Man. Tifa is super complicated, and while I'm not sure I'm 100% with The Sauce, we are at least on the same wavelength.
You really gotta look at Tifa in context of her time both as a character and even critically. like examining her from the perspective of both the 90s and a 90s feminist view gives a radically different analysis than what would be today.
It's complicated, but I think the equation works out that she is positive but I'm not sure yet.
She was certainly progressive for her time, I think.
If people modded it so that that one person lived, surely there must be a "not-so-sexist Tifa" somewhere.
Also while its the current topic, I must say I enjoy Anita Sarkeesian's work a lot. Sometimes she stretches or distorts something, or interprets something in a way that I don't (maybe due to privilege, maybe just different people). But like, 95% of her work is good excellent work. And looking at her Wikipedia page, she has to be holding back for the sake of her audience! Those are some impressive academic achievements (for anyone, I hope nobody read that as "for a women")
I hope that's not controversial. I'm not forced to agree with her 100% of the time, right o_O
At 2:30 she brings up Rugrats, and at 3:05 she brings up Power Puff Girls. I think its important to the current topic of parents versus media.
Those are frickin' kids shows! And look at the messages they send!
Which seems to be bouncing between two extremes. Neither is wholly responsible. Parents, the media, and society all are responsible for who we are now. Remember "it takes a village to raise a child", because parents are not super-people who can swoop in 24/7 to tell their kids what they are seeing/hearing is wrong.
Now, I would argue that parents perhaps play the largest roll, but that's because mine were awesome and I was/is pretty anti-social! But, that said, the media and society do have some impact on how we grow up and the world-view we adopt.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
First I think she was exaggerated primarily due to technical limitations; see Advent Children's redesign, for instance (her breasts are less than half the size). But even if we ignore that, I still thought it was great.
Character design definitely wasn't very refined in that early 3D period. Like, you look at the early Lara Croft, and she's all hard edges, cartoony proportions, and geometric shapes, and over time, that's smoothed out into a practically photo-realistic rendering. Advent's Children does pretty well at making its people look like people, particularly compared with Playstation Cloud, who although he has no mouth, must scream. Folks don't even have hands. Kinda goofy.
I do think that when they wanted a female character to draw the eye, they went for the unusually large chest as a focal point, though. (There's even a joke about a special supportive undergarment when Cloud's flashing back to their past in Niflheim, as I recall.)
Second, considering when the game was released, having a female as the fist-using martial artist in this sort of game was still kinda new and cool.
Yeah, she definitely gets points for that. She's also a lot more dimensional than "love interest" often is, I think.
Third, going with canon choices for Cloud's dialogue and such, he's actually more interested in Aerith than in Tifa even though she's all sexed up. Both of them have their eye on Cloud, but they take very different approaches. Tifa, the strong athletic one, actually sexes herself up and tries to get Cloud's attention passively; these two things are not usually paired together in character designs and this makes it interesting. Aerith on the other hand is the modestly-dressed mystic girl who's cute but otherwise "normal" in appearance, but by being outgoing and chasing Cloud directly she wins the date (and presumably would have won him in the long-term).
That, I think, goes down to differing attitudes about gender norms in Japan. Tifa comes closer to meeting our self-actualized ideal of the strong, sexy woman, Aeris is more of a demure wallflower...but from what I've seen in Japanese media, there is a significant demure wallflower fandom over there. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, either. There's a character in nearly every show/game who's got glasses, and basically no personality independent of a desire to please her friends. Sailor Mercury is the most innocuous, and least bespectacled example I know of. Very worst, Anthy in Revolutionary Girl Utena. But! Forbidden Subject.
Generally, I suspect that we're supposed to be very attached to Aeris. It may just not really translate.
That, I think, goes down to differing attitudes about gender norms in Japan. Tifa comes closer to meeting our self-actualized ideal of the strong, sexy woman, Aeris is more of a demure wallflower...but from what I've seen in Japanese media, there is a significant demure wallflower fandom over there. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, either. There's a character in nearly every show/game who's got glasses, and basically no personality independent of a desire to please her friends. Sailor Mercury is the most innocuous, and least bespectacled example I know of. Very worst, Anthy in Revolutionary Girl Utena. But! Forbidden Subject.
Generally, I suspect that we're supposed to be very attached to Aeris. It may just not really translate.
I actually just replayed that game and while I went in with a similar view, I ended up with completely the opposite impression of both characters. Like, I think people have this vague memory of Tifa as the strong one and Aeris as demure and weak, but in the dialog it's completely the other way around. Aeris shows all kinds of agency in her dialog, first inserting herself into this underground resistance movement and coming up with plans (which the group then follows), then ultimately going off on her own to make a sacrifice that saves the planet. She does drag (literally, drag) Cloud on a date at one point, but she never moons over him, hides her affection, or shows any of the shyness that I think a lot of people associate with her. In the writing she's a strong-minded direct character pretty much from start to finish.
