[Bobboau]

I was going to move this in the direction of "how do we account for confirmation bias in this field" next, assuming there were no further objections to my last point.

[The E]

There's a difference between "There are issues with the way women are portrayed in media" and "All media is sexist". The former position is the one Ms Sarkeesian takes, the latter is a strawman.

Bob, the reason why I said you were trolling is because you're just bringing a strawman into this debate. Your little exercise doesn't add anything to the discussion.

[Ghostavo]

Is it possible to use the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in a way that is not sexist or is the trope inherently sexist?

[Phantom Hoover]

It's not an 'inherently sexist' trope in the first place. It's inherently ****ty character writing, but the sexist part only arises in aggregate, when almost all the instances of that character are female.

[The E]

According to BW, there seem to be a few movies that manage it. It's definitely possible to write a character who behaves like that and still treat him or her as a realistic individual. It's only when characters are reduced to the stereotype that bad things happen.
When the only raison d'etre of the character is to be a quirky person who shakes up the dreary dull life of the protagonist, and nothing else, that's when we're in bad characterization mode, and that's what is criticized.

If the majority of examples of this trope were well-written and treated with verisimilitude, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Unfortunately, they aren't.

EDIT: Topical XKCD:

[Bobboau]

Your little exercise doesn't add anything to the discussion.

at the very least it broke the cycle of "when you said X your meant Y" "not I didn't when I said X I meant Z" "well it sounded like Y" "thats only because you assumed I was focused on A" etc.

and I established that bias can effect the methodology, so now the question is how is it addressed?

[Polpolion]

Your little exercise doesn't add anything to the discussion.

at the very least it broke the cycle of "when you said X your meant Y" "not I didn't when I said X I meant Z" "well it sounded like Y" "thats only because you assumed I was focused on A" etc.

Posting your argument a sentence at a time is really much worse, to be honest.

[NGTM-1R]

at the very least it broke the cycle of "when you said X your meant Y" "not I didn't when I said X I meant Z" "well it sounded like Y" "thats only because you assumed I was focused on A" etc.

The problem is that Lorric is being Lorric, while you have previously shown yourself capable of sufficient rationality to realize what you are doing is not only badwrong argumentation, but intensely annoying.

[Lorric]

Your little exercise doesn't add anything to the discussion.

at the very least it broke the cycle of "when you said X your meant Y" "not I didn't when I said X I meant Z" "well it sounded like Y" "thats only because you assumed I was focused on A" etc.

and I established that bias can effect the methodology, so now the question is how is it addressed?

Don't let them get you down. They're doing it again, just dismissing you or calling you a troll when they don't like something and trying to appear above you and superior, like they do with me.

I really appreciate you trying to turn their way of twisting everything I say back on them.

[MP-Ryan]

Don't let them get you down. They're doing it again, just dismissing you or calling you a troll when they don't like something and trying to appear above you and superior, like they do with me.

Is that what you think is going on?  No, Lorric, these people are being extremely patient with you despite your infuriating oblivious behaviour, in this thread and others.

You have established a pattern as of late that goes something like this:

1.  Join an existing discussion about which you appear to know very little.
2.  Argue from your limited scope of knowledge.  Steadfastly refuse to do additional research or reading.
3.  When it is unequivocally shown that you are incorrect, don't acknowledge this but admit that you don't know much/anything about X and promise to do further reading later because you are tired.
4.  Continue posting from your original viewpoint anyway.
5.  Accuse the people calling you out for all of this of being trolls/superior/dismissive/sociopaths.
6.  Wait for next discussion, wash, rinse, repeat.

WE ARE GETTING EXCEPTIONALLY TIRED OF IT.  There are a bunch of quite intelligent, rational people trying to drag you kicking and screaming into the acceptable etiquette for debate and give you some knowledge, and your level of resistance to it is absolutely astounding.  It has become patently clear to all of us - from your repeated admissions across a variety of discussions - that you are not drawing from a large, deep pool of knowledge, but instead feel it acceptable to debate purely from your opinions with zero education/research/reading (other than at a very superficial level) to back it up.

I **** you not when I say that more than half of the discussion on the new ruleset in the Site Support forum is being made with thought given to past troublemakers on HLP, and includes you.  You may be a fine person - I don't know you and therefore have no frame of reference to make that judgement.  Your posting behaviour on HLP, on the other hand, is atrocious, obnoxious, and frustrating to everyone.  Time for a little reflection, Lorric.  Despite the fact that your postings generally infuriate me, I do not want to actually see you banned and based on what we went through with some other GD forumites in the past, I see that road looming in your future if you don't smarten up.

