Retreading "feminism"

This is the greatest strength this game has. There are only so many ways you can play an elf wizard or dwarf fighter... but an Inv/Fire tank can be a powered armor Soviet, an alien conqueror, a magic tiger-girl, a djinn, a mutant, a battlemage, or an archaeologist with a magic amulet. (All concepts I've personally seen.)

(Ultimately, I think that's why people hate the Origin of Power and the Well of the Furies: it fundamentally limits what was an extremely open game.)

Or how about the fact that that's not even remotely what I see?

Or how about the fact that I've seen and made plenty? Or how about the fact that maxing the sliders doesn't make believable large characters so much as grotesque bloated puppets? Why do you think we're here complaining about how the sliders worked if we thought they worked fine and had no qualms about maxing them out?

Considering how poorly it's implemented? More often than I'd expect.

Which tools, specifically? A muscle slider that doesn't work for women? The tools aren't being used as often as you appear to believe they should be because they don't really work very well. But you can't fix them at this point because people who've already made characters in the current system won't want to lose their body shape.

That puts your observations of sliders much more in perspective. You're apparently a very poor judge of sliders. Most of those characters have the legs slider either all the way to the right or close to it, many of them have the shoulders and waist slider quite a ways up and nearly all of them have the hips slider either all the way up or all the way down, depending on the position of the other sliders. When your female has a very high level of "muscle" slider, it makes her butt disproportionate, hence why a lower hips slider helps counter-balance that. A high muscle slider also makes the waist out of proportion, which is why a thick waist is also necessary.

Also, the pictures I posted, I posted specifically because those were intentionally revealing cheesecakes I used as examples of why I'm not qualified to talk about feminism. I picked them exactly because they were the PROBLEM, not because they were the SOLUTION. If we're talking about character sliders, though, then fine:

Tyler: Almost all sliders almost all the way up.

Pandala: Nearly max physique, shoulders, waist and hips, nearly minimum legs.

Isabella: Nearly maximal height, nearly maximal physique, waist, hips and shoulders, nearly minimum legs, I think.

Mary-Beth: Close to maximal height, physique, shoulders, waist, hips and leg slider.

Jack: Huge model, 3/4 height, heavy physique, wide shoulders, large waist, long legs.

Blige: Almost max height, almost max physique, wide shoulders, short legs, wide waist.

Sphyra: In her monster form, she's nearly max height, nearly max physique, with wide shoulders, long legs and a wide waist.

Brutticus: Non-edited, almost max height, almost max physique, wide shoulders, wise waist, long legs, wide hips. Nearly max everything.

Duriel: About 3/4 height, about 3/4 physique, wide shoulders, wide waist, wide hips, short legs, giant wings.

Shaffakoom: Huge model, 3/4 height, almost max physique, chest, waist, shoulders, very short legs.

Cheryl: Tiny little girl, almost minimal height, minimal physique, narrow shoulders and hips, short legs but wide waist.

Xanta: Non-edited. MAX height, nearly max everything else except for narrow hips.

Herald of Light: About 3/4 tall, high sliders for everything.

Do you need me to post any more?

I've been doing this for around four or five years, and that's more or less precisely the responses I've been getting. Several of the people to whom I've shown some of these characters have gone on to make replicas of their own, and one person in particular asked me if I could share the texture swap which produced the muscular pic. Every time I post my edited pictures of Xanta and Brutticus - or at least every time before everyone remembered them by heart - I used to cause a flurry of discussion and requests for adding muscular textures like mine, as well as almost always at least one PM of people asking me how they can do this.

It's easy to dismiss people's affinity for these concepts when you have nothing to provoke it, but over the years, I've seen plenty of interest for the large and exaggerated characters that I create. I know it exists because I've seen it.

And I'll stick to insisting that "it's like that in comic books" is a poor excuse for not including a wider array of character designs, specifically when it's not actually like that in comic books as often as people claim.

Then you need to pay more attention. That's all I got. These exist. I've made them. I know of plenty of other people who've made them. I run into them in-game every day, I see them posted around the forums every day. All you have is anecdotes, and if you'll be using anecdotes, then so can I, because what I've seen is nothing even remotely like what you're saying.

*edit*
To add insult to injury, for half the female characters I posted, it's not really at all evident that they have the muscle slider all the way up, because they don't look muscular. Here's your reason for why more people don't use it: It doesn't bloody work.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

For some unknown reason this response sums up this entire discussion. I am now satisfied and I thank Samuel_Tow for starting it.