Tifa is...not that. She's honestly pretty much written as obsessed with Cloud from start to finish. She's in Avalanche to reunite with Cloud, she constantly goes on about how she wants to experience Cloud 'saving' her, and ultimately her reason for continuing on with the mission is to be with Cloud. She clings to him even when he goes into a coma, refusing to leave his side with the world at stake. She's not shown as weak or incompetent or anything, just super co-dependent and kind of lacking in her own identity.
I was actually surprised at how weak Tifa came across overall, given that my memories of the game were pretty much like yours, with Tifa as the strong physical one and Aeris as the shy weak magic-user. I think those are just the archetypes we've come to expect based on their visuals, but the writing in the game doesn't really support it.
Looking back on FF7 it had a rich blend of female character archetypes. Tifa's passiveness is actually in the minority in that game
If we're talking about demure, dependent, identity crisis characters though, we all know who wins the prize, Mr. Compensating
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I thought she was already in Avalanche, having linked up with Barrett and his adopted guilt-baby in the slums. It's Cloud who's a recent addition to Avalanche, at Tifa's insistence. He actually comes in and disrupts the little world she's built for herself in Seventh Heaven, leading to this chain of events where they all have to flee Midgar entirely.
Aeris is definitely something of a go-getter. Although considering she only meets Cloud when he plummets into her church after an act of terrorism, I'd say that her interest in Cloud is the weirder one. (Except for his not-coincidental resemblance to the late Zack.)
That's a sideways argument. No one has ever *ever* claimed that sexualized and/or objectified men are common enough in video games to be an issue. But when a particular game is examined that has males and females who are all fucking sexy, it's instantly hand-waved as "no those are male power fantasies and objectified women."
In some cases that's probably true, in other cases it's untrue, and probably in some it's a partially true but partially not.
The only reason the term "male power fantasy" is taking flak is because it's been used as a show-stopper. This isn't the first time a key term from gender studies 101 has drawn fire on the forums (I'm looking at you, "social construct").
My proposed solution is to stop shamelessly abusing buzzwords, but, you know, my proposals are usually unpopular.
Hunh. Okay, I generally think the issue with "but women and men are both sexy in THIS game" is that it's not a particularly interesting discussion topic?
Sometimes there are men who are sexualized, but not often and generally not by editorial fiat or due to an understanding that men are unimportant.
I don't really care about the result so much as the leadup to the decision. There's a reason that women are more or less always made sexual objects in games and men are only occasionally made sexual objects in games. Or actually, there are lots of reasons! Discussing those reasons is kind of interesting, listing games which buck the trend could be interesting if it was done with any intent to actually follow up on the discussion.
So these games where dudes are hot. Why? Why'd that happen? Is it just that all characters are attractive? If so, do we know that they're generally perceived as attractive to a female fan base? Is there a significant amount of data on what people do find attractive, or are we working from stereotypes? Are games actively attempting to sexualize the male protagonists in them in order to appeal to viewers, or are they taking cues from movies (which generally enjoy a wider audience and a more even gender split). Is it like in films, where Brad Pitt headlines anything he wants, but Vin Diesel's weird super-mutant baby look is really exclusively for action films targeted to men? Hell, how come big AAA film productions don't feature enormous uncovered boobs? Avatar gave the cat-people boobs, but they were small...
Discussion is fun, listing a game and then yelling at a person who I can't see is less fun.
i can answer that one
giant boobs look like totally different things unless they're all strapped in and girded up.
like, they start to look like big floppy udders. male gaze averted. power-boner deflated. female objectification ruined.
I'm sure there are people into that. Not the body normative mainstream media, though.
Power Puff Girls is a terrible show because it teaches kids to solve problems through violence.
See also: G.I. Joe from my childhood, and Popeye from the generation before mine.
Recently I caught like 5 minutes of a current kids show that had something to do with martial arts, and Avatar the Last Airbender this was not: the protagonist was a violent little shit, exactly the kind of kid you know will wind up in prison some day.
Good to know children's television is ever the cesspool.
Power Puff Girls is a terrible show because it teaches kids to solve problems through violence.
I remember an episode of PPG where the Professor urged the girls to use restraint and not pummel ugly monsters and bugs and gross things - that it's what is on the inside that's important. The girls took this advice to an extreme and became pacifists. But later in the episode, the girls were swallowed whole by a giant roach and they determined the roach was ugly on the inside, too, and proceeded to tear it to pieces.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties. Management has to act in the sole interest of the shareholders, and it does so by pursuing profit. That said, "pursuing profit" can be incredibly broad because of something called the business judgement rule which basically says that we won't second guess fiduciary decisions that are business decisions, but if you are ever in a place where the CEO is saying "this won't make us money, but its the right thing to do" then you have probably breached fiduciary duties.