This is not a personal attack.  It might be backseat moderation, but FFS, at this point someone has to spell it out for the kid.  If it earns me some time off for brutal honesty, I'll live with it.

[Lorric]

Don't let them get you down. They're doing it again, just dismissing you or calling you a troll when they don't like something and trying to appear above you and superior, like they do with me.

Is that what you think is going on?  No, Lorric, these people are being extremely patient with you despite your infuriating oblivious behaviour, in this thread and others.

You have established a pattern as of late that goes something like this:

1.  Join an existing discussion about which you appear to know very little.
2.  Argue from your limited scope of knowledge.  Steadfastly refuse to do additional research or reading.
3.  When it is unequivocally shown that you are incorrect, don't acknowledge this but admit that you don't know much/anything about X and promise to do further reading later because you are tired.
4.  Continue posting from your original viewpoint anyway.
5.  Accuse the people calling you out for all of this of being trolls/superior/dismissive/sociopaths.
6.  Wait for next discussion, wash, rinse, repeat.

WE ARE GETTING EXCEPTIONALLY TIRED OF IT.  There are a bunch of quite intelligent, rational people trying to drag you kicking and screaming into the acceptable etiquette for debate and give you some knowledge, and your level of resistance to it is absolutely astounding.  It has become patently clear to all of us - from your repeated admissions across a variety of discussions - that you are not drawing from a large, deep pool of knowledge, but instead feel it acceptable to debate purely from your opinions with zero education/research/reading (other than at a very superficial level) to back it up.

I **** you not when I say that more than half of the discussion on the new ruleset in the Site Support forum is being made with thought given to past troublemakers on HLP, and includes you.  You may be a fine person - I don't know you and therefore have no frame of reference to make that judgement.  Your posting behaviour on HLP, on the other hand, is atrocious, obnoxious, and frustrating to everyone.  Time for a little reflection, Lorric.  Despite the fact that your postings generally infuriate me, I do not want to actually see you banned and based on what we went through with some other GD forumites in the past, I see that road looming in your future if you don't smarten up.

This is not a personal attack.  It might be backseat moderation, but FFS, at this point someone has to spell it out for the kid.  If it earns me some time off for brutal honesty, I'll live with it.

Ryan, unlike these others, you are someone who I believe honestly wants to help me. And I bear you no ill will for this post, and would not want you harmed by the mods. The trio are doing their best to smear my name and make me look bad.

I will address these points:

1. I debate to learn. And you can't possibly tell me everyone outside of me in a debate has an extensive knowledge of the subject matter, especially with so wide a range of subjects on discussion.
2. If I was to go and buy a book on a given subject, the debate would long be over when I was done reading it. Plus, I'm not after such a level of knowledge. It often seems a dismissive way to try and get rid of me as well.
3. This was only in this thread. Are you saying I was wrong to acknowledge that I was wrong?
4. The subject of empathy never came up again.
5. They are horrible to me. I've never called anyone a troll.
6. Maybe we should have a chat sometime. You have had success a few times with me in the past.

Usually it's only the trio, talking (down) to me, who wish me harm. I have few problems with others.

I freely admit that I'm not an expert on subjects because I want to learn.

I understand what is going on in there. Again, I believe you about not wanting me banned. All of NGTM-1R and Battuta's posts about me in there are geared towards getting me banned. You posted once about me, and while I don't like the sound of being "socially hammered" I think it was, at least you were talking with a view to integrating me into the HLP community, rather than just trash that needs taking out.

I don't mind brutal honesty if it is constructive. Would you like to pm with me?

[MP-Ryan]

Well, I tried.

Would you like to pm with me?

No, thank you.  No offense, but my time is limited as it is.

[General Battuta]

Keep in mind my point is that if you come at it from a position of "there is oppression of women here" you will be able to find a way to satisfy your prejudice.
and in a flagrant appeal to authority I would just like to point out that as soon as I was able to put my proposition into understandable terms even The General conceded it.

this is obviously true

No, I didn't. Reread my post. What I said was that this assertion can be made about anything, but it cannot be substantiated about anything. (Trumpeting about a point being conceded is deeply irritating because it reframes discussions as a contest of winning and losing.)

More broadly, your point about the presence of confirmation bias is largely irrelevant as a specific critique of feminism. This is because feminism is a subset of human cognition, and human cognition is subject to confirmation bias.