Again, I cannot say why. It is merely my gut.

Edit: Althought the suggestion for chest hair sliders and the like is appealing.

Similar build to that on Fat Lady (shorter height and legs), and I am afraid to play her because of all of the comments of "Is she supposed to be fat? That's not really fat. Do you think that is what a fat lady looks like?"

"Is that what a fat lady looks like?" Without having seen your character, I'm going to go with "no," because you can't actually make a fat lady in City of Heroes You can make one that doesn't look like she could catch wind and drift away, not one that's actually "fat."

If I may presume, however: I believe leg length, specifically short legs, and hip width, specifically wide hips, are the most common causes of these misconceptions. The female model, when given a high "muscle" slider, develops a very large butt, which wide hips make seem even larger. Reducing this helps. Also, a short-legged, stocky character often comes off as fat even for men, just because it's not long and slender. You can combat this somewhat by using longer legs, which will help make her look taller without making her look any smaller. In fact, a long-legged big character seems to look even bigger than a short-legged big character just because said character looks TALL as well as big.

Counter-intuitivel, making the breasts smaller on large female characters "to compensate" doesn't end up helping much. As the character gets bigger and her frame becomes heavier, large breasts start to look less out of place, at least to me. I'm not saying it looks better or worse, but trying to compensate for a large character by making the breasts smaller will not help.

Making the head smaller, on the other hand, will. Heads scale with character size, so a tall one will have a larger head. However, if you shrink the head, your character becomes "more heads high" and "more heads wide," effectively looking even bigger than she actually is.

It's cheap tricks like this that I use most of the time to both get the basic dimensions I want AND make sure the character still looks like a human being, when that makes sense.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Look at Nanny Flambeau (Pratorian Version)



And the *edit* Steampunk version



((These are not my creations, but my girlfriends))

From what i can tell, the "Huge" body size can be used quite nicely for this, although you are stuck with male costume pieces, there is still *some* possibility of using Huge for female characters

Kind of a tangent, but: I really have to disagree here. Maybe that's me showing my sexism after all, maybe it's just me being picky, I don't know what it is, but I REALLY don't like ideas of using the Huge model to depict women. It's grotesque enough depicting men, and I really don't think there's much to be gained from it depicting women.

I've always tried to make a point of asking for "muscular" women specifically, as opposed to just "huge" women because I don't feel women need to bulk up to the point where they lose their humanoid body shape, but rather I feel they will benefit far more from getting options to appear stronger, more muscular and heavier built. Note, when I say "heavier built" I don't necessarily mean huge. You can have a person who appears solid without necessarily being all that big.

To be perfectly honest, I don't like using the Huge model to depict actual people. I never have. All of the Huge characters I have are inhuman monsters, both good and evil. To me, human gender only has a meaning when you retain a vaguely human body shape, and I just don't feel the Huge model has that, at least not with anything but the lowest physique sliders. I know very large body builders exist, both male and female, but... Let's just say that that's not what I'm asking for.

Here's the root of my disagreement - I don't think both this and what I want are compatible. Give it a shot and try to see how "small" you can make the Huge model, and you'll see that the answer is "not very." Even at its lowest settings, Huge is still huge, and "Huge Women" isn't what I wanted. I'm actually more or less satisfied with how "big" women can get, other than possibly bumping up their max height a little. What they lack isn't size or "thickness," it's definition.

Let me put it this way - take a large average man, take a large fat guy and take a large athlete. I'd wager a bet that they'll be about equally as thick, thought the average guy is likely to have less upper body strength and skinnier arms as compared to his legs, the the fat guy is likely to have much of his mass around his waist and the fat athlete is likely to have much of his mass in his shoulders, upper arms and thighs. It's that mass distribution that I'm really interested in shifting around, because right now it feels like 50% of a City of Heroes female is concentrated in her breasts and butt.

Here's where the rubber meets the road: Body shape. Not so much size, not so much weight, not so much thickness, just basic body shape. How much of a body is muscle mass, how is that muscle mass distributed, which parts of that body are intended to be strong, that sort of thing. As we've seen, people come in many shapes and sizes, but body shape tends to reflect where a person is strongest.

This, I believe, is where the art in City of Heroes and in comic books in general may be seen as sexist - men are almost always depicted as having tremendous upper body strength and women are almost always depicted as having tremendous child-bearing hips. I suppose that, in a rudimentary cave-man society, that sort of gender divide might make sense from a mechanical level, but to ingrain this in an environment that is, to a large extent, diverse just seems... Limiting. And I don't necessarily want men to be thinner or women thicker, so much as I want their apparent "roles" to be diversified a little bit more.

