The gaming enthusiast known as seanmalstrom seems to be on a personal crusade to challenge the stereotype of men as the “logical sex.” He does this mostly by 1) being a dude and 2) writing things that make no sense at all.
In a recent post on his blog Malstrom’s Articles News – no, that’s really what it’s called – Mr. Malstrom attempts to rebut a piece by John Walker of the gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun that challenged misogyny in the gaming world.
It’s not much of a rebuttal, but Mr. Malstrom makes a couple of, er, “arguments” that grabbed my attention. At one point he suggests that if game developers stop populating their games with sexy lady characters with giant boobs and long legs, American men will have no way to exercise their God-given right to ogle sexy ladies with giant boobs and long legs.
There is a great question I have yet to hear anyone in the Game Industry answer. If women cannot be depicted fantastical (big boobs, long legs, slaughters armies single-handedly) in fantasy entertainment, where can men go to see fantasy women? Women have their fantasy men from endless soap-operas, romance novels, chick flicks, and such. Are men not allowed to have fantasies in entertainment?
True, that is a question I’ve yet to see anyone in the game industry answer, largely because most of the people in the game industry, whatever their flaws, live in the real world, and in the real world images of sexy ladies with big boobs are not exactly difficult to come by.
Mr. Malstrom goes on to argue that men in the English-speaking world have the greatest need for sexy lady video game characters, because the women they run into on a regular basis in the real world are all fatties. In the Cold War era, politicians warned about a “Missile Gap” with the Russians. Today, apparently, we and the Russians have a Fatty Gap.
In Russia, it is stunning to see alcoholic bums of Russian men with model quality looks Russian women. In the same way, in the United States it is stunning to see wealthy, hardworking, handsome American men with an American woman who looks like a Troglodyte. Of course, this is just a generalization. The point is that the typical American male has a better worldwide value if they stop thinking the local obese women around them are ‘the normal’. They aren’t the normal worldwide.
If anyone needs fantasy depictions, it would be English speaking men who don’t have access to the worldwide standard.
Mr. Malstrom is also bothered by the suggestion that video game makers should try to make female characters more interesting. You know, with personalities and motivations of their own, and stuff like that. To Mr. Malstrom, there’s nothing more interesting about a women than her body.
What makes a woman interesting to men?
The truth is that interesting women needs youth, big boobs, long legs, long hair, and an hourglass figure to be interesting to men. The more women go away from this, the less interesting they become to men. This is why women when inevitably age, they become more and more invisible to men. It is just Nature at work. Ironically, for men the older they get, the more interesting they can become to women as their earning potential goes up. This balances out how most young men are invisible to women when they are younger. After the age of 25, men tend to become the more interesting ones compared to a woman of equal age. This is why mothers always advised their daughters to ‘snag him when he and she are both young’.
Indeed, Mr. Malstrom argues, men who insist that women be depicted as sex objects are doing women a giant favor.
And we should only hope that women wish to be depicted as sex objects for that is how they become love objects as well. No man wants to marry a women they aren’t attracted to. Last I checked, marriage rates were plummeting in the West. Perhaps journalists should strive for ‘positive change’ by suggesting to women to be depicted more as sex objects so they can attract a man for marriage before they get too old. That would truly help women and make men happier as well.
Mr. Malstrom concludes with a stirring call for women to stop being such fat fatties.
It IS tasteless for using women as sex objects to sell games. Why? It is because real life women should be sex objects to begin with. If that were the case, putting them on a game cover wouldn’t be selling the game. This used to be the case decades ago. Since obesity in women have skyrocketed and attractive women have diminished, putting attractive women on game covers definitely attracts men more than it should.
It IS sad that women can’t find themselves sensibly portrayed in the games they play. It is not because the women in the games are ‘too attractive’, it is because the women playing them tend to be ‘too fat’. It is sad for women that they are fat. It is also sad for men. What John Walker should do is to advise women to get in shape and try to look like the depictions of women that men are attracted to. This would be ‘positive change’ we could all get behind.
I hate to burst your bubble, Mr. Malstrom, but I don’t think there was any era of history in which women looked like this.