What you're aiming for here is an argument I've heard called the 'criterion question': given that people operate with very different priors, how can we establish a reasonable consensus ruleset to determine whether a piece of art or behavior is misogynistic? One answer is simply that you can talk about it. Human discourse is obviously made really hard by the fact that most of our cognitions are shaped by unconscious factors we're not aware of and don't always share, but I believe at least a bit of discussion is still possible, if not much. Another answer is that you can look at statistical aggregates. As I'm often fond of pointing out, attitudes are in large part frequency-driven, which is why a lot of misogynistic patterns in media don't particularly care whether one example fits or not - the point is that they exist in the aggregate, and they undergo uptake by mere exposure.

Sizz mentioned Firefly earlier and ironically the only thing that saved that show from burning all its gender cred in a spectacular display of up****ery was cancellation. At least one of the unaired scripts was a complete nightmare.

[Lorric]

Well, I tried.

Would you like to pm with me?

No, thank you.  No offense, but my time is limited as it is.

That is a shame. I think you and I could get somewhere in a one on one conversation.

[General Battuta]

At the risk of actually talking about the original topic, I wonder how carefully she's really vetted the examples she uses in her video. I'll admit, that while many of these films I haven't seen, the two that I have seen seem to stand out more as subversions of the MPDG trope than supporting them.

The two I'm talking about are 500 Days of Summer, which I've only seen once, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I've seen a few times and really, really like. There are spoilers below, obviously - if you've not seen Eternal sunshine at the very least I strongly recommend it before reading below, the story works better if you don't know what's coming.

Anyway, I'll start with Summer because I can't go as in depth into that one (due to less familiarity with the film). Zooey Deschanel's character seems to fit all the standard personality traits of the MPDG - hell, she's made playing them something of a speciality (Yes Man springs to mind, as does her character on The New Girl). But the film doesn't follow the supposedly well worn path that these sorts of films are meant to follow. It starts out typical enough - Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character is in something of a funk, working in a profession he doesn't care about and not particularly happy, when he meets Summer, and suddenly everything changes. She's whimsical and fun, and after spending time with her, his whole outlook on life changes (which the film plays up pretty obviously through the animations and his greeting card stuff). If the film were following the proposed path, it would stop here, the credits would roll and they'd live happily ever after.

But, of course, that's not what happens. What we actually see is that JGL's character runs smack into the reality wall when Summer turns out to be not the simple 2 dimensional cutout he thought she was. She had her her opinions about love and relationships before she met her, and they don't change as a result of their time together. The two are fundamentally incompatible, and they stay that way until they break up. The rest of the movie is him pining over her, wishing that she was what he wanted her to be - that doesn't stop until he finally forces himself to accept that she's gone - when events other than his relationship with her have changed her perspective. The last thing we see of his character in the movie is when he meets another woman - one whom he actually has things in common with, and whom he can (it's implied) start a serious relationship with as an equal, and not as a caricature. To me, that seems like the opposite message than the typical MPDG storyl.

Eternal Sunshine is, IMO, an even better example of subverting the trope, because it comes at it from both sides. Although told non-chronologically, the story essentially again starts out in fairly typical MPDG territory - Joel (Jim Carrey's character) is depressed and lonely, his previous relationship having not worked out, when he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) who forces him to enjoy living his life - they break into someone's beach-house, go make snow angels, all that jazz. However, as their relationship went on, Joel is forced to confront the fact that Clementine isn't what he initially thought she was - not because there's fundamentally anything different about her, but because he was seeing her as the simplistic MPDG, not as the full person with the full personality that would eventually lead to him pulling away during the "real" phase of their relationship.

The other side I was talking about is the relationship between Clementine and Elijah Wood's character (who's name I can't remember). Essentially, Elijah Wood is using Joel and Clementine's memories of one another to seduce Clementine because, it's implied, he wants her to be his own MPDG, or at least he wants to be with him. His attempts to coerce her though, to essentially take her by stealth, are pretty spectacularly rejected, and she ends up back with Joel, starting again in a relationship that, while flawed, was at least real, and between two people, not one person and another person's idea of what they are.

So yeah - like I said, I haven't seen many of the movies on the list, but the two I have seen seem to me to be rather a long way off the story she's trying to tell. The video's author obviously has an agenda (just like literally everyone else on the planet), and she's doing her best to present it/support it, but the fact that these two films are thrown in there, with no qualification or explanation, as part of her series of negative examples makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of her examples and her overall argument.