---

Speaking of relative body shapes, here's a bit of a tangent:

Most people believe that a woman is sexualised because she is drawn to have large breasts. I can say with almost complete certainty that this is false, because the general effect comes less from the woman's breasts and more from her entire figure. MovieBob had a good point here - it's what women are built to represent and what they behave to exude that's the problem, not just the size of their cups. If we can get past the subject of breasts, we'll notice that what sexualises female characters in fiction is practically everything about them - the hips, the legs, the back, the arms and more.

Men, interestingly enough, suffer a similar problem, though I'm not sure how sexual it is in nature. Most men in fiction are drawn as primarily having great upper body strength, but comparatively rarely having strength elsewhere. That's why I call them weightlifters. This often means that men's legs suffer, and suffer greatly, either being drawn as short, small or underdeveloped. Men, for some reason, tend to be drawn as though they're cranes on tracks - great lifting arms positioned over small, stubby legs that aren't all that great at moving them around. The leg slider in City of Heroes seems to have escaped this to some extent, but still the only real way to make a tall, slender man is to jam the leg slider all the way to the right and cross your fingers.

---

In either case, body shape and posture is the key much more so than size or weight. I'm really not suggesting that we turn women into men - which is what using the Huge model to depict women practically does - so much as I'm suggesting we give them more body shapes to play around with.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Amusingly enough... Yeah, that's pretty much it Even more amusingly, David already agreed to that and I'm still waiting to see when a window of opportunity opens up. My original request and David's acceptance are about as old as the Costume Request thread, so it should be easy to judge how long it's been, but on this account, I'm not willing to insist or rush. I get that this is a nice appeal thing, so just having it in the game, whenever that happens, will be enough for me.

Now, if I wanted to ask for a few more things, here's what they would be:

1. "Titanic arms." Using the existing Robotic Hands torso, add a pair of bigger, more muscular arms to the female model. With metal rings separating them if necessary.

2. The ability to have a larger rib cage, both sideways and front-to-back. Note I don't mean a larger "chest," I mean specifically rib cage. A large upper body in relation to the lower body is important.

3. The the option to have larger hands and feet without having to ALWAYS use Large boots and gloves, and more specifically without having to use gloves at all.

---

However, the reason I keep going on tangents about this is because... Well, part of that suggestion has already been accepted by the art team, part of it should eventually come true and part of it won't happen. That's more or less a done deal. And yet despite this, I end up having to argue with people about how I'm not the only person in the world to want these things and how adding these things to the game won't be the same as chucking money off a bridge. That, I believe, is the larger problem: That we as a world-wide community seem to have certain notions ingrained into our minds so deep that we consider doing anything else to be pointless and wasteful.

Gender roles, to bring this back around to topic, are one such example, but within the context of a fictional game, they're hardly the only one. I had and still have a very hard time convincing a particular friend of mine to take that pink winged bunny girl I made seriously, just for a random example, and I've had people rag on my designs because they were "too anime." We all saw the furore over Dual Blades, did we not? "City of WoW?"

I don't mean to "cure" society off its bias, nor do I really want to shift people off of what they'll accept and what they want. But I kind of wish we'd move past stepping on each other's toes and proclaiming each other's ideas as "weird" or "unpopular" and constructing complicated arguments for why they should be ignored.

Whether or not I get what I want isn't so much the point, as whether I should even be allowed to WANT it, and honestly... Sometimes that actually does concern me.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Minimum Physique:


Middle Physique:


Max Physique:


Max Everything:


I know what the proportions look like

*Note: For the first image, the model has Minimum Physique, 3/4 of an inch over the minimum Shoulders/Chest, Minimum Waist, and Maximum Hips/Legs. After that I just increased the Physique Slider to the 1/2 way point and then max.

Now all my comments have been on new character models by the way. I have no problem with new skin textures. That totally makes sense to me. That seems worthwhile in making. It's the idea of taking time on whole new avatar models I think would be a waist of time.

Also, I think it's likely to late in the game for them to likely fix the sliders looking better as you move them to the left, and and from comments made, if they did, they'd have to fix every costume pieces to fit them, which would be a complete time sink, that imo would be better spent on new costumes, or even giving some of those gender exclusive items to the other gender models.