Because we cannot rely on corporations to be moral (in fact, we effectively prohibit it in most cases) we need to divide the world of actions that we want to see occur into two groups. Those that are important enough for us to force or constrain action through laws, and those that are not. Sexism in video games? Pretty firmly in the latter, so you need to make it easy for executives to choose to address the issue, and that means making it good business to do so, and furthermore, it means making it clearly seem like good business.
Power Puff Girls is a terrible show because it teaches kids to solve problems through violence.
I remember an episode of PPG where the Professor urged the girls to use restraint and not pummel ugly monsters and bugs and gross things - that it's what is on the inside that's important. The girls took this advice to an extreme and became pacifists. But later in the episode, the girls were swallowed whole by a giant roach and they determined the roach was ugly on the inside, too, and proceeded to tear it to pieces.
Sounds about right.
On the plus side, programming like that can help bring equality between the sexes.
Hah hah, I jest. There's a lot of biology going on with violence in society, not just sociology. Testosterone plays a role. Anyone who says otherwise is a fruitcake.
| Zinnar on most things | Avatar by Blameless Cleric
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Tifa is one of my go to strong female characters. She is a strong fighter, she effectively deals with rejection (possibly) without falling apart and she is an overall badass. She isn't Celes or Kreia, but few are.
What is more important, visual or personality design? Would it be preferable to have more big titted Kreia depth characters or sensible shoe wearing B cup bland female space marines? I would prefer the in depth chars.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties.
Moral duties, yeah, duh, given.
But don't ethical duties supercede fiduciary duties?
DID B SCHOOL LIE TO ME???!!!!
Power Puff Girls is a terrible show because it teaches kids to solve problems through violence.
I remember an episode of PPG where the Professor urged the girls to use restraint and not pummel ugly monsters and bugs and gross things - that it's what is on the inside that's important. The girls took this advice to an extreme and became pacifists. But later in the episode, the girls were swallowed whole by a giant roach and they determined the roach was ugly on the inside, too, and proceeded to tear it to pieces.
Sounds about right.
On the plus side, programming like that can help bring equality between the sexes.
Hah hah, I jest. There's a lot of biology going on with violence in society, not just sociology. Testosterone plays a role. Anyone who says otherwise is a fruitcake.
You certainly have shown that person, should they ever appear.
Though "plays a role" is broad enough to be meaningless as it is. The frontal lobe plays a role in violence. Toes play a role.
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties.
Moral duties, yeah, duh, given.
But don't ethical duties supercede fiduciary duties?
DID B SCHOOL LIE TO ME???!!!!
Fiduciary duties are ethical duties. They have their basis in the law of trusts, which governs the ethical obligations of the holder of assets in trust for the beneficiary of the trust.
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Power Puff Girls is a terrible show because it teaches kids to solve problems through violence.
I remember an episode of PPG where the Professor urged the girls to use restraint and not pummel ugly monsters and bugs and gross things - that it's what is on the inside that's important. The girls took this advice to an extreme and became pacifists. But later in the episode, the girls were swallowed whole by a giant roach and they determined the roach was ugly on the inside, too, and proceeded to tear it to pieces.
Sounds about right.
On the plus side, programming like that can help bring equality between the sexes.
Hah hah, I jest. There's a lot of biology going on with violence in society, not just sociology. Testosterone plays a role. Anyone who says otherwise is a fruitcake.
You certainly have shown that person, should they ever appear.
Though "plays a role" is broad enough to be meaningless as it is. The frontal lobe plays a role in violence. Toes play a role.
Essentially I'm saying that even if we achieve the society of perfect equity, men will still be more violent as a general rule. This should not be read as "men are violent and women are not".
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Actually, everyone should take testosterone and we should just Highlander this shit out until there's only one person left.
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties. Management has to act in the sole interest of the shareholders, and it does so by pursuing profit. That said, "pursuing profit" can be incredibly broad because of something called the business judgement rule which basically says that we won't second guess fiduciary decisions that are business decisions, but if you are ever in a place where the CEO is saying "this won't make us money, but its the right thing to do" then you have probably breached fiduciary duties.
Because we cannot rely on corporations to be moral (in fact, we effectively prohibit it in most cases) we need to divide the world of actions that we want to see occur into two groups. Those that are important enough for us to force or constrain action through laws, and those that are not. Sexism in video games? Pretty firmly in the latter, so you need to make it easy for executives to choose to address the issue, and that means making it good business to do so, and furthermore, it means making it clearly seem like good business.
1) Legally they do.
2) That is why it is up to the consumer to not buy products they feel support ethics and morals that we do not agree with. Corporations are out to make money, and if holding position X leads to them losing money, smart of corporations will drop support X so quick your head will spin.
I never ate at Chick-Fil-A, and there were none around here until recently. But if some says to me "Hey Pluto, wanna go to Chick-Fil-A?", my answer will be a sound "Nope!" until they change their policy on giving money to hate groups.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Going through infertility we met other couples who were in the same boat and a couple of them were purely male factor (most are female factor like us or a mix). In one of those couples, the husband had almost no testosterone. Still had a normal sounding male voice.