It’s probably just as well, as Lara here doesn’t seem to have eyelids and her head isn’t properly connected to her neck.
Note: Thanks to Tatjna for pointing me to Mr. Malstrom’s post!
@pecunium
Another thing I tell others, but forget it applies to me as well 🙂
Louis CK is great. I saw him recently and he totally called out Nice Guys. I forget the bit exactly. It was great.
It starts out with him saying, yeah, it takes courage for a guy to ask a girl out — he might get rejected. But it takes more courage for a girl to say yes. “It’s totally ill-advised for her to say yes. Men are the No. 1 threat to women. ‘Yes, I’ll go out with you in the dark in a car; the girl tells the guy. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’ ‘To your death, statistically.'”
Shiraz, I only know the Louis version. Didn’t know it came from somewhere else.
Man, you get used to them pretending they aren’t misogynists. It’s almost refreshing when one of them admits it.
God, I hate all of the sexual and street harassment. My first harassment was at eleven, and it sucked. When I was about sixteen I had a fifty or so year old man asked me to marry him when we were alone together at an isolated bus stop.
bahumbugi – that’s a great comment (I don’t know anything about Louis CK except seeing his name come up here).
There’s also the danger for women of saying No. It’s like that line Gavin de Becker quotes in The Gift of Fear: men fear women will laugh at them. Women fear men will kill them.
Oh, my bad, TomBcat, that’s a Louis joke too? Whoops.
Kitteh’s, if you’re so inclined, check out Louis CK on YouTube. There is an HBO special that is an extended riff on George Carlin’s Dirty words. There are two HBO specials, but if he comes out with *ag and *unt, that’s, believe it or not, the good one. Still trigger warnings, because, hey PWM, but he totally acknowledges his position as a PWM. I dunno. Mixed feelings. Bloke makes me practically wet my pants with laughter.
There was a pastor today who said to me “awesome” pause “blossom”
And I gave him massive side eye and went on with my day.
Yeah, he’s PWM — I hadn’t seen his bit on slavery, and my friend (who is African American) started the sentence “I saw his bit on slavery…” and I was like oh god, this will be bad, “…and he totally owned it and got it!” Sometimes he is just depressing and gross, but he’s pretty brilliant. There’s some stuff on Netflix. It’s dark though.
Nick Offerman and Paul F Tompkins are my favorite non-dark comics, for now, I guess.
Hmmm … not sure I really want to listen to anyone who uses that language. Tends to kill the humour for me, however good the comedian.
Yeah, Ck can be really funny, but he’s also…well.It isn’t very feminist friendly. Or women friendly. I’m pretty selective about his stuff.
You should check out Hari Kondabalou Saw him at Caroline’s last week and just about bust a gut. It’s not often a comic can make topical references to “pop-culture” and have me feeling I am likely the only person in the place who gets them (he made an oblique reference to Roots,and a direct one to Jack Johnson, the Black Boxer who created the Idea of, “The Great White Hope”).
OMG… his show was about colonialism,and he made a feminist dick joke. It was great.
Now I have to check it out.
I think I never heard a feminist dick joke…
Pop culture references (especially US ones) would be almost entirely lost on me. 😀
I’m really not into comedians, stand-up and the like. I much prefer comedy series, British ones for the most part – Hamish MacBeth, Oliver’s Travels, that sort of thing.
Ok, I’m tots doing this as a person who doesn’t want to excuse anything that Louis CK has ever said. On the one hand, he has a total audience with our infamous nice guys. They think he is on their side, but I’m not so sure that he is.
Completely OT to anything, but I’m idling through the Manly Guys Doing Manly Things comic and found this. Scented Fucking Candles!!!
Also this has got to be the funniest Twilight joke ever.
I love Manly Guys Doing Manly Things! This is my favorite right now.
That’s one good reason for making kids wear school uniforms – there’s someone to report them to when they do crappy stuff like that.
I mean, I never liked having to wear a uniform, but since I don’t have to anymore, I can see their good points.
Gotta say I have a hard time appreciating David Foster Wallace because of you-know-who. He made a lot of Game of Thrones references, but his biggest tell was DFW.
