- Whooping cough epidemic in Alberta, Canada – Their vaccination rate is below the level that can maintain herd immunity, as low as 62% in some areas. Once again, GET VACCINATED and tell everyone you know to GET VACCINATED. From Angela.
- Let’s end the FPS sausage-fest – First person shooter style games are notably devoid of playable female characters. Here’s a video that addresses the “Making female characters would be too much extra work” response in a humorous way.
- There’s no shame in being a male feminist – There’s only horrible people who will try and make you feel ashamed.
- The Occam’s razor game for kids – From Vanessa.
- Cute Animal Friday! Cat vs. singing birthday card. Kazakhstan’s rocket gopher, from nowoo. And baby otters aptly named after Olympic swimmers.
I had to get a tetanus shot a while back (booster because I smashed my head off something and broke the skin within the 1-year of when I’d be due for one anyway), and they asked when my last pertussis was. I said with my teenage immunizations, and the nurse asked if I’d be okay with adding pertussis to my tetanus shot. I said that I was about to ask for it since my neice has secondary immunodeficiency, so even though she’s immunized, she could still catch it.
Done. Yeah, my arm hurt and I felt sick for a week (I have a very vigorous response to immunizations in general), but I don’t have to worry about killing my neice with pertussis. Feeling sick and having a sore and swollen arm pales in comparison. :)
What’s wrong with sitting down to pee now?
It takes the weight off your feet, it frees your hands to hold a magazine and if, after peeing, you find you could squeeze out a poo as well now you’re there, well, you’re already in the proper position.
Or do I have to stand up and poo as well to be a proper man?
lol omg this reminds me of a friend of a friend’s facebook profile I was reading yesterday that read:
“I sit down to pee. Then I wipe my penis. I’m hygienic. And I don’t give a fuck what you think.”
I ALMOST DIED.
The only way to take a crap like a real man is to bend over in the woods with a hustler or sports magazine and pop several blood vessels as you painstakingly squeeze out a big meaty turd (because fiber is for PUSSIES!!!).
Afterwards you kill a deer and wipe your ass with little patches of its skin that you rip off with your MEGA MUSCLES.
You may followup afterwards by eating a big meaty 48oz steak, drinking a 6-pack of beer, watching and yelling at a football game, and pleasuring the entirety of your harem that you have because women fall all over you due to your real-alpha-man-dude-bro-iness.
Dito. It’s simply more comfortable. Also, in (semi)public toilets (For example in pubs) it offers a certain privacy.
I don’t think when you’re a male feminist you have to go overboard advocating things like “sitting down to pee” to be a good feminist. I don’t do it.
However that’s inconsequential, the point is not having 1 damn ounce of shame if you are a male feminist or if you do sit down to pee.
About the fps thing: In my opinion it’s about the stereotype of men being in the army, being the ones holding the guns, doing all the shooting etc. Which means that the women aren’t the ones usually expected to be doing all those things and as a result not so much included in games as such characters.
You can try to do away with that stereotype but i doubt that the main thing that it will achieve is to eliminate inequality of women characters vs men characters in fps videogames. The main thing that it will do away with is the expectation of women to not be soldiers in wars.
“The main thing that it will do away with is the expectation of women to not be soldiers in wars.”
And why shouldn’t a woman who joins the military expect to be a soldier? I’m not sure what you’re saying here…
“And why shouldn’t a woman who joins the military expect to be a soldier? I’m not sure what you’re saying here…”
I’m saying that eliminating the cause has results that most women wouldn’t care for. Not all countries are like the US or most of europe, in most countries there’s conscription which simply doesn’t include women.
Imho the problem is more a lack of female protagonists in games in general, not only in FPS. (Maybe excluding Point’n’click adventures and games with character editors).
Well written characters of any gender are even rarer. And more or less an anomaly in FPS,(The only one i can think of which was halfway decent would be Kate Archer).
And maybe XIII, from, well XIII, but that was based on a comic book, so i am not sure if he counts. (Since the game missed a good chunk of the story).
Love JimQuisition!
UGH, ALBERTA. I’m so ashamed of my province right now.
Hmm, Jim Sterling. The same guy who’s not an ally and has made sexist comments in the past?
Yes.
https://gomakemeasandwich.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/in-his-words-why-jim-sterling-is-in-fact-very-sexist/
I did watch the video, and it is good, but he is not a good guy.
I love the Occam’s Razor game! I’ll have to try that out…
Male feminist and proud. But I really admire the hell out of female feminists who take the abuse but keep fighting harder. Kudos to the Skepchicks!
Women are humans. Women’s concerns are human concerns. If you claim to be a humanist, to be consistent, you need to be a feminist.
I’d nominate this for COTW if it wasn’t too late.
Perhaps a runner up?
Make it for this week!
I like this XKCD about shooting AT women in a fps.
http://xkcd.com/873/
I have a difficult time imagining the mindset required for one to be ashamed to be a male feminist. Fuck that shit.
