Check out Margaret Corvid’s fascinating piece in the New Statesman on male sexuality and the appeal of misogynistic movements to sexually frustrated men. As a professional dominatrix who’s also a feminist, she’s acutely aware of the ways conventional masculinity restricts and impoverishes male sexuality.
When I became a professional dominatrix after years in the kink scene, I expected my kinky work to involve lots of spanking, whipping and bondage. And, to my delight, it has. But in the majority of my sessions, I am creating a space for men to explore areas of their sexual lives that society feels are unmanly; they come to me to be penetrated, to be used, to serve, to submit, to worship, to be taken. A client might have any or all of a bewildering array of fetishes, but they mostly come to me to experience something well outside the very narrow confines of what society says that it means to be a man.
Unfortunately, as she notes, Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists offer nothing to men who feel confined by these narrow notions of manhood; indeed, their definitions of manhood are both retrograde and restrictive.
One of the greatest tragedies of the men’s rights movement is that, in the end, its lessons serve only to drive men further away from what they yearn for. Pick up artist techniques and aggrieved entitlement are unlikely to help men achieve the goal of intimacy, but feminist values can teach them the skills to communicate with respect.
You’ll notice a few quotes in there from me, from an email interview she did with me as well as from my post Is the Men’s Rights Movement driven by the rage of the rejected? (I also discussed the issue in this post on the weird sexual undercurrents in A Voice for Men’s Facebook “memes.”)
Do you have earplugs, WWTH? Or noise cancelling headphones? Even quiet music would probably be better than listening to a bunch of randoms whoo-hoo-ing.
Well, at least the discussion with Jennifer King has gone well.
And Cassandra, please keep being our resident meanie. You’re good at smacking down mansplaining.
GroundPetrel, thanks for apologizing. I hope that you can honestly continue to grow.
Ken L., are you the same guy who was shaming rape survivors for not reporting?
The reason I’m not having Ken’s bullshit is that yes, this is not his first time at the rodeo. Apparently hanging out on feminist blogs telling women they’re Doing It Wrong is some sort of hobby for him.
So I was remembering that correctly.
Ken L., if you’re still here, I’d recommend checking yourself before you shrek yourself, but…well…you’ve already kind of shrekked yourself, and I can’t buy that you have good, pro-feminist intentions after all this.
Ken’s that guy? ::brain explodes::
OH, HELL, NO!!
[insert noptopus, nope badger, and all the other nope animals]
Good intentions, possibly, but certainly not good results. At a certain point other people may stop caring about the intentions.
Isn’t there an old saying about the road to Hell? It’s supposed to be paved with something… Nah, I forget.
I was wrong. It’s my upstairs neighbors. I went to the store to get some ice cream in case my throat gets worse. It’s really loud outside too. At least it’s so loud that someone else might ask them to be quiet. I really don’t want to it.
All true, but at this point, Ken doesn’t even seem to be trying to listen.
At this point, I’d be for banning Ken. Petrel, I don’t know. He’s screwed up and apologized before and I don’t think I’m ready to accept it yet. I hope he does some reading and gives it a few days before coming back. If other people are quick to forgive, that’s cool. But it’s going to take time for me.
I actually haven’t seen a lot of overt gender bias in online gaming either, but that’s a self-selection thing for me. If a space is like that, I don’t stay there for very long.
I also greatly appreciate it when reviews warn me about ridiculous levels of sexualization in a game, as that has caused me to not play games I’ve downloaded.
I tolerated Rift’s starting miniskirt (it looked like something you could play tennis in, so quite suitable for an active mage) but had someone told me about Tera’s creepy camera angles, weird glued-on outfits and constant upskirt shots, I wouldn’t’ve bothered even trying it out. That game is the worst I’ve ever seen, and it’s not just cultural, either, as I’ve tried other Korea-based MMOs.
A lot of the things that make videogames unfriendly to women aren’t overt. It’s things like female characters being portrayed generally as sex objects and not people; box art and canon featuring male versions of characters; having a single token female on a team (if any at all); having costuming that shows skin when it’s totally inappropriate, and often for the flimsiest of reasons; women characters getting fridged for the manfeels.
Then there’s the list of OOC things that happen to you when you’re female. If you have a female screenname, you’ll get creepy, sexualized whispers occasionally when you’re minding your own business; if you have a female-sounding voice in a raid, you will have less credibility than a male-sounding voice; if you are female you will be presumed to be less competent and often you have to prove yourself just a little bit more than someone who presents as male.