Side note: men seem to take male factor infertility much harder than women take female factor infertility. I think its because virility is viewed as a masculine trait in our culture. I never heard of a girl saying she was less of a woman because she had problems with her eggs, but any man with sperm count issues seems to think they are less of a man. Its really unfortunate, because its complete bullshit. Your actions make you a man IMO, not your ability to naturally impregnate a woman.
+1
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties. Management has to act in the sole interest of the shareholders, and it does so by pursuing profit. That said, "pursuing profit" can be incredibly broad because of something called the business judgement rule which basically says that we won't second guess fiduciary decisions that are business decisions, but if you are ever in a place where the CEO is saying "this won't make us money, but its the right thing to do" then you have probably breached fiduciary duties.
Because we cannot rely on corporations to be moral (in fact, we effectively prohibit it in most cases) we need to divide the world of actions that we want to see occur into two groups. Those that are important enough for us to force or constrain action through laws, and those that are not. Sexism in video games? Pretty firmly in the latter, so you need to make it easy for executives to choose to address the issue, and that means making it good business to do so, and furthermore, it means making it clearly seem like good business.
1) Legally they do.
2) That is why it is up to the consumer to not buy products they feel support ethics and morals that we do not agree with. Corporations are out to make money, and if holding position X leads to them losing money, smart of corporations will drop support X so quick your head will spin.
I never ate at Chick-Fil-A, and there were none around here until recently. But if some says to me "Hey Pluto, wanna go to Chick-Fil-A?", my answer will be a sound "Nope!" until they change their policy on giving money to hate groups.
What do you mean by 1? Executives only have fiduciary duties when acting in that role. One of those duties is to obey the law though.
I agree 100% on 2. But more important than just boycotting, you need to tell them why you are boycotting.
So a question from the businesspeople. You have claimed repeatedly that we don't understand the economic argument, but never really explained how, at least not to my personal satisfaction.
So I guess here is my question. How do special interests consumers or niche markets (assuming "people who want better female representation/diversity" can be considered in this way) affect producers?
That is, how do producers respond to niche markets, and how do those niche markets make demand known?
The answer we got earlier, and I'm picking on Will, even though he kind of backed off on it, is "they should create their own products". This is, to my understanding of economics, how to interpret the claim that "if you want better females in games, make them yourself."
Obviously this makes no sense, so I'm actually curious from a market economic standpoint how niche markets are handled.
Our argument seems to be "by being critical of current market practices, niche markets can encourage producers to shift towards this new demand, or away from producing products that people dislike."
Is this not economically sound, like academically? Is it not sound in practice?
Basically wax academic about this, because I feel like just saying "y'all don't understand the economic argument" isn't really helpful.
You keep falling back on "companies are risk averse," which while true doesn't really, really address the actual argument being made.
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Actually, everyone should take testosterone and we should just Highlander this shit out until there's only one person left.
A... novel solution.
Reduce the population to 1, problem solv... wait, I see a flaw here.
Back to the drawing board.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties. Management has to act in the sole interest of the shareholders, and it does so by pursuing profit. That said, "pursuing profit" can be incredibly broad because of something called the business judgement rule which basically says that we won't second guess fiduciary decisions that are business decisions, but if you are ever in a place where the CEO is saying "this won't make us money, but its the right thing to do" then you have probably breached fiduciary duties.
Because we cannot rely on corporations to be moral (in fact, we effectively prohibit it in most cases) we need to divide the world of actions that we want to see occur into two groups. Those that are important enough for us to force or constrain action through laws, and those that are not. Sexism in video games? Pretty firmly in the latter, so you need to make it easy for executives to choose to address the issue, and that means making it good business to do so, and furthermore, it means making it clearly seem like good business.
1) Legally they do.
2) That is why it is up to the consumer to not buy products they feel support ethics and morals that we do not agree with. Corporations are out to make money, and if holding position X leads to them losing money, smart of corporations will drop support X so quick your head will spin.
I never ate at Chick-Fil-A, and there were none around here until recently. But if some says to me "Hey Pluto, wanna go to Chick-Fil-A?", my answer will be a sound "Nope!" until they change their policy on giving money to hate groups.
What do you mean by 1? Executives only have fiduciary duties when acting in that role. One of those duties is to obey the law though.
I agree 100% on 2. But more important than just boycotting, you need to tell them why you are boycotting.
Like some may see fair hiring policies as ethical, or proper waste disposable the same.
Those ethics and morals corporations are forced to follow due to law.
In fact, the slap on the wrist penalties are stupid and should probably go away if we want that to happen. If it costs 1,000,000 dollars to dump waste legally, or 250,000 illegally and a fine of 250,000, what are most companies going to do?
