[General Battuta]

The endings in Nox were all a bit ambiguous. For the wizard path she lost her memories and seamed to have lost her powers but that doesn't mean anything with regards to sexism. In the game itself she was portrayed as an unmatched supervillan concentrating more on the fact that she was a evil necromancer rather than a female. Although her tendency to slaughter male dominated societies (warriors/wizards) did seam to me to be making a bit of a feminist statement

Hilarious as the sentiment may seem, 'kill all men' is not really a feminist statement

[NGTM-1R]

and suddenly you have this burning personal hatred of me?

...no.

Rather you typically don't do anyone the courtesy of addressing their statements at length or acknowledging any kind of nuance or qualifier, and seem to be trying to maximize the amount of **** you can stir. (If you'd actually laid out your position rather than nitpicked a single possible inconsistency I'd have responded in a much more affable manner.) So I decided to be equally annoying just this once, albeit in a different manner.

This appears to have resulted in something of an overreaction to both our posts.

[Gray113]

'kill all men' is not really a feminist statement

 

No more one evil necromancer (who just happens to be a woman) can overcome the mightiest wizards and warlocks (who are all old men blinded by their mutual distrust and rivalries) with relative ease. The actress who voiced Hecuba was awesome as she managed to convey the sadistic joy that Hecuba felt in destroying these old fools. The arch-enemy role could just as easily have been done by a man but I think that Hecuba was a far more effective enemy in this game. In doing so she overturned the old "weak woman" sterotype by showing how easily she could best the greatest male heros in Nox. (Made all the easier with the inclusion of no other strong female roles in the game)

[Spoon]

Hilarious as the sentiment may seem, 'kill all men' is not really a feminist statement

Wow. The more you know!

[dazo]

Feminism is a very complicated issue. I don't think it can be taken just in terms of games.

[deathfun]

I don't see anything wrong on the part of PhantomHoover in these posts

I do

NGTM wasn't the one who said he finds females in games are not believable as accused in this post:

So... you're not writing believable female characters if they're the same as the male ones; but you're also not writing believable female characters if they're different from the male ones?

Rather it was MP Ryan seen here:

I cannot think of a single game I have played with female characters in which a female was believably portrayed.

NGTM was simply stating that to be written otherwise due to gender, would be unbelievable as the male and female characters in Mass Effect are essentially the same person

His point was directed solely towards ME, not any other game


Phantom's post was that of bridging a general statement to a specific statement from two different people, and making them one thought.

[karajorma]

Let's not talk about who did what, and instead return to the subject.

[SpardaSon21]

I vote we spend more money on biotech and advanced surgical methods so people can quickly and easily be whatever sex they choose to be, hopefully invalidating all these nasty sex and gender related issues because they simply won't matter anymore due to the ease with which people can go change those two attributes.

There, transhuman wank over.

[karajorma]

Then we kidnap all of the Westbrough Baptist church members and swap their sexes so that they're all gay.

[General Battuta]

Then we kidnap all of the Westbrough Baptist church members and swap their sexes so that they're all gay.

This brings up the tough question (related to Sparda's comment) of whether fluid sex necessarily permits fluid gender.

[SpardaSon21]

Well, there's really only one way to test the hypothesis of fluid sex leading to fluid gender, and that's to have fluid sex.

[General Battuta]

We have that, and it isn't an easy territory to explore - the relationship between sex, gender, and sexual orientation is a couple links more intricate than most people are used to considering in the West.

There are a number of societies with really different takes on gender. Samona fa'afafine are a cool case study.

[Mikes]

There are a number of societies with really different takes on gender. Samona fa'afafine are a cool case study.

Going by the Wiki link (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine) and possibly completely false first impressions ( )... this sounds more like sending more people to the kitchen "where they belong" - nevermind the gender :cough:

Raising either female or male kids with a predetermined purpose / role in life ...    raises all kinds of reds flag for me. Smells of casteism ...

Is that really a different take on gender? I don t see it. I just see a certain percentage of the male population having to put up with being placed in a certain predetermined life "as well".

Course... as said above, I could be completely wrong

[Phantom Hoover]

i find it interesting that most cultural 3rd genders are feminine men, which is something which in the west is kind of implicitly recognised (cf. drag queens etc.) if not given much singular significance. given that, i'm not really sure gender is as fluid and arbitrary as some claim

[General Battuta]

I don't know if you're completely wrong, but you're not really understanding the situation or its complexity. So you're certainly at least a bit wrong!

Your take is that men are assigned to be fa'afafine and that this is close to casteism. There are factual problems and less factual complexities to unpack here.