Not all these things happen all the time, and as I said above, if you’re careful you can often self-select out of the worst of it.
Even the hardware isn’t made for us. On the whole, women are more likely to have smaller hands than men. Controllers are made for you, not for us; many of us are hand-icapped right out of the gate that way.
A lot of those things are things that male gamers don’t necessarily see or notice because you don’t have to notice it.
Female gamers don’t generally have the option of not seeing it at all.
We can work around it, and we can choose friendlier spaces sometimes, but sometimes that also means not playing games that we would otherwise love to play, solely because their culture is toxic. Other times,it means accepting limitations like not being able to use voice chat or spending money on a comfortable, third-party controller that a man would not have had to purchase because the normal controllers are sized for him.
Most of these things male gamers may not even ever notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Upskirt shots would annoy the crap out of me. Things like that are basically a big neon sign saying “this wasn’t made for you”, from a female perspective. Some people apparently manage to ignore it well enough to consume the media in question anyway, but it’s an irritant.
Jarnsaxa: Bless your face.
Dangit, I missed an Anita Sarkeesianvideo game sexism debate! I knew I shoulda checked the comments earlier. *kicks at the dirt*
Oh well, I’m glad he came around.
On the topic of upskirts: one of the reasons I detest Lollipop Chainsaw (as awesome as a concept it was) is because it has an achievement for getting your camera to upskirt the main character even though she has lines of dialogue that pretty much say “don’t look up my skirt”, and she has animations when she’s standing still that pull her short skirt down so you can’t up skirt her while she’s just standing there.
I got it by accident during a combat sequence and I nearly threw my controller across the room.
http://lollipopchainsaw.wikia.com/wiki/I_Swear!_I_Did_It_By_Mistake!
It’s that idea that boundary violation is the sexiest thing ever that creeps me out most when it’s normalized in male-focused spaces.
EEEEWWWWWW! They give you an achievement for violating the personal space of the main character?! That’s just so far beyond gross.
cassandrakitty
Speaking of upskirt shorts. There’s a developer for a popular series that said one of the reasons they switched from an originally planned girl main character to a boy was that there was lots of climbing and he didn’t think it was as realistic for girls to climb, and that he was worried about guys rotating the camera for upskirts.
Such awesome reasoning.
*shots… not shorts.
That’s kind of amazing, trying to be decent and yet managing to include so much fail at the same time.
Oh thank bog. The party has broken up.
Former climbing girl here. Yeah, no skirts involved.
Yay!! Hope you have a good night, WWTH!
Shorts for girls do not exist. They are simply not a thing. If a girl attempts to buy shorts the store immediately sends her over to the Ministry of Gender Roles for reprogramming.
OK, that’s one of those things that’s just plain creepy.
I will say that I’ve never heard of or played that game before (I prefer strategy and sci-fi shooter style games, turn-based or RTS), but holy fuck that’s creepy as hell.
Given that my main is a female character, and while I have her sensibly and smartly dressed in a military uniform (with a cute winter scarf that I got at the last winter event), magnificent shoulderpads and all, I must state that I have gotten creepy PMs from trolls. Then again, many of the same trolls try the same thing when I’m on my male character, Hunky McHunkerson, who’s about as beefy and muscular as the character editor lets you be, and who wears shorts and nothing else. No, really.
They don’t seem to hit on me when I’m playing my 4-foot-2 pot-bellied Ferengi, though. Some things are too strange even for the trolls, I guess.
As for presumed competence…well, my fleet at least has never shown that kind of bias. Maybe a bit of anti-newbie sentiment after a really bad pick-up raid that got spoiled by somebody shooting the wrong thing at the wrong time, but never any sexism. Like I mentioned, our fleet’s PVP specialist is female, and the best PVPer in the game right now. She lives in Serbia and makes custom laptops for a living. Nice enough as long as you don’t mention the Yugoslavian breakup. Nobody in their right mind insinuates that she’s somehow incompetent.
I do PVE elites with women a lot of the time (they’re better than me even though i have a Scimitar), and they only got the sexist treatment like once. Then Sam out-DPSed the oaf’s Scimitar with her Odyssey (basically, she out-DPSed the best DPS ship in the game with a specialist tanking ship, which speaks to the asshole’s incompetence), and posted the parse. He left without another word.
But that’s just my personal experience, in a relatively niche game marketed at an existing fandom and based on a gender-egalitarian franchise. Given that accolade posted above…yeesh.