I can’t be the only person who looks at the pics above and is less annoyed by them being too sexy than by the following issues.
A. They are wearing exactly the same outfit, just in different colors. How lazy was the person who designed those costumes?
B. The girl on the right appears to have something very wrong with her spine. I’m not entirely sure why this is supposed to turn people on.
The Batgirl (?) one just makes me want to ask why she’s running around in her underwear. I mean, she’s got the mask, why’s she still in a singlet and petticoat?
Well, at least they have all their internal organs and I can see only either back or front. But I completely overlooked the outfit thing…maybe the designer wasn’t lazy but has a very specific fetish?
Aaliyah, for some reason I could not figure out which thread we were talking about hair on (it’s early here lol), but I saw this link this morning and thought of you: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/11/18/revisioning-aspirational-hair/ It is photos of a bunch of short hairstyles worn by lesbians. I’m not trying to make any assumptions about you or anything like that, but I thought it might help you get some ideas about short hairstyles that might help you compromise with your dad for now.
I have long hair now but I used to always wear mine very short and I’ve never seen a collection of this type of short hairstyle before…usually I had to shift through a bunch of relatively long clearly feminine styles before I could find a single more androgynous cut, so I just figured I’d leave it here in case you found yourself in a similar situation. 😉
And now that I’ve caught up on the actual thread…I just looked at those pictures in the OP again. I’d noticed the similarity of their outfits but I just realized they even appear to be wearing the exact same belt. WTF how lazy can you get, designers. Gamer guys should agitate for less caricatures of sexy women if for no other reason than to get some creativity in character design.
Re: Louis CK…I’ve watched a lot of his stuff. He sometimes says something terrible, but more often than not I think he actually *is* fairly feminist-friendly, in content if not always in language. I like stand up a lot, and he’s really one of the few male comedians I enjoy watching. He’s probably the only really famous one I like. So much of stand up really does rely on sexist or racist tropes, and his stuff does a lot too, but it usually is fairly subversive and turns it on its head.
I’m not sure I’d go see him live as a lot of his stuff is still pretty damn problematic, but I watch his stuff on TV and on Youtube and enjoy the vast majority of it, which is really saying something for me. 😉
Re: street harassment…I’ve been harassed a *ton.* I was a punk when I was a kid and didn’t have a job and lived in this way over-crowded punk house, and looked the part, but also looked very young. What freaks me out looking back is how often I’d be walking around in broad daylight (often on Sunday mornings, amusingly enough…I used to ask ’em if their wives were at church) middle-aged men in nice cars would pull up to me and ask me if I wanted to “earn some money.” I’m sure they targeted me because I did look so young and homeless.
I’d respond by either making fun of them or throwing rocks at their cars if any were handy…once I cracked some guy’s rear window as he drove off and he slammed on his brakes and started backing up, so I booked it out of there. Fortunately I was still in my neighborhood and was able to cut through some yards and get to my house, but looking back on that now I shudder to think what might have happened. Really, any of those occasions I could have pushed the wrong guy too far. And then it makes me kind of sad that I’m not that fearless kid anymore.
I have small breasts but I’m slender and conventionally attractive, and really always have looked young. I’ve gotten both the typical sexual propositions, and because I’m queer and have usually dressed rather androgynously (leaning towards the masculine), I’ve also often heard shouts of “dyke” and various suggestions that all I need is a good man, etc. I usually have my German Shepherd with me when I’m walking and when I do I shout right back at them because I feel brave when he’s with me (seriously, how many people are going to attack someone who has an 80-pound GSD–plus they don’t know this, but he’s a personal protection dog so he is actually trained to defend me), but if I’m alone I tend not to. Again, makes me kind of sad.
@eli, speaking of dogs, did you find that the acupuncture helped your beagle? I have an old herding dog who has had a few accidents in his life (hit by a car, trampled by cattle, etc.) and now that he’s like 15 he’s pretty arthritic. I’ve been thinking about getting him some but I’m also a bit skeptical.
Sorry for the long post, wanted to reply to a lot. 😉