I hope that made sense. Corporations must follow ethics and morals that have been codified into law.
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Going through infertility we met other couples who were in the same boat and a couple of them were purely male factor (most are female factor like us or a mix). In one of those couples, the husband had almost no testosterone. Still had a normal sounding male voice.
Side note: men seem to take male factor infertility much harder than women take female factor infertility. I think its because virility is viewed as a masculine trait in our culture. I never heard of a girl saying she was less of a woman because she had problems with her eggs, but any man with sperm count issues seems to think they are less of a man. Its really unfortunate, because its complete bullshit. Your actions make you a man IMO, not your ability to naturally impregnate a woman.
Yo, spoilers
Female infertility is literally a gigantic cultural problem and you have somehow missed encountering it.It is the plot for a lot of TV shows, and has been a driving factor in a lot of British royal history. So.
Like, in Doctor Who, Amy has problems because she can't have kids and almost divorces Rory because of it
which is double dumb because at this point she has already met her adult daughter.
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Actually, everyone should take testosterone and we should just Highlander this shit out until there's only one person left.
A... novel solution.
Reduce the population to 1, problem solv... wait, I see a flaw here.
Back to the drawing board.
It's not a problem unless you're like, in love with humanity or something.
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties. Management has to act in the sole interest of the shareholders, and it does so by pursuing profit. That said, "pursuing profit" can be incredibly broad because of something called the business judgement rule which basically says that we won't second guess fiduciary decisions that are business decisions, but if you are ever in a place where the CEO is saying "this won't make us money, but its the right thing to do" then you have probably breached fiduciary duties.
Because we cannot rely on corporations to be moral (in fact, we effectively prohibit it in most cases) we need to divide the world of actions that we want to see occur into two groups. Those that are important enough for us to force or constrain action through laws, and those that are not. Sexism in video games? Pretty firmly in the latter, so you need to make it easy for executives to choose to address the issue, and that means making it good business to do so, and furthermore, it means making it clearly seem like good business.
1) Legally they do.
2) That is why it is up to the consumer to not buy products they feel support ethics and morals that we do not agree with. Corporations are out to make money, and if holding position X leads to them losing money, smart of corporations will drop support X so quick your head will spin.
I never ate at Chick-Fil-A, and there were none around here until recently. But if some says to me "Hey Pluto, wanna go to Chick-Fil-A?", my answer will be a sound "Nope!" until they change their policy on giving money to hate groups.
What do you mean by 1? Executives only have fiduciary duties when acting in that role. One of those duties is to obey the law though.
I agree 100% on 2. But more important than just boycotting, you need to tell them why you are boycotting.
Like some may see fair hiring policies as ethical, or proper waste disposable the same.
Those ethics and morals corporations are forced to follow due to law.
In fact, the slap on the wrist penalties are stupid and should probably go away if we want that to happen. If it costs 1,000,000 dollars to dump waste legally, or 250,000 illegally and a fine of 250,000, what are most companies going to do?
I hope that made sense. Corporations must follow ethics and morals that have been codified into law.
It is conclusively presumed that violating the law is against the best interests of the shareholders, so execs don't get to choose the illegal act that saves $1MM but results in a $1k fine. That is a policy judgement that we have made in relatively modern times and I stand behind it. Laws regulating pollution (for example) should not just be treated as imposing a cost on polluting. They are a prohibition on doing it, full stop.
There are dozens of stories where a female character cannot bear children and has thus either no perceived personal value or no actual value in their society.
Not that it isn't also a male problem but I'm just saying that just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it ain't a thing, in fiction and history.
EDIT: maybe not in video games though. I can't think of a game with this plot. But also I'm forgetful.
I don't know that the role it plays is significant to any real degree, and besides its a meaningless statement? We can't really best biology, unless you want people to take antiandrogens.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Going through infertility we met other couples who were in the same boat and a couple of them were purely male factor (most are female factor like us or a mix). In one of those couples, the husband had almost no testosterone. Still had a normal sounding male voice.
Side note: men seem to take male factor infertility much harder than women take female factor infertility. I think its because virility is viewed as a masculine trait in our culture. I never heard of a girl saying she was less of a woman because she had problems with her eggs, but any man with sperm count issues seems to think they are less of a man. Its really unfortunate, because its complete bullshit. Your actions make you a man IMO, not your ability to naturally impregnate a woman.
Yo, spoilers
Female infertility is literally a gigantic cultural problem and you have somehow missed encountering it.It is the plot for a lot of TV shows, and has been a driving factor in a lot of British royal history. So.
Like, in Doctor Who, Amy has problems because she can't have kids and almost divorces Rory because of it
which is double dumb because at this point she has already met her adult daughter.
I am not downplaying the hardship of female infertility at all. Just in my experience it seems like women handle it better than men, because it doesn't challenge their identity as women (at least as long as they can still have children). No matter what, infertility sucks to go through for both members of the couple.