I say this as someone who would love a more feminine male avatar, so one of my concepts can be fully realized (I've yet to see a male avatar look like a female, and putting the chest slider all the way to minimum and covering it up with a jacket doesn't work 100%)

So it's not like I don't understand the want for different avatars or changes. But even then, I'm not sure what I want would be popular enough to warrant either

*BTW 30mins in AP, new characters popping in...not a single huge model yet.

To Healix: Now see, I see that avatar and think bodybuilder. Nice job!

Let's get back to talking about BOTH genders.

As long as you have an "us vs them" mentality, you're not striving for equality.

No.

When you want two things to be equal, you absolutely have to get them to equal first before you start talking about adjusting both.

And yet society does this to us all the time. Grown men don't cry because little boys are heckled when they do. Grown women's only dream is to find a good husband, because that's what everyone seems to say. Everyone is supposed to want to go out drinking as often as possible, because if you don't, then... What the hell is wrong with you?

I don't want to delve into armchair psychology, but this is just what I've seen: a lot of what like - or rather what we believe we should like - is formed less by desire and opinion and more by the world around us. There's that famous ill parenting line "do what I say, not what I do," and it exists for a reason - because our environment forms who we are, and that force can be incredibly strong if we don't realise it exists. Hell, the very notion that "women are just drawn like that in comic books" itself should be evidence enough that people are masters at conditioning their own psyches.

If we allow all of these notions to go unchallenged, then they become status quo without anyone realising it. That's why I make it a point to challenge notions I disagree with wherever I meet them - not because I think I can convince anyone of anything or because I believe I can change society, but because I'm determined to prove that there are other ways to think about things, and little though I may know about it, I feel there ARE other, possibly even better ways to look at gender politics in comic books at large and City of Heroes in particular.

I know for a fact just how powerful these pressures can be, and how unseen their influence is. When you hear a certain notion enough times from enough people, it starts to feel like a basic truth of life that doesn't even need justification. It just is. There are certain things men are expected to do, and if they don't do them, they're weird. There are certain things men are supposed to like in a woman, and if they don't or like different things, they're weird. Trust me, I know a little something about that.

Someone previously made an interesting observation - some people seem to feel like for one "group" to get what it wants, another must lose something in return. If someone is seen as asking something different, said someone is either seen as either hopelessly wrong, completely alone or otherwise as an aggressor seeking to take something away from people who disagree. Generally, that's what bothers me the most, and I've seen it enough times surrounding so-called "furry" themes and anime themes.

It's true, you can't take someone with a fully-formed wish in his head and force him to stop wishing for it, that much is true. But by constant repetition of the same assumed values, you very much CAN condition a person to disregard his own wishes and instead replace them with the wishes of others. And it doesn't take 15 years of family upbringing to do that, either. A pervasive enough community with a strong enough social pressure can do this to a person seeking to belong within a matter of a couple of years.

Granted, WE aren't that community. One look at the Costume Request or Best Designs threads can show you will show that most of us genuinely do want everyone to explore his or her imagination and actually encourage and praise greater diversity. The costumes I see most often credited are the ones that make the most unusual use of the editor. We aren't "that" community... But we could be if we're not careful.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You're being naive. You cannot preach equality on the one hand, while only championing the rights of ONE HALF of the population with the other. Allow me to explain why.

Both genders are social constructs of the patriarchal society within which we live. They are both equal parts of the problem and need to treated as such. If we focused just on women's right, and not at the meta-societal concerns, we would simply be granting women the right to become pseudo-men. This is because the power structure of the patriarchal society within which we live would STILL EXIST. Rather than be granted equal rights, women would be granted MALE rights. Do you see the problem here? If the patriarchal society is still in place, and dictates what power is, and that power is then "given" to women, it is not true gender equality. It is just giving women the right to be men.

This is what I was saying earlier. This notion of male power/sexuality being "neutral" or "normal" to so many people is in fact A MASSIVE PART OF THE PROBLEM. True equality would be the complete and utter breakdown of the patriarchal society within which we live, especially as a source of gender empowerment. To just focus on women, and ignore men, would in fact HURT women's right in the long run.

This is obviously all just my opinion. And I'm well aware this is just a forum for a video game. But a lot of people here seem to be very keen on equality for women, but aren't really looking at the wider picture.

It's not an "us vs. them" mentality. I'm a man and I firmly believe that Western society, for all its emancipation, is still oppressing women far more than it oppresses men. Trying to present a legitimate grievance as an "us vs. them" problem and diminishing its importance in the problem does completely the opposite of what you claim to be doing.

