Leave it to Vox Day, the proudly reactionary sci-fi author and game developer, to say what most of his #GamerGate comrades spend so much energy denying: that their little movement is at least in part a backlash against women in gaming. At least against real women, with their own opinions.
As Vox writes in a post on his Alpha Game blog,
Games have long been an escape from women and social pressure for many young men, so it should surprise no one that they aren’t particularly keen on seeing their retreat invaded by the very things from which they are escaping.
So why exactly do guys want an escape from women? Well, as Vox once explained in an interview with “Dr. Helen” for her book Men On Stike,
Women can be entertaining, but they’re expensive, inaccessible for most men, and from the male perspective, shockingly unreliable.
What makes it worse, Vox suggests on his blog, is that the kind of guys who play a lot of video games aren’t exactly the guys scoring the top quality women.
When people ask a gamma or an omega if he wouldn’t rather be out and about “with a real girl” instead of playing games, they should first keep in mind what sort of “real girl” is probably on offer for him. And considering the alternatives, who can truly blame him if he looks at his choices and decides that games and porn are genuinely the better option.
Huh. Aren’t you a game developer, Vox? I thought the first rule of GamerGate is that journalists and developers shouldn’t insult their customers.
But GamerGaters were quick to pardon Mytheos Holt for calling them all a bunch of dateless losers, and I suspect they’ll do the same with Vox, because no matter how pathetic he thinks most gamers are, it’s clear he thinks women are worse.
Pallygirl
http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3r6cmq
You have a knack for picking just the right ones with just the right text. It’s one of your many talents. 🙂
And by picking, I also mean making. Choosing the right picture, choosing the right text.
Argh, it’s been a long day.
My mom haaaaaaaaaates that song, since my biological father (her first husband) used to listen to it a lot, and she took it as a veiled threat…he was heavily depressed and did quite a bit of gaslighting. 😛
I suspect we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this:
There absolutely is not. There is certainly certain things that cause you to be ignored by the high fashion world (try being Black), or even ridiculed publicly (don’t offend people AND be fat–that’s a crime, trufax), but what is “mainstream” “hot” is so utterly all over the place that you’d look like a fool trying to define it.
Clear skin? Freckles? Beauty mark? “Flawless”? Warm hues? Translucent? Blond? Red? Natural? Permed? Straight? Short? Long? Bright irises? Dark irises? Long nose? Puck nose? Flat nose? Pointy nose? Strong chin? Shy chin? Florid coloring? Heroin chic? Epicanthal folds–y/n? Crazee makeup? Hippy makeup lite? Form fitting style? Drapey-flowey style? Flat butt? Big butt? Cleavage? Lift and separate? A-cup? Wonderbra’d? Athletic? No visible muscles? Skinny? Voluptuous? Tall? Petite? Pregnant? Never had a baby? Age? Betty White, anyone? Queen Latifah?
Now there’s research on what is attractive to men on average and the role culture plays in those conceptions … but that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?
We’re talking about the world according to magazine covers. And it seems to me that actresses become “hot” by making their handlers lots and lots of money by being in lucrative projects … and “not” by making bombs. You can also become “hot” or a “sex symbol” by playing the laddie boy mag and skin-showing speaking parts circuit just the right way (cough Megan Fox); but luck is involved because there are so many wannabes that never break through (the less famous Olivia).
Then add magazine copy about from their makeup artists about how this person is so angelically beautiful and naturally gorgeous it’s almost a crime to put makeup on, and finish off with photoshopping every photo into submission (art photographers need not apply?) so the cover image looks ever so unnatural, otherworldly and just plain off.
Hot. Okay.
I still don’t know from a set of photos who is going to be judged “hot” unless under the photo you tell me how much profit their movies made.
If you’re not talking about real humans but about those “hot” NPCs you do realize those are polygons with exaggerated simulacra of secondary sex characteristics and there is not a bleeding human being on Earth who looks like that, right? So I’m pretty sure that’s not what the OP had in mind. Either that or the OP needs glasses. ;-D
@Puddleglum, you may (or may not) be too young to remember this, but Cindy Crawford was considered the hottest woman in the early 90s. She seems to be a decent person but physically? I would never look at her twice. And in fact some of her early shoots before she became hyperfamous were airbrushed quite a bit. But once she was famous all the unique things about her face that make her unforgettable become her signature.
A few generations ago there were a lot of men who were obsessed with Marilyn Monroe and her “measurements”. She wasn’t necessarily considered the most beautiful or most glamorous figure in Hollywood at the time, but she became a sex symbol with great staying power. I would argue this was largely on the back of the roles she played in racy “B” movies. My grandfather had a poster of her on the bathroom door of his bachelor pad but after they got married, my grandmother gave the ultimatum: Either Marilyn moves out or I do!
Grandmother was much thinner than MM, probably a few inches taller, and quite attractive as a young woman. She spend hours curling her hair so it could be formed into a fashionable coif. To me, MM’s hair always looks a mess. What is hot? Hot becomes it’s own justification. Hot people define hot. There is no “mainstream” hot. It is supplanted by whatever creature has become the most famous, the most successful, or the most daring, the most flirty and exposed.
Wow, two teel deers to say you disagree. I really could have done without the boner update.
We don’t really want to read these long detailed letters from your boner. Please keep them in your pocket where they belong. Thank you.
Anarchonist:
Unless, of course, you are a cat. Because then everything is about you personally. Which is only right and proper, because cat.
“When people ask a gamma or an omega”
Blargh, this crap was bad enough when we just had Alpha, Beta and Omega. What, are men now supposed to be ranked through the whole greek alphabet?
Then why is it so bad to be a Beta, shouldn’t they be rather high?
