Women are breaking up with their boyfriends after seeing the Barbie movie

Those already existed. Lara Croft, Samus Aran, Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, any RPG where you can create a woman character, to name a few.

Games made to appeal to women already existed.

She got pushback because her criticisms are based on lies. I'm starting to think you don't actually play videogames and when I bring up these examples you have no idea what I'm actually talking about. Just like Anita.

 

The irony in her asking for you to talk about her whole reply when all she does is cherrypick the parts of what people say to her. I'm still waiting for a reason as to why making female characters in media ugly and giving them masculine personalities is a feminist thing to do. Spoiler alert: the answer is because many women are threatened by other women and don't like seeing men look at women that aren't them, fictional or not. They're also raging hypocrites, saying nothing about men being commodified the same way by "muh female gaze."

 

Look, guys. I found a moviefilm much better than a Barbie.



or this



Cool, huh?

 

Very cool.

 

Then why so many of the agentic characters were sexualized ? If the purpose is in fact to tell as story about an agentic female character that is meant to be a role model for girls, what is the point of sexualising her ?

Can you look at this fact reflects and say how well girls' need for more agentic female representation has been prioritised Vs men's desire for jerk off material ?

Why has female objectification to be so widespread in video games to begin with ?

What you said is only a small part of what drives us to criticise female objectification in media, not the whole range of motivations. If this is the case, you wouldn't see so many women feeling critical towards it, regardless of whether they are partnered or not.

You can't use that single aspect as a blanket statement to dismiss any form of criticism of female objectification. This only a part of the truth.

It's only you who see them this way. They are not ugly or masculine, just less sexualized. The issue here is that male players are so accustomed to seeing sexualised female characters that it became a baseline through which which the worth and value of every female character is determined. Any deviation from that standard is enough for them to label a female character as masculine or ugly.

Another detail you seem to ignore is that feminism was always about prioritising what is the most harmless route for women, and combat men's surface level delight if it made at our expense.

Your observation about turning female characters masculine and ugly was never realistic, and even if many decided to view it as such, it certainly wouldn't present a breach of our core goals.

I can't believe you thought this was a witty reply.

Is male objectification that common in video games ? Or is it the exception that proves the rule times and times again ?

What would you qualify as male objectification in video games ?

What are the patterns of objectification in video games and is objectification equally distributed between male and female characters ?

 

At this point I am starting to believe that you don't have any grey matter left in your brain.

Patriarchy restricted a lot of women's options and made their standards as low as possible. So just having a job and a source of income guaranteed a man a partner and progeny. In other words, it made it a luxury for women to include the man's mindset and personality, as well as his ability to satisfy his mate, in their mating criteria. Which couldn't be said about men since they had a wide range of disenfranchised women to choose from, and who wouldn't be able to leave easily no matter how badly they treat them once married.

Patriarchy brought in a social system and an organisation, I am not denying that. However, our needs as females were never prioritised within that system. If it wasn't the case, then how can you explain the fact that divorce was made almost impossible for women, and many had been forced to deal with horrible husbands ? How can you explain the fact that for centuries, women were excluded from decision making despite needing this to advocate for themselves and their sex class ? How can you explain the fact that access to financial autonomy was made extremely difficult, despite women's undeniable need for such an outlet to avoid the worst outcomes ?

The social order under patriarchy was never primarily about ensuring that women's humanity will be recognised as equal to men's.

 

Why is sexualizing a character bad? Why is men looking at attractive women bad? Why do you think a sexy character and a character with agency cannot be the same character, when that is blatantly false?

I don't really care what the reasons are, they're all stupid. Men like looking at hot women and many women like it when men look at them. Just because you don't doesn't mean your reality applies to everyone else. The difference between you and I though is I have no intention of forcing my worldview on you, but you would force yours on me. If you could. But you can't.

Lmao now you're just lying. Straight up lying. The character designs I posted got a ton of criticism for taking attractive real life women and making them ugly in the game.

Yes. There are numerous attractive male characters or males with unrealistic bodies in videogames and literally nobody cares or says anything. The most popular game this year, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, stars a muscular twink you can make run around shirtless the whole game and nobody complains about that being sexist to men.

 

Because it has the potential to be harmful to us, make men less able to relate to us and even excuse our own dehumanisation. Just like what porn does. Especially when that sexualization is so widespread and may be coupled with varied forms of violence and degradation.

So what, what is your point ? I am not a libfem who thinks that any choice a woman makes is automatically empowering. It's not because a woman decides to do something that it shouldn't be criticised and the harmful aspects of it exposed.

Also, liking being attractive doesn't have to devolve into the realm of objectification and dehumanisation. These are very different things.

I don't think any instance where a male go around shirtless can count as sexualization. And it certainly not equivalent to the pov angles the camera takes with many sexualized female characters.

Many male characters are shirtless and ripped not as a form of eye candy for the female players but as a form of male fantasy that embodies strength, power and ability. So you have to take that into account too.

 

The issue with a lot of what you're saying is it comes from a binary worldview. Something either is, or isn't, with very little nuance. That isn't how the world works. I'm not talking about women being dehumanised, I'm not talking about violence. I'm talking about the very simple human desire to want to look at attractive people. Men and women do this and there's nothing wrong with it.

You've kinda exposed yourself here with that second sentence. "Not a libfem who thinks any choice a woman makes it automatically empowering" - it's not about whether it's empowering or not. It's about a woman's right to make her own choices. I've noticed you go after other women on this site before when they disagree with your own brand of feminism, and I fail to see how that makes you any less of an authoritarian than the patriarchal men you clearly hate so much.

So basically it's only a bad thing when it happens to women? Got it. This here is exactly why less and less people take feminism seriously, it's full of insane double standards like this.

 

I don't understand how you came to this conclusion. What part of my reply made you think that I think sexualization is only bad when it happens to women ?

The more men double down on the misogyny and the manosphere the more women are going to realize that everything radical feminists have been saying for four decades was true to the letter. Men have always been the best recruiters for feminism, and the generation of men who grew up under the exposure of extremely misogynistic and violent sexual portrayals, as well as under the influence of token misogynists like Andrew Tate, are all that's needed to push women into the ranks of feminism.

By saying that women's choices need to be analysed we don't mean that we need to impose anything on them, but that if these choices have the potential to bring more harm and erode our ability to advocate for ourselves in the long run, it shouldn't be forbidden to disqualify these choices as empowering for women.

The women in question can still live however they want, but they shouldn't be offended when other women don't acknowledge their choices as feminist.

 

My wife is seeing it this weekend with her girlfriend, I hope she doesn't divorce me? I'll remind her that I'm hung better than Ken.

 

The fact that men and women desire one another and like to be desired by each others doesn't invalidate the reality that normalising and amplifying female objectification in various forms of media is harmful to us, and it also doesn't erase the negative ideas and attitudes men will end up adopting in relation to us as they get more and more accustomed to the patterns of female objectification in media.

This is just another example of the motte and bailey fallacy.