It’s almost impossible to catalogue all the ways men are oppressed by women in contemporary gynocratic society. There are so many! For example, did you know that men are oppressed by female characters in video games? I know, right? The last bastion of red-blooded manliness, invaded by imaginary ladies!
Luckily, the fellows at MGTOWforums.com are on the case, exposing this foul virtual misandry. I Am started off a recent discussion on the subject by asking
WTF is with empowered women in video games now? …
I see a new trend in the video/computer game world and that is the increase in strong playable female characters.
Now, I am no hardcore gamer but I do play computer games often and the recent one I have been playing recently is Shogun 2 total war. Now for those who don’t know what this game is, it is a strategy game based on the military of feudal Japan. I recently bought an upgrade for the game the other day and guess what one of the strongest military units was? Nuns. I shit you not. The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game. Somehow I doubt that in real life a nun would have swung a sword or used a spear faster and harder than a feudal warlord, and this game was based on history.
Clearly nuns are incapable of manlike swordplay, though it is true that they are capable reenacting famous internet panda sneeze videos. (I have seen video proof of this.) But Shogun 2 does not depict them sneezing like pandas. It depicts them fighting.
This is an outrage because video games are meant to be a perfectly accurate reflection of reality. Obviously there is nothing even slightly unrealistic about any of this:
Most of us dudes are in fact capable of karate-chopping heads in two. We just don’t like to show off all the time.
I think I have the right to ask steam and other gaming companes: WTF with the subliminal brainwashing? What now when I buy or play a game women will be doing all the ass kicking? …
I call bullshit on this subject. Video games are the last place for guys to hang out and now women are taking over. Why not just save us the trouble and instead of eliminating our fantasy world just throw us in work camp to provide for thier bastard children (literally speaking) while they shit all over us…wait they already do that.
I Am is not the only dude who’s noticed this alarming femtrend. Goldenfetus added his observations:
I’ve noticed this too, and it drives me insane. Was co-oping Gears 3 last month and there’s a point where 2nd player has to take over a female character. Almost ruined the game for me. It may seem minor, but once you’re aware of this type of brainwashing it’s impossible to ignore. There’s no way a slim female could keep up with the massive battle-hardened male Gears in that kind of environment. They would be a liability as they are in real life combat.
Exactly! By contrast, the male characters in Gears of War 3 are all completely accurate representations of real-world men.
Goldenfetus continued:
You’ll see the same thing in most stat-based role-playing games as well, where you have the option of a female player character – like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, D&D, etc. The women never have any strength or intelligence penalties compared to the males. … They want to give the impression that people of any race, gender, and sexual-orientation are interchangeable – that there are no differences in ability between them, and that only a bigot could think otherwise. I’m sick of it too.
At the very least, female characters should be depicted as carriers of cooties.
Despite the very serious subject matter – video game misandry is never funny! – Xtc tried to lighten the mood with a little humor:
It would be hilarious to portray the female characters realistically. If you chose the female character in your FPS [First Person Shooter] she would have to move very slowly, dragging the gun around. You could build in some extra shake to the crosshairs to represent hopeless accuracy. Every time you needed to reload your gun, instead of just pressing a button, you’d have to find a male character and go through some flirting dialogue options to persuade him to do it for you. One out of every four missions the game would tell you that you were sitting out this one due to ‘women’s issues’.
Calloway, for his part, offered some historical perspective:
This is nothing new. I got heavy into gaming back in the late 90’s and even back then they had Tomb Raider, S.I.N., etc. Even in the original Unreal, you played as a big-breasted female.
I saw a documentary on the making of the original Tomb Raider once. The lead character, Lara Croft, was originally going to be a man. They saw him as an Indiana Jones-type character. Then, one of the designers suggested it be a woman because “if you’re going to be playing a game for hours, you might as well have something good to look at”. …
When you first take the red pill, it’s amazing the things you see. It’s as if you had blinders on before, and all of sudden they’ve been removed, allowing you to actually understand what you’ve been seeing.
Yep. And what you’ve been seeing is Lara Croft’s ass. Lara Croft’s ass oppresses men! The red pill tells me so!
Now we come to the clincher.
When you try to get romantic with the imaginary ladies in video games, they don’t act like Roissy and those dudes say ladies act. I mean, you can’t even neg them! As Dave sadly pointed out:
I remember about 12 years ago playing the Baldur’s Gate rpg series and there were some romance dialog paths between your character and some of the women who could join your group but you had to treat them very nice. You couldn’t give them any attitude or make fun of them otherwise it would be over.
Basically you have to be a total mangina towards women in most games if you want to bed them.
Even imaginary ladies are stuck up bitches!
The horror!
I had a
@WTF is up with Meller’s incessant need to control women? I know he’s a condescending fop with a lot of unwarranted self-importance, but is his life really so empty that it can’t have meaning unless he has his very own slave? Or maybe he’s just got some sort of processing disorder.
Sadly, Meller’s desire to control women seems to be a trait that MRAs share. In fact, Meller’s division between the evil nasty free-thinking feminists and his imaginary ‘real women’ who knows her place as the wife has given me a lot of insight into MRA’s philosophy.
