By David Futrelle
So the gamebros are up in arms about the fifth installment in the Battlefield series, Battlefield V, because the game, set in World War II, has LADIES in it, which makes it TOTALLY UNREALISTIC because there were NO LADIES in WWII, well ok maybe there were actually a bunch of ladies in WWII, some of them serving in combat even but goddammit WHY CAN’T OUR MALE SPACE BE SACRED ah bloo bloo bloo.
So anyway a bunch of these broflakes have decided to fight the female menace … by all posting the same dumb joke.
thought we were getting Battlefield V, not Battlefield Vagina#NotMyBattlefield pic.twitter.com/qFrakro53g
— Harrison (@uhHarrison) May 24, 2018
Well gentlemen the SJWs are taking over it seems and we're losing first CoD fell and now Battlefield Vagina @EA_DICE you have officially ruined a good video game franchise #BattlefieldV #NotMyBattlefield #NotMyBattlefieldV
— BattlefieldGOAT (@GoatBattlefield) May 24, 2018
https://twitter.com/DordTheGhost/status/999705460885344263
https://twitter.com/Daimuzu/status/999548810450866176
https://twitter.com/DoktorJok3r/status/999479765227790336
oh i get it
it's called Battlefield V for VAGINA
really taking this empower women thing too far
— Joey 🍄 (@MZjosef) May 24, 2018
https://twitter.com/TiddieSlapsII/status/999537983329112065
It's a hard pass from me for #Battlefield V
The V obviously stands for Vagina.
Not even being misogynistic, 95%+ of soldiers were male, the chances of finding female fighters on the battlefield were slim to none, let alone transgender female disabled fighters. #HistoryIsHistory
— Skorge (@GearsofSkorge) May 23, 2018
Saw nothing but vagina in @Battlefield V smh. Women taking over. #BattlefieldV
— Angel Torres (@ATJ_SNS) May 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/muricanmuslim/status/999406430364098561
https://twitter.com/dualbIades/status/999396908979376128
https://twitter.com/niggat1ve/status/999395932809637889
https://twitter.com/fioquattro/status/999382176427802625
https://twitter.com/Bangliukang/status/999762047188504576
https://twitter.com/yourincelmcm/status/999733482522755072
battlefield Vagina
— 豆腐 (@mayoi894_mpik) May 21, 2018
Gotta love all those Tweeters with anime avatars complaining that Battlefield V isn’t “realistic” enough. YOU KNOW PEOPLE’S EYES AREN’T THAT BIG IN REAL LIFE RIGHT?
https://twitter.com/QuackityHD/status/999400107358420992
https://twitter.com/GiometryE/status/999396333147557889
https://twitter.com/DaPaperAssassin/status/999405219447492608
#Battlefield V more like Battlefield Vagina
— Commeownder🌲📉🇺🇸 (@Meowfficer) May 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/GioTomelleri/status/999409215981735941
https://twitter.com/Umber_man/status/999417962657472512
https://twitter.com/xDANIEDx/status/999420817443344384
https://twitter.com/BondAkshay/status/999680270126145536
https://twitter.com/OldRowSwig/status/999643253438853120
https://twitter.com/OldRowSwig/status/999690305841414145
Das V in Battlefield V steht für Vagina.@EA
— bima (@bimade45) May 24, 2018
Well that’s enough of that. There are more. Many, many, many more.
Even if you don’t speak German I think you can probably figure out what that last one is saying.
It’s always a bit amusing to me when dudes get mad about asskicking female characters in video games, claiming that these characters are “unrealistic” or “historically inaccurate.” VIDEO GAMES AREN’T REALISTIC. THAT’S WHY WE LIKE TO PLAY THEM. In real life, hedgehogs mosey along through the grass at about one-billionth of a mile an hour; in video games you can play a blue hedgehog that speeds through an assortment of surreal landscapes at supersonic speeds.
In real wars, if you get shot, you fall down injured and maybe even die; in video games you can barrel ahead after being hit multiple times — and regenerate your health by hiding behind something for a few seconds.
I think these gifs say all that need to be said about the “unrealistic ” complaints.
"Battlefield has abandoned historical accuracy for political correctness" pic.twitter.com/OpCRFV2zV8
— David Milner (@DaveMilbo) May 23, 2018
"It's, like, not even about the history anymore" pic.twitter.com/4GoYrXuTTJ
— David Milner (@DaveMilbo) May 23, 2018
"With female soldiers Battlefield is abandoning realism" pic.twitter.com/40JrSe38nh
— David Milner (@DaveMilbo) May 23, 2018
Nick Capozzoli, a freelancer who mostly writes for Waypoint now, has been going after this issue on Twitter. My favorite is just a retweet of something from a year and a half ago.
You are not seeing things, people. We are in a situation where EA has the moral high ground.
