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
MRAL: Being socially awkward is not an excuse for misogyny.
MRAL, do you understand that the Metroid franchise stretches waaay back to the NES (circa 1986)? Metroid Prime and its derivatives are the most current, but they’re sooo not the version that I was discussing back in the day. Which was a good deal before youtube was available or the internet could be accessed at more than 14.4 speeds…
And yet, Samus has been the main charachter in all of them, and identified as female in all of them. Shocking i know!
This is another instance of “your life experiences do not encompass the whole world’s life experiences”.
Dude. The OP is pissed that a video game features female characters as the strongest unit in a game, and points to it as proof of the hatred of men as a group. You do not think that is inherently mockable?
MRAL, most socially awkward people who may post here are not raging misogynistic assholes.
Spare me the “men have issues too” line. What you mean is that YOU have issues, and we have made a LOT of threads here all about you. If you want therapy, I suggest you start paying for it.
I’m not, and never was, much of a “videogames” fan. I like computerchess, but largely for tutorial value of playing against stronger programs (most contemporary computer programs, e.g. rybka, shredderchess, and Houdini, now play at their best above human grandmaster level) and of course, the occasional 1 or 2% draw rate is exciting when I earn one!
It is important to note, however, that a lot of men are starting to resent the pollution of videogames by a female (or feminist) presence, and are making our resentment known!
Women are uninvited!! If you want videogames, go play your own! I’m sure that there are more than enough touchy-feely, “co-oerative” rather than “competitive”, woman-as-victim, pishposh that would make women players happy, and we men wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Enjoy!
It comes to a matter of personal space. If the men who were playing videogames wanted to play with women, they would be on internet dating sites, singles, cruises, pickup centers like bars or nightclubs, or perhaps avail themselves of “escort” or “outcall” services. They are instead enjoying their time with their computers! Leave them alone!
You modern women don’t like us men at your gyms, your taverns, your schools, your centers of woman’s activism, and even most of your businesses, do you? Give us the same courtesy.
This post would not be complete without noticing that men are not “intimidated” by so-called “strong women”! We are DISGUSTED by them! You are horrid to us!
@Zhinxy I am an autistic woman and met some decent autistic and aspie men as well. The ableism of NTs who believe that if one autistic person is misbehaving that means that all autistic people act the same way. I am a video game nerd myself (well more console then computer to be honest) and I just hate the assumption that if a woman plays video games, it means she never gets laid or is asexual or some stereotypical crap! UGH
I’m pretty socially awkward myself. I’ve gotten a lot better in the past several years, but I still have a great deal of anxiety surrounding social situations. (Though again, WAY more comfortable than I used to be.) So I have a lot of sympathy for people who have a hard time with human interaction.
That sympathy is, however, reserved for those who aren’t self-absorbed, mean-spirited, misogynistic and inconsiderate of other people’s feelings.
Hey, Meller’s back! Now the party can start.
You know who I like playing video games with, Meller? Women. And men. Anyone I like and want to spend time with who shares my interest in gaming. It doesn’t matter what what genitals they have or what their gender identity is. So once again, speak for yourself, you scared little boy.
How is DKM a real person in the world?
DKM, where did you get the impression that we gave a rat’s ass what you think?
How is DKM a real person in the world?
Massive narcissistic delusion.
Admittedly, he’s loads more fun than watching MRAL slowly relapse into shitheaddom, but…
Hej, bit of a lurker, used to post quite regularly here but now the comment threads jump up to 250 so fast! I never want to delurk and disrupt shit!
Anyways, this article is pretty relevant to the topic at hand. As a female geek who still goes to ComicCon despite the harassment, gaming and geek culture is so close to my heart:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_235/6978-Vaginophobia
“Ducat, a clinical psychologist and professor of Psychology at the New College of California, believes that “this fantasy of being under constant siege by a multitude of external feminizing forces is really an unconscious defense that is employed to keep out of mind something even more disturbing – an identification with women.”
This phenomenon has found an accommodating home in the culture of videogames where empowerment fantasy is de rigueur. Consider the nominees for the 2009 Game of the Year at Spike’s Video Game Awards: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Left 4 Dead 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Each game is combat-oriented, features male protagonists, and presents a world full of aggressive antagonists in which the player must become a savior. To whom are these experiences most likely to appeal?