Lol at NWO getting the smackdown. Amazing how no website that isn’t dedicated to men’s rights trollishness will put up with him.
I came across one of his posts on another site a while ago, one that I don’t even think was about feminism. He was spouting the same bullshi there too. He’s really committed to trollin’ around the world.
Casual gamer here…
1. Re misogyny: I remember reading an article about game design in the late 90s where they talked about the need to develop realistic “breast physics” to get the bounce right. Given that one of my main reasons for playing is to kill monsters, I was saying WTF for days.
2. These guys do know it’s all fantasy, right?
@Crumbelievable
There’s definitely a pattern there. Selfishness, narcissism, emotional maturity of a pre-teen, pretty much everything you lot have said much more eloquently than I have.
Hey, at least they’re a minority! 🙂
Fun fact about the history of chess pieces, the queen was originally a male figure. The slow feminization of the piece took place through the middle ages, but became standard during the late Renaissance. There is some argument among a medievalist scholars as to whether or not chess is a homoerotic symbol in some medieval literature (I had a classmate in undergrad who was a bit obsessed with this topic). Anyways, the modern movements of the queen are also a later development, originating in Renaissance Spain. The figure had more limited movements in most earlier versions of the game. There was rather extreme gendered controversy over it as the change spread through Europe. It was perceived in some quarters as giving women bad ideas and promoting the notion of warrior women (some people actually called the queen piece the “Amazon”) and as making the game too competitive to be suitable for upperclass women.
Do you think chess is too scandalous and tough for women, Meller? It is hard to call your gender ideals regressive, when even the average medieval or renaissance writer is often better or in any case not worse than yours.
@Preya:
I should add that just because someone is opposed to feminism obviously does not make them uneducated. If someone reads up on feminism and still says “I really disagree with a lot of feminist tenets” then that’s fine. But MRAs seem to use ‘feminist’ as shorthand for “women we don’t like”. Case in point, prominent MRA blogger and Worst Candidate For Shopping Mall Santa Ever Paul Elam wrote a piece saying that MRAs should vote to acquit accused rapists even if it’s 100% positive the guy did it, in order to make some sort of fucked up point about how biased the courts are against men. Note that in this scheme, Elam has decided to take his vengeance out not on feminists, but all women who accuse people of rape. All are rape victims feminists? I really doubt it. Does Elam care that his plot will potentially ruin the lives of women who aren’t feminists and might themselves be opposed to feminism? Not at all.
Less extremely, some MRAs, particularly the Spearhead crows, have make it quite clear that they despite feminists because feminists gave women the right to vote and helped get women into the workplace. Here, the idea of a real women for them is the kind of thing Meller is talking about.
“Hey, at least they’re a minority! ”
I’d like to think so. Certainly, most people are not as insane and violent as MRAs are, and the pathetic dreams they have of a revolution will never come to fruition. However, MRM ideas about rape and sexuality seem to be really common all over the world and in our society.
crowd*
Cassandra: Being one of the people who has those swords, they do take strength. They also take stamina. A swordfight that lasts ten minutes is exhuasting (same for a polearm fight, be it naginata or pikes.
The record for “tameshigiri” (practice cutting) is held by an American, and was set, semi-accidentally (he was responding to a challenge).
After the event he was completely out of it for two-three days. But if you look at what he’s doing, that’s a combination of strength, and technique. Each of those bundles is tatami reeds, wrapped around a bamboo shaft and soaked in water. It’s roughly the same effort as required to cut through a human leg.
Re Bruce Lee, and “size”. I’m pretty slight. Very few people seem to want to tangle with me.
Oh… I forgot to mention, making a mistake in tameshigiri can lead to a broken sword. The Mccartney Sensei is using a single sword, with no stop to polish it in the entire course of his demonstration. He was also flat on his back for two-three days, because it’s an entire body motion.
And I’ve seen women who are much better at it than I am. I don’t practice enough.
One more note. He isn’t, “perfect”, if you look you can see some strokes where the target wobbles. Those were blows he was doing more chopping than slicing.
“Cue a couple of firearms instructors, including one semi-famous woman, who had taught hundreds, pointing out less than sweetly that none of them had had an issue even with small and even disabled women, and that if 50% of his students were failing to acquire a basic skill, the problem was not their gender.”
I think I remember that one. Hilarity. Was it the “Cornered Cat” person, or am I thinking of the wrong semi-famous woman?
I’ve had trouble racking slides on two guns — the first actually was a 1911, and the problem turned out to be that my hands were covered in oil (I’d not yet grasped the concept of moderation in oiling firearms) and secondarily that I wasn’t particularly familiar with it. Generally, I’m more concerned about losing control of the firearm. The second one was what was formerly my great-aunt’s pocket pistol — a Beretta in .22 short, about which there is an amusing story*, and that really was a case of “I can’t figure out how to hold this thing and apply force to it in a way that won’t put, like, my whole hand in front of the barrel. Can show me plz?”
* No, .22 Short is not generally a recommended self-defense round. It was my dad’s idea, on the basis of her ladyhands. In his defense, my dad points out that he was 14 at the time, and he did grow up.
