you keep ending up with strip clubs as a background, and not as an actual developed theme, itâs kind of hard to avoid thinking that the strippers have become erotic wallpaper. (I donât know that you do this, of course.) However, the problem of certain contentâs repetition iâ why someone like Anita Sarkeesian, who points out how even pretty good works can fall into easy tropes, is a useful source. I mean, in fairness, a well-developed character might be motivated by the murder of his wife or daughter, but, well⌠not again.
I imagine youâve never actually dealt with wasps? Anita Sarkeesianâs (and othersâ) greatest achievement was in exposing the wasp nest. Now, a great many people are poking at it. Iâm not denying that itâs dangerous, but I wouldnât call the ensuing furor a âculture warâ. The other side, if it can even be called that, is acting reflexively. It is essentially brainless.
Itâs good that society will not tolerate blatant misogyny, to the extent that invasion of privacy and death threats do not generate much public sympathy. However, I would be more interested in how Social Justice Warriors plan to tackle the behemoth of corporate interest behind something like Hollywood. We could wait for all the assholes to die of old age, but I donât really have any better ideas.
âThe Patriarchy hurts men tooâ is a fairly well known meme, and accepted in most feminist circles, so I donât think youâre in any danger of being labeled an MRA just because you also talk about men suffering because of the patriarchy.
Part of the suffering is what causes them to lash out, of course, like any cycle of abuse.