@Nentuaby,
I was wondering what was going on in that sequence, having never played a FPS-style game before, let alone any Battlefield game. So the off-ness there was the pilot running in the air like Wiley E. Coyote, then?
So this game has superpowered horses, proto-Transformer airplanes, and Warner Bro. characters running around. Did I sum up those clips right?
I don’t know what to say about the death of TB/John Bain, other than what’s already stated and he gave his kid a cool name. Hopefully, his kith and kin will be able to cope and progress.
On a note more directly connected to the post at hand, I’m surprised no-one’s brought up that Shadman is in the tweets…
@Troubelle: Moonbeam Malcontent + Bard of the New Movement
I was trying to ignore the hardcore porn artist’s tweet.
“Bummed out”, perhaps? Or is that still too intense?
(TIL my adblocker actually prevents me from seeing the tweets people were replying to.) The man’s a self-proclaimed edgelord who thrives off people getting offended by his creative output, so I’m hardly surprised.
“Yeah, V for VAGINA… like I’ll never have in real life. Also ‘Battlefield’… which I’m such a chicken(bleep) I’ll never be on one of those in real life, either”.
So, these twerps are angry they can’t fake fight in a fake war with no fake girls around.
The girls in WWII, even the ones without guns, took risks that would make their little nads melt. Rose Villand risked death every day to listen in on SS conversations, without letting them know she spoke German, to track stolen artworks and keep track of war crimes. Every one of the chumps complaining about this ridiculous shyte would have undoubtedly turned her in out of fear.
One of Russia’s top snipers was a woman, Lyudmilla Pavelochenko.
309 kills.
There is actually quite a lot of goalpost-shifting in the debate I’ve seen on Twitter, going something like this:
Et cetera.
Gamebros doofuses: so effin’ boring; they can’t come up with one new joke?
Worse, they’re shameless about it?
C’mon, guys, try harder.
Came here to see if anybody mentioned the Night Witches, was not disappointed.
Also: http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/
And: http://mentalfloss.com/article/29219/11-women-warriors-world-war-ii
http://www.upworthy.com/15-badass-women-of-world-war-ii-you-didnt-learn-about-in-history-class
http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/mariya-oktyabrskaya
https://www.audrey1.org/biography/16/audrey-hepburn-timeline-1929-1949
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTNhTVt00OoE3XVqZx-5pExv0m_cMMG8KNbBwCNNcANW8KMVqnG
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrG96l9sURtzzFhfarGCbplUo6bYWsfNWbET64B74hCVBT80PZYg
Sorry for those half-complete postings, which didn’t show up until it was too late for me to edit them. And I tried to post a photo but was unsuccessful.
I’m gonna add the beauteous, charming Audrey Hepburn, who had a strong sense of morality and was on the right side of history, to the list of Resistance heroes. I’ve read in at least one biography of her that as a child and then as a young teenager, she would hop on her bike to carry messages for the Dutch Resistance, which were tucked into her socks.
https://www.audrey1.org/biography/16/audrey-hepburn-timeline-1929-1949
All this ranting about gaming and vaginas is just giving me flashbacks to my (tabletop and mostl female) gaming group and our off-topic conversation about beefy vaginas. Not beefy as in roasties, no no no, but beefy as in “the vagina is a muscle, and we can therefore imagine the kinds of fantastical feats it might be used to perform, just like other ridiculous feats of strength can happen in this game.”
Featuring such hits as:
“Honey, I can’t get this jar open.”
“Okay, give it here.” *mimes unzipping pants*
“Oh no, that building down the street is on fire and we need to open the fire hydrant!”
“I got this.” (You may imagine the accompanying gesture to this statement at your leisure.)
And of course “Never skip vagina day.”
…This was far from the weirdest conversation that we had, although it might have been the one that gave me the worst stitch from laughing so hard.
On top of being stupid and misogynistic, those “hurr hurr, a vagina…. exists!” jokes are just lazy.
Few things make my laugh harder than these guys getting salty about women in games and movies.
I mean: how to wear your insecurities on your sleeve or what?
The stand out one for me was:
No, dude, that chance is about 1 in 20.
Did somebody say “dumb, obvious jokes”?
*bursts through wall like Kool-Aid Man*
It should be Battlefield Viagra, amirite?
One of the things that also bothers me about these outbursts (besides the casual lazy misogyny) is that these folks, by virtue of being men, are somehow entitled to a share of “glory” because it was men fighting. It gets a little personal for me because I did volunteer and serve in the Army (and I do understand there’s a lot of complicated things about our military culture, to put it kindly). These are the sort of people who want to puff out their chests and say “Us MEN were the ones fighting, not the wimmenz!” and I just want to say “What do you mean, *US*? I don’t recall seeing you out there.”