Corporations don't have ethical or moral duties, and expecting them to act morally will always leave you disappointed. What they have are fiduciary duties to their shareholders, and using shareholder money to pursue the pet "moral" cause of management is a breach of those duties.
Moral duties, yeah, duh, given.
But don't ethical duties supercede fiduciary duties?
DID B SCHOOL LIE TO ME???!!!!
Fiduciary duties are ethical duties. They have their basis in the law of trusts, which governs the ethical obligations of the holder of assets in trust for the beneficiary of the trust.
Cool this is probably why Ethics in B School is a "Survey" course, while ethics in Law School is a "LOL, here's how you dont get disbarred" course. :P
Tifa is one of my go to strong female characters. She is a strong fighter, she effectively deals with rejection (possibly) without falling apart and she is an overall badass. She isn't Celes or Kreia, but few are.
What is more important, visual or personality design? Would it be preferable to have more big titted Kreia depth characters or sensible shoe wearing B cup bland female space marines? I would prefer the in depth chars.
Can't we have both reasonable female designs and great characters?
Womyn is, yes, one of the more ridiculous expressions of feminism, and not what I would call the mainstream iteration thereof. But there's a certain fascination with "reclaiming" words, for example "c***" and "bitch," as well as "history" (herstory), of which this is one example, as is her own (non-profit) corporate sponsor, Bitch Media. It feels like a whitewash to me to behave as though this kind of thing doesn't exist, just because it's not something she wants to associate herself with.
Also gotta quibble with her characterization of Y: the Last Man. For one thing, the most competent and self-actualized characters in that story are all women, as Yorick is a useless schmuck and the only living man on earth. So there's that. It also directly addresses the dearth of women in important positions; the new President after the mystery plague was Secretary of Agriculture, after the other seven people in the line of succession (VP, Speakers of the House, Cabinet secretaries, &C), all male, die. Yeah, the Daughters of the Amazon are crazed, violent female chauvinists, but like the other characters, they've got their own way of coping with half the population of the planet dying in a day, and the race being a very short stretch away from inevitable extinction.
Sounds on point to me about Veronica Mars.
I feel like she comes close to conspiracy theory, a lot of the time.
Posts
Eh, since they give the player character the choice to be Han solo (complete with copied costume) I'm not sure that's true.
If anyone in the companions of that game was Han solo, it was Mission Vao. She's the one with the smart mouth and wookie companion.
On my sleeve, let the runway start
If people modded it so that that one person lived, surely there must be a "not-so-sexist Tifa" somewhere.
Also while its the current topic, I must say I enjoy Anita Sarkeesian's work a lot. Sometimes she stretches or distorts something, or interprets something in a way that I don't (maybe due to privilege, maybe just different people). But like, 95% of her work is good excellent work. And looking at her Wikipedia page, she has to be holding back for the sake of her audience! Those are some impressive academic achievements (for anyone, I hope nobody read that as "for a women")
I hope that's not controversial. I'm not forced to agree with her 100% of the time, right o_O
Also the video @Arch mentioned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tnJxqRLg9x0
At 2:30 she brings up Rugrats, and at 3:05 she brings up Power Puff Girls. I think its important to the current topic of parents versus media.
Those are frickin' kids shows! And look at the messages they send!
Which seems to be bouncing between two extremes. Neither is wholly responsible. Parents, the media, and society all are responsible for who we are now. Remember "it takes a village to raise a child", because parents are not super-people who can swoop in 24/7 to tell their kids what they are seeing/hearing is wrong.
Now, I would argue that parents perhaps play the largest roll, but that's because mine were awesome and I was/is pretty anti-social! But, that said, the media and society do have some impact on how we grow up and the world-view we adopt.
We may be seeing more sexuality overall in media in the future
I got this from a colbert video cuz Im hip
might as well start a dialogue going
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I do think that when they wanted a female character to draw the eye, they went for the unusually large chest as a focal point, though. (There's even a joke about a special supportive undergarment when Cloud's flashing back to their past in Niflheim, as I recall.)
Yeah, she definitely gets points for that. She's also a lot more dimensional than "love interest" often is, I think.
That, I think, goes down to differing attitudes about gender norms in Japan. Tifa comes closer to meeting our self-actualized ideal of the strong, sexy woman, Aeris is more of a demure wallflower...but from what I've seen in Japanese media, there is a significant demure wallflower fandom over there. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, either. There's a character in nearly every show/game who's got glasses, and basically no personality independent of a desire to please her friends. Sailor Mercury is the most innocuous, and least bespectacled example I know of. Very worst, Anthy in Revolutionary Girl Utena. But! Forbidden Subject.
Generally, I suspect that we're supposed to be very attached to Aeris. It may just not really translate.
But Carth just annoyed me.