What problems men have with social pressure are not the counterpoint to feminist issues that you use them as. They don't lessen or excuse feminism's very real, pressing concerns. Do man have social problems of objectification? Yes, they do. But how are they relevant within the context of a feminist tangent but to say "Your problem is less important because my problem exists?"

If you want to bring up the problems of the male self-image and the unrealistic standards of appearance and physical ability, then by all means, do so. I'm not sure it will be entirely on topic, but I AM sure there is room for you to run that tangent IN ADDITION to that of feminism, not INSTEAD of it.

You don't need to stamp out other people's ideas to promote your own. That's what I've been trying to say from the beginning. You can't come into a conversation about integration and solidarity and attempt to push your own idea by pushing out someone else's, largely because you don't have to. Trust me, there's room in the thread for everybody.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Honestly, the difference between middle physique and max physique isn't all that telling. Putting them side-by-side with captions makes it obvious, of course, but if I, personally, saw your max physique pic in the game, I wouldn't have called it.

Here's the thing - women get so little travel on most of their sliders (except breasts) that the difference in slider values is only telling from one extreme to the other, and isn't very obvious between degrees closer together. That's why how "big" a female character looks is often much more down to what costume pieces she's using. You'll note that both Brutticus and Xanta have large boots and gloves, large belts and large shoulders, as well as relatively smaller heads. Xanta, especially, really stands out less so due to her stature and more so due to the Medieval shoulders and the Glam hairdo - they're both huge and make her look much bigger.

Considering David shot down both a new model and reweighing the sliders on the old models so hard he left a hole in the sky... Yeah, obviously It won't happen - which is a pity - but there are still ways to work around it. As I've mentioned before, most of a the female model's body is more or less right, especially from the waist down. What women need is more mass in their upper body, and the easiest way to do this seems to give them a new pair of bigger arms via the Rrobotic Arms category. This should be easy to do without the need for new tech and without the need to tweak any existing costume pieces, though it WILL leave the arms separated from chest patterns and textures like short sleeve jackets are. Another possibility is to outright give them a new chest, as well, kind of like the Armoured chest, only bulkier, but this will probably require some work on existing textures and patterns to make sure they stretch right, as well as possibly realigning attached costume pieces like chest pieces and shoulders.

Huge are bad at depicting human people, so I would never argue that they're as common as Male and Female, and I'd even agree that they are more rare. I'm just saying that they're not as non-existent as you say. Keep looking, I'm sure you'll see one before too long. I teamed with one on a Death From Below trial the other day.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

In most cases, societal pressures do not alter what a person wants, IMHO. They alter what they are willing to do in order to get what they want (often to the point of ceasing any attempt to get it whatsoever).

'Boys don't cry' results in boys that don't cry and boys that don't enjoy a good cry, but by and large (YMMV) those boys generally still have times when they want to cry.

I beleive this is borne out in the proliferation in many modern societies of activities which were social anathema a few years ago...like gaming (what did you think I was going to say? ) or even the tacit legalization of some drugs. Those social anathema did not go away, the underlying desires remained, and when the people who were having those desires came to power, they declared them harmless to society and legitimized them.

However, I do acknowledge the existence of pheonomena like Stockholm Syndrome. But that delves into the concept of changing what a person beleives to be true, which to my mind is not the same thing as changing what a person wants: it just changes their perception of the environment and resources available.

However, I do beleive that what a person wants can be changed. People can choose to change, and work to change their own desires.

Exterior pressures work a bit differently in my perception: the desire to avoid punishment can grow to be greater than the desire to play D&D, for example. However, that desire to avoid punishment does not overwrite the desire to play D&D, it coexists alongside it and prioritizes one's actions.

Of course, there are individuals that are exceptions to (nearly) every rule.

I can only speak for myself on the matter, but let me give you a really stupid example:

Blasters. I hate 'em. With a passion. And yet, until a few months ago, I had a whole three of the things at level 50 and another couple at level 40. Why? Because I was genuinely, honest-to-god, convinced that I liked them, for no real reason than because I'd managed to convince myself. Give me a minute and I'll explain why.