On the pure factual level, children are made fa'afafine if the family sees a fa'afafine in their behavior as a child. This isn't pure self-selection but it isn't entirely arbitrary either. Today, many fa'afafine actually self-select, even with resistance from their parents. Surveyed fa'afafine think positively of their childhood gender behavior whether or not parents supported it, suggesting that the primary driver of being fa'afafine may be internal, not external. If the child chooses to be fa'fafafine, how can it be a caste system? The evidence seems to suggest that fa'afafine know they are fa'afafine from very early childhood.

On the more complex political level, we face a number of questions:
-To what extent are we able to judge the moral rightness or wrongness of another society's gender systems? We hold egalitarian norms as a universal ideal, but our own societies still practice sharply gendered caste-style upbringing.
-Aren't all gender roles externally mandated? To what extent are gender systems a product of feedback between individually motivated behavior and social reinforcement of that behavior?
-You're not wrong to be worried about the idea of assigning a child to a gender role, but is it possible to avoid doing this? We already provide strong assignment to boys and girls. How are the fa'afafine different?

The fa'fafine are absolutely a different take on gender. They map to no similar concept in the West. We have no pervasive third gender; we do have gay men, a sexual orientation often accompanied by different gendered behavior, but gay men are generally involved in liaisons with other gay men, whereas fa'afafine rarely if ever liase with other fia'afafine, almost exclusively partnering with 'straight' (to appropriate the Western term) Samoan men.

You seem to have interpreted the fa'fafine as a proposed example of a 'better' system, some more socially just or equal setup. But that's not why I think they're interesting; I'm not trying to evaluate their moral rectitude or the egalitarianism of Samoan genders. The remarkable thing about the fa'afafine, and other third or liminal genders around the world, is the parallax they provide in demonstrating why our gender system isn't necessarily the normative one, and why gender is more fluid and diverse than we commonly conceive.

Although the evidence is weak, the fa'afafine and the fertility of their female relatives also provides interesting support for the sexual antagonism/'Johnny Depp' hypothesis.

[Phantom Hoover]

The fa'fafine are absolutely a different take on gender. They map to no similar concept in the West. We have no pervasive third gender; we do have gay men, a sexual orientation often accompanied by different gendered behavior, but gay men are generally involved in liaisons with other gay men, whereas fa'afafine rarely if ever liase with other fia'afafine, almost exclusively partnering with 'straight' (to appropriate the Western term) Samoan men.

Well we... do have transwomen. From what I've read of fa'afafine and all the many other analogous features in other cultures it seems plausible that the 'feminine man' gender is essentially a way of categorising transwomen before any means of effective sex reassignment have been developed.

[MP-Ryan]

Then we kidnap all of the Westbrough Baptist church members and swap their sexes so that they're all gay.

This brings up the tough question (related to Sparda's comment) of whether fluid sex necessarily permits fluid gender.

There are some studies (published in Science, no less) that pretty much refute absolute correlation between sex and gender (as I believe you know).

Biological sex, physical sex, and self-identified gender can appear in pretty much any of the possible combinations within human society - further complicated by the fact that most societies assign binary gender roles but the sexual practices differ between societies (ex:  the African society in which young unmarried men / post-pubescent boys engage in oral sex, despite being completely heterosexual).

Though I learned something today - I'd never heard of the  fa'afafine before this thread, which is odd.

[General Battuta]

The fa'fafine are absolutely a different take on gender. They map to no similar concept in the West. We have no pervasive third gender; we do have gay men, a sexual orientation often accompanied by different gendered behavior, but gay men are generally involved in liaisons with other gay men, whereas fa'afafine rarely if ever liase with other fia'afafine, almost exclusively partnering with 'straight' (to appropriate the Western term) Samoan men.

Well we... do have transwomen. From what I've read of fa'afafine and all the many other analogous features in other cultures it seems plausible that the 'feminine man' gender is essentially a way of categorising transwomen before any means of effective sex reassignment have been developed.

Fa'afafine are definitively not transwomen as they experience no dysphoria about their biological identity. They would not seek sex reassignment.

[Luis Dias]

So I got to this extremely late. Seen some videos of hers (independently of this thread), and quite agreed with the general gist of them.

"Huh, nicely caught, perhaps too severe here and there, somewhat going to the deep end there, but I can see her point"

I ain't exactly a fan, but I like the idea that people post their views on cultural ideologies, patterns they recognize, even if they are wrong it's good to discuss and so on and so on.


Then I saw the internet reaction to it. Holy ****ing cow. And people who I had in somewhat relative high regard going full retard on this one.

So I'll just leave this thought: We have still *lots* to go as a culture. *LOTS*.

[666maslo666]

She manages to explain the issue without insulting our precious masculine sensibilities. And it is important that normal feminist is in the spotlight for a change, not only the man-hating ones that sadly attract the most attention. There will be hate campaign and trolls, its just a part of internet culture for any remotely controversial issue and I am sure she knows it well too.