(Excuse the rambling, I’m tired and had a bit too much to drink. And I don’t want this to come off as uncritically praising the military. I’m proud of my time in the Army, but I was damn lucky that I wasn’t placed in a situation where I had to do some really shitty things, unlike some)
@Uly
The night witches were easily some of the biggest badasses in WW2, and there’s a great song about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vRg039MTQg
Yeah, I know most people probably expect the Sabaton one, but I like the Hail of Bullets song better, and I think the lyrics (posted in the description) are far superior. That last verse is one of my favorites in music history.
Anyway, in case it hasn’t been brought up yet, there was this whole issue with the last Battlefield game that makes all the manbaby screeching even more pathetic. Back when they were developing Battlefield 1 (which was what it was called, despite not being the first game in the series), they said the developers said they weren’t gonna make it completely true to history, but rather focus on making it fun and unique. One of the things they promised was to include playable female character, despite it being a WW1 game, and there weren’t really any women fighting in WW1 as far as I know. But again, they were intentionally making the game inaccurate to make it more fun.
But then at some point, they declared that there wouldn’t be any women in the game afterall, because that would be “inaccurate”…and yet they kept all the other wildly inaccurate shit in the game. One woman, who I think worked on the game or at least had something to do with it, talked about how disappointed she was in this decision and their nonsense reason for it. And of course, to gamers this story translated as “feminists are outraged because they won’t put women in this game even though it’s historically inaccurate!”, because of course it did.
So now with this new game, it’s set in WW2, where many women actually did fight, and they still don’t give a shit about historical accuracy, and yet the gamerbabies are flooding their diapers over how inaccurate it is because a woman is in it. But the fact that she has a metal claw hand, that part they’re ok with! No, seriously, she has a metal fucking claw for a hand, and all the people throwing a tantrum over “inaccuracy” aren’t even talking about it.
I haven’t done much gaming over the past year, and the Battlefield games were never my thing anyway. But I just picked up Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and it’s been pretty cathartic mowing down hordes of Nazis. Who knew that would seem so relevant to the present day?
EJ (the other one)
you are correct that names with this ending origin in Ukraine but does not mean that they are Ukrainian people. for example, Samusenko right now is most common for Russian cidizen, not Ukrainians. Lyudmila Pavlichenko is Ukranian but I think Alexandra Samusenko is not.
My great aunt Nelda Little won a Bronze Star during the Battle of the Bulge.
Mind you, this was before the medal was turned into a “You showed up” medal for officers in Vietnam, later reaching a disgusting degree during Granada, when plane loads of desk jockeys were shipped into the war zone, allowed to step off the plane, and then shipped back home clutching their medal..
In WWII, the Bronze Star meant something. In my aunt’s case, it meant that she volunteered to stay in Bastogne, working the communications center when they evacuated all the other WACs working there, afraid of what would happen to them if the Germans took the town. The Germans very nearly did. At one point they completely surrounded the town, and asked for surrender. This was the famous case where the Allied commander’s responce was “Nuts!” (For those unfamiliar with WWII slang, that responce can be roughly translated to “Not only no, but fuck no”)
She stayed and helped maintain the communications until the reenforcements arrived. She was one of the early people to receive the Bronze Star (though it was later awarded retroactively back to the beginning of the war).
Technically, she was never in combat. Technically, neither were that list of idiots quoted above.
Ok, here comes my favorite example of “unrealistic” depictions of women soldiers in an otherwise “very realistic” game. It comes from my favorite game of all: XCOM 1 & 2 (“Gatecrasher” is the name of the first mission of XCOM).
My first time playing the game, I was surprised to discover that there were women soldiers in it. And not only that, the women soldiers actually looked like… soldiers and not “sexy” bikini ninjas! The female soldiers had the same outfit and equipment as the male soldiers, and when they run, they run like women in reality do, that is, without cat walk hip sways.
I had never seen such a thing in a game before! (I know, it’s really tragic.)
But what would the gamerbros of the internet think of this? I googled it, and what I found doesn’t surprise anybody here. Of course such a silly, unrealistic thing as women soldiers (in Kevlar that actually covers the body) can not be tolerated!
I found lots of discussions complaining about the female soldiers; various “arguments” about how their existence in the game was ridiculous and UNREALISTIC and tips on how to get rid of them. The discussion also contained a nice piece of confirmation bias as the gamersbros complained about the female soldiers being scared and running away when the aliens fired at them, despite the stats (and thus the “courage”) of the soldiers having nothing to do with gender, but with experience of previous missions.
Here’s the thing. XCOM is a game where you lead an X-traterrestrial COM-bat force against aliens that have invaded the Earth. You research over-the-top plasma guns, enter space ships and occasionally mind control aliens. Among other things.
Question:
Which of the following does undoubtedly exist in real life? Is it…
A. Alien technology plasma guns
B. Shape shifting alien monsters
C. Psionic mind control
or
D. Female soldiers?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
Most of my female older relatives served in WWII. Mostly in air defense.
Battlefield Vagina’s a real thing, I believe it’s the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights for women worldwide.
Also, go Ireland, hope the 8th. gets repealed today!