This is a pretty great post and I like it, but ultimately I think these two films are still going to take some flak for using their women characters didactically rather than subjectively, so I think Ms. Sarkeesian gets away with at least a jab at them. (It'd be cool to see the additional complexity acknowledged, though.) There's no spectacular taboo against this, and I wouldn't raise my banners and get on a horse about either movie, but they're still ultimately very guy-centric movies in which the woman serves as kind of a construct to evoke emotion and change in the more subjective man. They do a more interesting job of it than the bog standard rom-com setup, though!

[The E]

*words*

Lorric, those were not individual points. It's a description of your behaviour in these threads as we see them, replying to them individually is missing the point.

[Dilmah G]

Hey Lorric, check your PMs, big man.

[Grizzly]

That varies a lot, actually. Campaigns making people aware helped for me personally, nusually it's outside help. The big problem lies in recognizing the problem itself. One can usually turn to professional help after that.
Note that I am only what is so-called an "Experience expert" (I only know of me and a few people I know who had similar issues, both of which did not detect it in me), so I geuss I am rather unreliable.

Do you have any links or could it be searched for? As in something specific to search for please?

Well, ironically enough, I found out my depression to a website known as www.depressionquest.com (the name is rather deceptive, but the method it is brought in is extremely effective). From there, you should probably be able to further your searches.

[Luis Dias]

Again, I'm slightly worried about those with a scientific bent who are completely dismissive of these feminist challenges. I've almost bought a war on youtube against this mob over this issue, but what I see is their strongest argument is that because she cannot prove that this sexist representation in games has the ability to form, influence people to be more sexist, then all her talk is "feminist bull****". Their reasoning is that there's probably more evidence that violence in games make people more violent, however it has been extremely difficult if not impossible to extract any evidence of this (while keeping in mind the fact that violence has been declining ever since DOOM and MORTAL KOMBAT came into the market), so the hypothesis that sexism in games (which is much more subtle) influences us to be sexist is even more difficult to actually prove (while she just states it outright as obviously true).

This is, I think, a worrisome argument, because it paints sexism in games (and in general) as a "battle" exactly like the battle about violence in games. Curiously, if the war on violence is a conservative movement, the war on sexism is a progressive movement, but all of these are just party poopers who have no sense of fun and just want to take our joy away and so on.

The trick that I think works for even these people to understand how abhorrent this line of reasoning is is to make the connection not with violence but with racism. Unlike violence, both racism and sexism are discriminatory. Violence does not discriminate per se, it's absolutely democratic, egalitarian. Not sexism, nor racism. How would people react if these guys really pushed back against the argument that games were Racist and shown very strong pieces of evidence that this is so? I'm pretty sure the conversation would be terribly different.

I mean, just imagine. A black woman / guy making a series of videos showing how racist games are (they aren't as much racist as they are sexist, but I'm sure there is probably a case to be made there). THEN youtube and all of 4chan and the rest of the internet mob starts a campaign of doxxing, murder rape threats, hacking attempts, sabotage kickstarter, etc.,etc.,etc. What would we say of such people? Any link to the likes of the KKK's attitude a hundred years ago would not be over the top.

However, because the theme is Feminism, the girl is white, all this obnoxious behavior is "just the internet" reacting to "bull****". All this phenomenon really was an eye opener for me.

[Mars]

Again, I'm slightly worried about those with a scientific bent who are completely dismissive of these feminist challenges. I've almost bought a war on youtube against this mob over this issue, but what I see is their strongest argument is that because she cannot prove that this sexist representation in games has the ability to form, influence people to be more sexist, then all her talk is "feminist bull****". Their reasoning is that there's probably more evidence that violence in games make people more violent, however it has been extremely difficult if not impossible to extract any evidence of this (while keeping in mind the fact that violence has been declining ever since DOOM and MORTAL KOMBAT came into the market), so the hypothesis that sexism in games (which is much more subtle) influences us to be sexist is even more difficult to actually prove (while she just states it outright as obviously true).

There isn't that big of a violence culture - people may fight, gangs may clash, but there aren't really large sections of the population who think it's okay to shoot lots of random people.

There are totally lots of people who think that women should 'get back to the kitchen' and that girls who have slept with too many people are 'sluts,' with the unspoken idea that it's therefore okay to use them. I don't know where you are and who you're talking to, but this is something that more than half of the males I've talked directly about this believe, and a significant percentage of the females as well.

EDIT: To say some form of rape culture doesn't exist is overlooking a massive amount of evidence to the contrary. And that's the most extreme arm of the same thought process.