There seems to be a set of iconic tasks — racking slides, per above, is one of them, and changing tires on cars is another, that are disproportionately important to many men as “their own preserve”. Actually I find that latter one to be useful as a crude approximation of those implicit association tests or whatever that are used to detect subtle (or not so subtle) prejudice, as bringing up the subject of “women + remove tire and put new one on” seems to drag a looooot of crazy out of the woodwork.
Regards that point, although I don’t know for sure, based on experience I think that most women who are willing, not disabled (note for the stupid: differing substantially from the hypothetical healthy female, e.g. having a bad back), and informed of basic points of technique should be physically capable of either a) successfully doing all the things needful for changing an offending tire, b) failing by means of snapping something off, or possibly c) stopping in reasonable anticipation of b).
ooops quote fail retrying that
@ pecy
I will say that saying penis + no boobies = man is pretty cisexist >_>
@Crumbelievable
““Hey, at least they’re a minority! ”
I’d like to think so. Certainly, most people are not as insane and violent as MRAs are, and the pathetic dreams they have of a revolution will never come to fruition. However, MRM ideas about rape and sexuality seem to be really common all over the world and in our society.”
I guess I’m talking about the more extreme ones who see women as subhuman. I think that they’ll become a thing of the past (relatively) soon, but sexism and some of these old-fashioned ideas will take longer to die out. Hell, I even shared some of them about ten years ago, but I grew out of them.
I agree.
@Pyena:
I tend to feel overwhelmed because I spend a lot of time online and run into their kind a lot. But at the same time, it’s telling that I only see people expressing all sorts of racist and misogynistic sentiments online–people who think like that are gradually being pushed out of polite society and the Internet is the only place they have to go. I won’t be so ignorant as to think a major change will happen in my lifetime (Most of the filth is coming from people my age or younger, most likely) but it will happen and the MRAs will not win.
“I think I remember that one. Hilarity. Was it the “Cornered Cat” person, or am I thinking of the wrong semi-famous woman?”
Yep. Kathy Jackson of Cornered Cat, and KdT of infamy.
The largest issue I can see here is mra’s thinking their vr gaming personalities have anything strength wise ( as they say reality based) compared to a female character.
Neither of them are real dude….
Seriously. Not even close to being real. You are not a giant hit-man warrior as so much as Laura Croft is. They are both not REAL.
How hard is that to figure out? I can honestly say I haven’t played a video game in 13+ years, and none of my kids have decided they are actually characters in the video games they play.
My kids live in reality. Sorry you don’t.
Argh, super late to the party :
I can’t believe these guys are serious.
Misogyny is still alive and well in the video game industry, and the assertion that fanservice aimed at straight men is supposed to be an example of misandry is absolutely so ridiculous, so ignorant, that it made me do a double take.
I didn’t catch up on all the comments yet, so I hope this hasn’t been mentioned before.
A few months ago, I stumbled upon an interview of one of the game designers from Team Ico (of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus fame). Apparently, it was originally planned to have a female protagonist for their new game, The Last Guardian.
The reason why they changed it to a boy pissed me of so much that I really regret liking Shadow Of The Colossus:
They just got to be shitting me. First of all, the protagonist is pretty much a child, and I really doubt there is such a difference in grip strength between girls and boys at that age (I also think it’s not so significant between grown up people, and if the girl did a lot of climbing, she would gain strength anyway – also, it’s a fantasy game for fucks sake!)
As for the skirt-comment: uh, yeah. it’s not like they could CHOOSE not to give her a skirt, or anything. It’s like they think that women are incapable of wearing anything but skirts.
To be honest, I would have a bit more respect for them if they just said “we are worried that a game with a female protagonist wouldn’t sell as well”. It would still be a shitty reason, but it’s still better than the reasons they gave about why they didn’t make the protagonist female.
So yeah, MRAs seem to get more and more desperate to make themselves look like the victims – and failing spectacularly at it.
I haven’t played a video game in years but the obvious is obvious.
A; There is little to no upper body strength needed to push the buttons. Case closed as far as this is concerned.
B: There is no gamer on earth that possesses strength anywhere close to their video game avatar. Fantasy is not the same as reality.
C. Men tend to like to see hot women in video games. Except for David K Meller who grasps onto a traditionally female hobby of doll collecting yet professes to be somehow traditionally masculine to teach women to be like dolls.
And mgtow which never seem to just go there own way.
Any questions?
DKM and any other misogynistic douchebags who care to respond:
You know, all things considered, homophobes who turn out to be closet cases tend to be common enough to be rather amusing when they turn up. How do we know you’re not hiding transgender tendencies, or at least a thing for lacy underwear, under your pseudo-macho bullshit?
I was the one who wrote that, but I do not actually think fanservice for straight men is misandric. I was being sarcastic to make fun of MRA’s. I should have used a sarcasm tag because it’s impossible to say something so ridiculous that it can’t be mistaken as a real MRA belief.
You know, at one point I would’ve scoffed at such an over the top, cartoonish caricature of misogynist gamer geeks. Bad writing. Obvious parody is too obvious. Real life is subtler than that!
I miss my naivete.