*Carth has stopped walking and now stares longingly into the distance*
Me: "Hey buddy what wrong"
Carth: "Oh, nothing much. Just things, you know"
Me: "You can talk to me Carth, we're friends"
Carth: "I'll be fine"
Repeat 15 times. Just spit it out already!
That being said, it was just a video game and I was young. In real live, no way I'm prodding some guy I just meet about his life if hes not ready.
Probably one of my least favorite things about Bioware. The PC is always a nosy fuck who shoves his nose where it does not belong.
It was actually kinda nice when Veronica told me to mind my own business when I asked her if she was in love. A realistic answer!
I actually just replayed that game and while I went in with a similar view, I ended up with completely the opposite impression of both characters. Like, I think people have this vague memory of Tifa as the strong one and Aeris as demure and weak, but in the dialog it's completely the other way around. Aeris shows all kinds of agency in her dialog, first inserting herself into this underground resistance movement and coming up with plans (which the group then follows), then ultimately going off on her own to make a sacrifice that saves the planet. She does drag (literally, drag) Cloud on a date at one point, but she never moons over him, hides her affection, or shows any of the shyness that I think a lot of people associate with her. In the writing she's a strong-minded direct character pretty much from start to finish.
Tifa is...not that. She's honestly pretty much written as obsessed with Cloud from start to finish. She's in Avalanche to reunite with Cloud, she constantly goes on about how she wants to experience Cloud 'saving' her, and ultimately her reason for continuing on with the mission is to be with Cloud. She clings to him even when he goes into a coma, refusing to leave his side with the world at stake. She's not shown as weak or incompetent or anything, just super co-dependent and kind of lacking in her own identity.
I was actually surprised at how weak Tifa came across overall, given that my memories of the game were pretty much like yours, with Tifa as the strong physical one and Aeris as the shy weak magic-user. I think those are just the archetypes we've come to expect based on their visuals, but the writing in the game doesn't really support it.
If we're talking about demure, dependent, identity crisis characters though, we all know who wins the prize, Mr. Compensating
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Aeris is definitely something of a go-getter. Although considering she only meets Cloud when he plummets into her church after an act of terrorism, I'd say that her interest in Cloud is the weirder one. (Except for his not-coincidental resemblance to the late Zack.)
I'm sure there are people into that. Not the body normative mainstream media, though.
See also: G.I. Joe from my childhood, and Popeye from the generation before mine.
Recently I caught like 5 minutes of a current kids show that had something to do with martial arts, and Avatar the Last Airbender this was not: the protagonist was a violent little shit, exactly the kind of kid you know will wind up in prison some day.
Good to know children's television is ever the cesspool.
I remember an episode of PPG where the Professor urged the girls to use restraint and not pummel ugly monsters and bugs and gross things - that it's what is on the inside that's important. The girls took this advice to an extreme and became pacifists. But later in the episode, the girls were swallowed whole by a giant roach and they determined the roach was ugly on the inside, too, and proceeded to tear it to pieces.
Because we cannot rely on corporations to be moral (in fact, we effectively prohibit it in most cases) we need to divide the world of actions that we want to see occur into two groups. Those that are important enough for us to force or constrain action through laws, and those that are not. Sexism in video games? Pretty firmly in the latter, so you need to make it easy for executives to choose to address the issue, and that means making it good business to do so, and furthermore, it means making it clearly seem like good business.
Sounds about right.
On the plus side, programming like that can help bring equality between the sexes.
Hah hah, I jest. There's a lot of biology going on with violence in society, not just sociology. Testosterone plays a role. Anyone who says otherwise is a fruitcake.
What is more important, visual or personality design? Would it be preferable to have more big titted Kreia depth characters or sensible shoe wearing B cup bland female space marines? I would prefer the in depth chars.
Moral duties, yeah, duh, given.
But don't ethical duties supercede fiduciary duties?
DID B SCHOOL LIE TO ME???!!!!
You certainly have shown that person, should they ever appear.
Though "plays a role" is broad enough to be meaningless as it is. The frontal lobe plays a role in violence. Toes play a role.
I said it plays a role. Don't overstate my statement.
Fiduciary duties are ethical duties. They have their basis in the law of trusts, which governs the ethical obligations of the holder of assets in trust for the beneficiary of the trust.
Which I know you don't, I'm just making a joke. If your initial post was tongue in cheek, then disregard both of mine.
Essentially I'm saying that even if we achieve the society of perfect equity, men will still be more violent as a general rule. This should not be read as "men are violent and women are not".
Actually, everyone should take testosterone and we should just Highlander this shit out until there's only one person left.
1) Legally they do.
2) That is why it is up to the consumer to not buy products they feel support ethics and morals that we do not agree with. Corporations are out to make money, and if holding position X leads to them losing money, smart of corporations will drop support X so quick your head will spin.
I never ate at Chick-Fil-A, and there were none around here until recently. But if some says to me "Hey Pluto, wanna go to Chick-Fil-A?", my answer will be a sound "Nope!" until they change their policy on giving money to hate groups.
