Holy crap, what the hell happened in here? I go out of town for one day…
@Bhjaddhos
I can see you’re very passionate about your position, and I can respect that. However, if this topic is important to you then I feel you’re doing yourself a disservice by being so hostile towards others. Even if you have some good points to make no one is going to want to listen to you. Not only that, but if too much conflict erupts the topic will be closed and what could have turned into a venue to elicit change is instead lost. My biggest suggestion to you would be to calm down and state the reasoning behind your points. Otherwise, you come off as a troll whose goal is to inflame the topic at hand and get the thread closed.
I really enjoy this topic and thread. So I’d like to keep it open. I feel there has been some good discussion and would like for it to continue. If you’re going to participate in here please be respectful. If it came down to the thread getting closed or you getting banned, I’d choose the later.
With that said, I’ll move on to the topic directly.
For a moment let’s ignore the semantics of whether games are sexist or not. Instead, let’s just assume they are. Let’s assume Anita is completely right and women are treated unfairly in their portrayals in games. But does that mean she has the right to control the creative content made by others?
The underlying logic here is that sexism is innately wrong, and wherever it exists we must stamp it out. The core idea of sexism is treating someone differently based off of their sex, but is that always wrong? If an artist wishes to draw large breasts on a female figure is that sexist? Technically yes, as he probably wouldn’t draw large breasts on a male figure, nor would he sexualize his male figures in quite the same way. But if we wanted to get even more technical, we could argue that artistic depictions are IMPOSSIBLE to be sexist. Why? Because images and depictions of females are not females. They’re drawings, not people.
But is sexism a legitimate reason to censor his creativity? No. People are allowed to be discriminatory in their expressions. That’s their right. That’s freedom of expression. If the KKK wished to create their own media (and they do), depicting extremely racist themes, you have no right to stop them. You can complain about it, you can refuse to support it, but you can’t stop them. The people who want to watch it will seek it out and watch it. That is their right.
If you want to directly control this it creates a massive slippery slope of censorship, which is why our values of freedom are so open. If you control the expressions of others because it’s offensive, be prepared to have expressions you enjoy also censored.
You might even argue that these artistic depictions of females are somehow destructive to society, and that harm justifies their removal or regulation. Aside from the fact that this ‘harm’ would have to be proven to exist at all, you’d still have to deal with the fact that harm doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right to remove it. Look at our society and let’s start naming all the ‘harmful’ things that you see marketed towards people. Should we remove all of those as well? If you look hard enough you can make virtually anything harmful, but again, does that justify regulation and control? If people like the KKK are allowed to exist and proliferate their ideals, it’s kind of hard to make a case that virtual breasts ought to censored.
So even IF you could argue that games are sexist, it still leaves us at an impasse. The assumption that games are sexist still leads into a plethora of issues concerning freedom of creativity and expression. And for me personally, such a freedom is not something I’m prepared to compromise. And we shouldn’t take them for granted, as they are the reason why we’re even allowed to discuss this topic to begin with.
Saying all this it makes one wonder what exactly Anita’s goal is. It seems that she’s unhappy with women in games and wants change. However, she purely takes the role of the critic and offers little to no suggestion for practical solutions. Typically critics do this because they don’t want their own work criticized, and one can see this with how she approaches feedback. She censors and controls the feedback given, making her seem less interested in any sort of objective solution and more concerned with image. This undermines her legitimacy in anything even approaching an academic stance, instead making her seem like someone who wants to create controversy to garner attention. And when you finally add in the fact that she’s making money from all this…well it’s ‘not a good look’.
In fact what Anita is doing is great for getting attention, stirring up controversy, and then profiting from it. It’s very bad at finding objective truth or practical solutions. Is it any mystery that people question her motives?