Back in 2004, my first character was my namesake - Samuel Tow, the Scrapper. However, my second character was the Steel Rook, an AR/Dev Blaster that I made with a friend of mine and levelled up into his 30s on the old Smoke Grenade bug. With the bug fixed, the character ended up broken. I never deleted him, though, because he was partially my friend's character, and eventually I wrote a long, touching story for him, so I kept him. Eventually, the Blaster buffs came and I convinced myself that this character I couldn't delete but didn't want to play actually WAS fun, so I played him, and through blood, sweat and tears, I got him to level 50. Having thus convinced myself that I could play Blasters and having long since run out of powerset combos for Scrappers, I made a whole bunch of other Blasters. One of them was very dear to my heart as the protagonist of the best story I've ever written, and another was part of my most interesting idea ever, and both I got to level 50, through grit teeth.

Every time I loaded these characters up, I did so with a great deal of dread, but damn it, I liked these character's stories so I would play them and like it! Every time I died, every time Blasters pissed me off, I kept telling myself it was worth it, the characters deserved it, and if I could just be a little more careful, it would be all right. I kept telling myself that this really was fun, and I just couldn't appreciate it. And I actually believed that nonsense. For SEVEN ******* YEARS I played an AT that I hated, wasted my time on the forums suggesting things be done to it to make me like it more, trying new builds and taking advice and nothing helped. I hated playing Blasters, but I was so invested in them that I couldn't see past it. I honestly thought I genuinely wanted to play Blasters.

Then came I18 and inherent Stamina, and suddenly all of my previously Stamina-less Scrappers and Brutes became twice as strong and significantly more fun to play. My Blasters, by contrast, didn't change one iota since endurance was never the issue with them. That's when the bubble burst and I realised I didn't like playing Blasters, I'd NEVER liked playing Blasters, and I had flushed a combined 2000 hours of my life down the drain. That's not a fun realisation. Since then, I've deleted all three of my level 50 Blasters and replaced them with a Brute, a Scrapper and a Mastermind, and have been having the time of my life with these character, feeling like a four-sided idiot for paying $15 to torture myself every month, instead of using that game to have fun.

It took me a decision that several people have questioned my sanity over to force my own hand and admit that what I thought I wanted was a hollow lie all along, a hollow lie that I told myself, all because in I1 Smoke Grenade was bugged and I happened to make a Devices Blaster with it that I couldn't delete.

I wish what people want couldn't be influenced by society and circumstance. It would have saved me so much time and effort, to say nothing of saved me so much anger. Who knows - if it weren't for Blasters, I could be a jovial easy-going person right now

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You posted it while I was writing mine

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

While Eva wasn't responding to me in the quote you were originally quoting, I also think that I can be included in the generalizations that she was referring to and that was my my interest. The reason I'm singling your comment out is because I think that this is a particularly troubling mode of thought.

Women are, by and large, still more oppressed then men are in this society. The thought process that continues to oppress them, however, is the same thought process that stamps out the same kind of out-of-the-box thinking for men. Put it this way: intolerance of any kind have many of the same root causes. The main reason I wanted to make it clear that I think there are sexual politics going on on the masculine side of the equation here is precisely that reason - you stamp out the root causes of the inequality and you stamp out the inequality. Where as if you merely stamp out the inequality in your face at that moment you stamp out a symptom of a larger issue.

I WANT women with more muscle definition. I WANT cigars for women. I want all of these things because it would make my ability to realize concepts even broader than it is. With all that being said, while you can talk about the sexual politics of females in this game and their objectification you cannot then turn around and say there's none going on on the masculine side of the equation.

I'm not really suggesting that you simply remove gender restrictions. What I am advocating for is a "test" for the creators to see if they're making a political (and I don't mean US politics, I mean political as in advocating a point of view whether it be intentional or unintentional) decision or a practical one (clipping issues, technical issues, financial issues, etc). I'm not even saying that if they decide the decision is political they should say "f- it" and not put it in. I'm saying that if it is political they should be aware that it is.

Without the ability to talk freely and openly about both sides of the equation we're never going to get anywhere. I'm actually trying not to be angry right now because I am borderline offended by the remark - if it sounds like I'm talking strongly I am, because I have a brother who would like nothing more than to walk around in public in skirts. Society doesn't like to let him so while he sometimes does do it, he usually doesn't and the comment, while I don't think it was meant that way, grated me the wrong way.

I guess it can be summed up this way: when you want two things to be equal you should strive towards making them equal. Obviously we need to spend more time talking about issues of female equality than we do male equality, but it has got to be in the discussion, and I think it should be in the discussion from the beginning or otherwise it's just going to serve to piss off the people in the "majority" who are being singled out for their individuality.