According to the ESA, 40% of people playing games are women. There are almost twice as many women over the age of eighteen who play games than there are boys under the age of seventeen. And yet only one in every ten game developers is a woman, while the ranks of videogame journalists skew heavily male, as does the audience that reads their work.
“I can tell you a million personal experiences of me covering this industry as a woman where people are just clearly freaked out by the fact that you’re a woman but you’re not a booth babe,” said Heather Chaplin, journalist and co-author of Smart Bomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Video Game Revolution. “All you have to do is go to a games industry event and it’s obvious that there are mostly men in the industry.”
In a paper published in the Psychological Review, a group of UCLA researchers found that the “basic neuroendocrine core of stress responses does not seem to vary substantially between human males and females. Both sexes experience a cascade of hormonal responses to threat.” However, men are much more likely to respond to stress with a “fight-or-flight” tendency while women are prone to “tend-and-befriend” reactions.”
It is a good read!
And, as always, to MRAL: no one here is raging on about socially awkward males. Hello, I am socially awkward. What people are pissed off about is shit like this:
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/
You can’t actively alienate and harass women in your geek communities, or just sit back when other men do, and then still expect to have romantic luck. We tend to like people with similar interests. My fiancé is a big geek who does HAM Radio all the time, I am a sci fi geek and an anthropologist. If you want to meet more geeky women, you need to work to make your misogynistic geek communities less threatening to women.
Basically misogynistic socially awkward geeks are shooting themselves in the foot: being horrible to the women who would be perfect to date them.
So what about the women who are playing online games minding their own business who get harassed by men? Should they be left alone?
Yeah, reading Meller’s rants is at least amusing in a “What if Dr. Byron Orpheus was a sexist asshole?” kind of way.
Can’t tell if Meller is a troll, being sarcastic, or really believes what he’s espousing.
Meller, please please tell me if you think women in doll collecting are invading your space? XD
The reason why I have no patience with the geek community’s misogyny and homophobia is that I’m a geek myself, and it’s not in my interest to put my head in the sand and ignore the fact that the gamer community is pretty bad on those points. I’m tired of the fact that the only social community I’m still in the closet in is my gamer buddies. I’m more out at my job, and that’s even though I usually don’t talk at all about my personal life so I tend to be seen as het cis male by default.
Also, I’m tired of nerds and geeks saying they’re socially awkward as though that was an immutable characteristic and not something that they can work on and improve.
Um, taking a look at the Total War Center Wiki the only female units (in Shogun 2) I can find are Onna Bushi which are not definitely not nuns and their melee attack is only 10. I count 14 different units (excluding hero units which I assume are intended to be rare and more powerful) that have higher melee damage.
Plus, I recall that in the original Shogun (released over 10 years ago), the most skilled assassin was the Geisha, but I suppose that is ok for these guys because the geisha aren’t useful in melee combat.
(Note: Said wiki doesn’t appear to have any info on units that may have been added in the various expansions)
I never want to delurk and disrupt shit!
What, are you afraid you’ll make it devolve into a discussion of bra sizes? We disrupt our own shit all the time. So don’t worry about it.
Aw, I was so hoping Meller’s latest rant would call me a “gameress.”
Also, I adore the fact that women are “uninvited” to play video games. Because the average dude routinely gets little caligraphied notes saying, “Mr. Deathbladezzz requests the honor of your presence and the use of your polymorph spell at Onyxia’s lair, Friday, May the 12th at 7:30 PM. Formal armor, please.” :-p
Socially awkward people tend to be extremely polite. Hate-spitters and harassers are obnoxious fucks, not cute awkward guys.
Stop making excuses for them.
Don’t be silly! Putting up with insults and unsolicited advances from men IS women’s business. Why else would we exist?
/sarcasm emitter overloading, breaking to undertake some art in five four three two…
Well, I’m not so much ‘socially awkward’ as I am ‘socially fucked beyond repair’ but For the most part I avoid being an asshole to innocents.