Going through infertility we met other couples who were in the same boat and a couple of them were purely male factor (most are female factor like us or a mix). In one of those couples, the husband had almost no testosterone. Still had a normal sounding male voice.
Side note: men seem to take male factor infertility much harder than women take female factor infertility. I think its because virility is viewed as a masculine trait in our culture. I never heard of a girl saying she was less of a woman because she had problems with her eggs, but any man with sperm count issues seems to think they are less of a man. Its really unfortunate, because its complete bullshit. Your actions make you a man IMO, not your ability to naturally impregnate a woman.
What do you mean by 1? Executives only have fiduciary duties when acting in that role. One of those duties is to obey the law though.
I agree 100% on 2. But more important than just boycotting, you need to tell them why you are boycotting.
So I guess here is my question. How do special interests consumers or niche markets (assuming "people who want better female representation/diversity" can be considered in this way) affect producers?
That is, how do producers respond to niche markets, and how do those niche markets make demand known?
The answer we got earlier, and I'm picking on Will, even though he kind of backed off on it, is "they should create their own products". This is, to my understanding of economics, how to interpret the claim that "if you want better females in games, make them yourself."
Obviously this makes no sense, so I'm actually curious from a market economic standpoint how niche markets are handled.
Our argument seems to be "by being critical of current market practices, niche markets can encourage producers to shift towards this new demand, or away from producing products that people dislike."
Is this not economically sound, like academically? Is it not sound in practice?
Basically wax academic about this, because I feel like just saying "y'all don't understand the economic argument" isn't really helpful.
You keep falling back on "companies are risk averse," which while true doesn't really, really address the actual argument being made.
A... novel solution.
Reduce the population to 1, problem solv... wait, I see a flaw here.
Back to the drawing board.
Like some may see fair hiring policies as ethical, or proper waste disposable the same.
Those ethics and morals corporations are forced to follow due to law.
In fact, the slap on the wrist penalties are stupid and should probably go away if we want that to happen. If it costs 1,000,000 dollars to dump waste legally, or 250,000 illegally and a fine of 250,000, what are most companies going to do?
I hope that made sense. Corporations must follow ethics and morals that have been codified into law.
Yo, spoilers
Like, in Doctor Who, Amy has problems because she can't have kids and almost divorces Rory because of it
It's not a problem unless you're like, in love with humanity or something.
I see no problems here
It is conclusively presumed that violating the law is against the best interests of the shareholders, so execs don't get to choose the illegal act that saves $1MM but results in a $1k fine. That is a policy judgement that we have made in relatively modern times and I stand behind it. Laws regulating pollution (for example) should not just be treated as imposing a cost on polluting. They are a prohibition on doing it, full stop.
Not that it isn't also a male problem but I'm just saying that just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it ain't a thing, in fiction and history.
EDIT: maybe not in video games though. I can't think of a game with this plot. But also I'm forgetful.
I am not downplaying the hardship of female infertility at all. Just in my experience it seems like women handle it better than men, because it doesn't challenge their identity as women (at least as long as they can still have children). No matter what, infertility sucks to go through for both members of the couple.
YOUR INSECTUMNORMATIVE BIAS IS WELL KNOWN! >.<
Erghhhh.....is....Other...M...secretly...feministtttttt aghhhhh
Cool this is probably why Ethics in B School is a "Survey" course, while ethics in Law School is a "LOL, here's how you dont get disbarred" course. :P
Can't we have both reasonable female designs and great characters?
Dude, Social Insects are like, super sexist.
Theres one queen always giving birth, and ton of male sex slaves, and a sexless-ish class of workers.
I don't know who is being repressed, but someone is. Hell, lets just say they all are
https://www.msu.edu/~womyn/alternative.html
Womyn is, yes, one of the more ridiculous expressions of feminism, and not what I would call the mainstream iteration thereof. But there's a certain fascination with "reclaiming" words, for example "c***" and "bitch," as well as "history" (herstory), of which this is one example, as is her own (non-profit) corporate sponsor, Bitch Media. It feels like a whitewash to me to behave as though this kind of thing doesn't exist, just because it's not something she wants to associate herself with.
Also gotta quibble with her characterization of Y: the Last Man. For one thing, the most competent and self-actualized characters in that story are all women, as Yorick is a useless schmuck and the only living man on earth. So there's that. It also directly addresses the dearth of women in important positions; the new President after the mystery plague was Secretary of Agriculture, after the other seven people in the line of succession (VP, Speakers of the House, Cabinet secretaries, &C), all male, die. Yeah, the Daughters of the Amazon are crazed, violent female chauvinists, but like the other characters, they've got their own way of coping with half the population of the planet dying in a day, and the race being a very short stretch away from inevitable extinction.
Sounds on point to me about Veronica Mars.
I feel like she comes close to conspiracy theory, a lot of the time.