By god, from all the infuriating bullshit these idiots use, this is not the worst, but in some way the dumbest.
Talk like this in seriousness and get lobotomized, it would actually improve their mental capabilities.
You read a lot more into my objection than was actually there.
“Some of us neckbeards actually get together with hot girls, Vox” is problematic because it plays right into the belief that sex with a hot girl validates you as a man, and that hot girls are the only ones worth dating.
If he’d just said “girls”, it would have been “aww, that’s sweet”…but no, he had to go and define his social success in precisely the same obnoxious criteria that Vox Day is using. Remind me again why we care about his approval?
@kittehserf:
Exactly. Then again, why would a cat want to be a better person anyway? Even the best person in the world is below cat. Cat is awesome. Who needs people anyway? Well, obviously cat does, to get the cat snacks, but that’s beside the point! The point is… umm… Why are you still reading this, you lazy bum? Go get me snacks!
/catspeak
@Buttercup, thank you, I was trying to put my finger on what was bothering me about this and got derailed by definitions, lol.
Pallygirl
http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/809/happy-oh-stop-it-you.png
Bask in your glory, fruitloopsie. 🙂
I think we’re also getting long detailed letters from his grandpa’s boner of yesteryear, which, it turns out, is worse then just corresponding with one boner.
WTF?
Seriously, creature?
I feel like I’m reading an article about Bridget Bardot from the 60s. Please note that this is not a compliment.
Is it just me, or does this sound weirdly demeaning to Megan Fox, Olivia Wilde, and Cindy Crawford? And given the sheer level of conventional attractiveness that these three women appear to have? This is also starting to verge on “2/10 would not bang” territory and to critiquing the looks of very pretty women and thereby holding all other women who aren’t like them to an even more impossible standard.
I mean…
Marilyn-freakin’-Monroe is only hot because she played in some racy B movies?
There’s definitely an argument to be made that Marilyn Monroe became a sex symbol* in part because the studio she was contracted with (MGM IIRC but I could be wrong on that) made it so. If you look at her pictures from before she became famous, it’s clear they gave her a huge makeover.
What I don’t get is why that’s an argument that there’s no such thing as mainstream hot. Her handlers crafted that image for her specifically because that look was mainstream hot at the time. Conventional beauty standards may change every decade or two, and they may be manufactured and arbitrary, but they still very much exist.
*It just occurred to me as I typed the words “sex symbol” how strange of a term that is. How can a person also be a symbol. It’s kind of creepy when you think about it. Or maybe I’m just drunk.
@tamerlame
Because a lot of women like gaming. What gives men any more of a right to gaming than women?
Oh right; I forgot. Because men are just better and we’re all helpless NPCs.
I’ve been gaming — PNP and video — since I was old enough to wonder what my parents were doing with dice and computers. It’s my space as much as yours, so either learn to be civil to another human being who might, ya know, be using a female screen name or go join a guild where you can be a jerkbag in private.
Basic human interaction 101: women like doing stuff they enjoy too. A lot of women like video games. A lot of women like multiplayer video games. You will encounter women on them. You don’t have to like it or talk to women online, but it is the most basic level of humanity to have the restraint not to pitch a fit about a female screen name or a high-pitched voice.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not, so I’m going to assume you are and go from there.
Let’s just start with the obvious: Women are not a “caste”. This isn’t a fucking feudal system here. We’re a gender that consists of both cisgendered and transgendered women, and we make up roughly fifty percent of the entirety of the human race. Hi, nice to meet you.
As andiexist said: A lot of women like gaming. Women have been involved with gaming from its fucking inception. Many of the games you know and love wouldn’t exist without women being present to help make it so. In fact, not only do women make up roughly half of the human race, we also make up roughly half of all gamers as well.
So, why is it that men get to claim the space as “male”, and try to exclude or force women out of it (y’know, like they do with comic books, sci-fi, fantasy, and practically every other “nerdy” thing out there, on top of sports, movies, music, and every other form of mainstream media?)
Why do men get to have more of a right to that space than women do if we have contributed and consumed just as much of this media as men have?
Kirbywarp’s Top 10 Reasons why keeping the privileged man hating caste out of male spaces, specifically gaming, is wrong!
Misunderstandings
1. Women aren’t privileged relative to men
2. Women aren’t a caste, they’re a gender
3. Women aren’t man-hating. That’d be a bit awkward…
4. Gaming isn’t a male space. In fact, this betrays a profound misunderstanding about what a “safe space” is. It’s a private group, not a genre.
Logistics
6. Keeping women out of gaming is practically impossible unless you kick out all the female developers, shop owners, burn all the game collections of all women, require gender proof for all game distribution platforms (like steam) and all gaming-related websites, train all game sellers to not serve women, prevent youtube let’s play (and the like) access to women, prevent women from creating their own games independent of the existing industry…. yeah.
7. Good luck convincing anyone outside of the manosphere that this would be a good idea. The rank and file of the population, and most gamers, are perfectly fine with the idea of women being gamers.
Morality
8. “Keeping X out of Y” is pretty much wrong by default, unless there’s a good reason to be exclusionary.
9. Trying to prevent half the population from taking part in a particular past-time just because you don’t like a couple individuals (and lets face it, it always boils down to the targets of gamergate) is extremely petty at best.
And the number 10 reason is…
10. It won’t solve anything that really bothers you, namely people enjoying something that you enjoy in a way that you don’t like. Unless you are the only gamer left in the world, there will be people doing things that you don’t like. Suck it up, go back to your bridge, and stop trying to make an amazing pasttime as hateful and miserable as you.
PSSST! Kirby!
You skipped five.