Oh, and sitting down to pee is a lot better for the prostate as well. There are no downsides, except that it takes a few second longer to get your trousers down and up again.
And it also ingrains a sense of sympathy for all the women who have to put up with guys who miss the damned bowl and hit the seat instead.
Is it better for the prostate? I saw references to studies but no “references” to studies. Doing a bit of online research keeps throwing up the same non references to studies.
I managed to track down a few papers on urinating in different positions (a thrilling Saturday night!) but they all appeared fairly inconclusive.
Conversely, there is shame in being misogynist. Almost everyone has a mother. If you swallow the fundamentalist christian or muslim line that women are somehow inferior to men, you are not only dishonoring your mother, (one of the many ways in which fundamentalist christianity contradicts itself), you have to rationalize the shame of your “inferior” origins.
Not necessarily. If you’re a misogynist then optimally you’re proud of your mother who stayed in her place in the home and was lorded over by a righteous and manly father. And you expect your wife to do the same.
Also, not all men who are or act sexist are the “traditional misogynist”, there is a lot of sexism that exists in many very liberal subcultures.
I live in the UK a whooping cough boosters is not offered to adults. Please if you are in the UK could you sign this petition to try and make boosters available for school leavers and adults.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/35504
OK, technically, Tomb Raider wasn’t a first person shooter game. But Lara Croft has always been the most badass shooter of all time.
“So, like, don’t do it, bro”
Doesn’t he realize those are fighting words that will release a shit-storm of hate?
Okay, the Jimquisition is hilarious. I can’t believe I haven’t stumbled on this before.
Crotchless lingerie… mm…
Great article on male feminists.
So far, I’ve avoided attacks of the sort mentioned. Not being part of social networks probably has something to do with that (but that’s only my conjecture).
I’d love to teach my cousin to play Occam’s Razor.
Just have to find the right occasion to do so.
Closest I’ve seen any sort of FPS that featured a woman would be playable characters for multiplayer in one of the “Medal of Honor” games. IIRC, there are two female charactes. One seems young (20s at least), the other is elderly.
If there was a game as such that featured a main female character for FPS, a good choice IMHO to model after would be “NCIS’s” Ziva David.
As i said there’s also Kate Archer, the protagonist from No one lives forever. Other than that and playable models in arena shooters like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, one can probably count playable female charas in FPS on one hand.
Offtopic: Am i the only one that read Jim Sterling and first thought it was the Leverage-Character played by Mark Sheppard?
Having plays FPS myself I find that kinda curious. 99.9 % of the time you are actually not aware of the gender of the “character” you are playing. So gender equality would actually mean that 50 % of the targets would be female. I find that idea kinda appealing but I strongly doubt you would be cool with that.
Meh, all that we need is a couple good titles that have that in a tasteful way, and people will get used to it.
Art and ideas is often offensive before they are accepted, and on this subject, we need to start offending people.
Except there already have been a few games like this and … no one complained! Huh. :P
He’s basing his opinion on stereotypes and “well this is what I THINK will happen!”, not reality.
Well I work in the computer game industry (casual iphone/facebook, not AAA FPS) and what I know is that the only people with the resources to make big-shit FPS games are publishers and large developers with a large amount of capital reserves on hands (like 10s-100s of millions) because a detailed FPS costs millions.
Because of this, publishers/large developers generally only want to build “proven” IP lines and “proven” ideas. And so misogyny/male dominance and the established titles that have those tend to be what they build. They do this to a fault many times, because they often lose money on tired IPs.
A lead female protagonist without giant boobs and only a bra for armor is a huge risk in the eyes of a game publisher. So you don’t see many.
That’s why I say, we need a revolutionary title!!! I have some ideas on how that would be *realistically* done.
And why do you ‘strongly doubt’ that? Kinda weird to strongly doubt something you don’t know the answer to.
As long as the story lines were good, then that would be totally fine.
Also, is this really true? Because I don’t think this is true at all. It depends on the game of course, but most games have story lines you have to follow. Also, most generally make it pretty clear the characters are men and none are women, if you watch the trailers, etc.
>And why do you ‘strongly doubt’ that? >Kinda weird to strongly doubt something >you don’t know the answer to.
Yeah, where does that: “If there were female enemies, the feminists would complain” come from? I also noticed it in the comment section of the article. There were instances of female enemies in FPS (Halflife, No one lives forever and the Wolfenstein sequels come to mind. There are probably more, but that’s the one i played) and more or less no one complained. (Yes, someone mentioned the nuns in Hitman 3, but i’m pretty sure the problem there was the nun part, not the female part).
It’s one of those MRA arguments. Feminists are why women aren’t in the draft, why women don’t get to see themselves in FPSs and also why all those ladies got first dibs on the lifeboats on the Titanic.
The problem with the nuns is that they were dressed like prostitutes and the implication was that you’re expected to watch 47 slaughter these women with only one hand on the controller. It’s gross.
Ah, ok, thanks. I didn’t play Hitman 3.
And that would be a great example of a “bad storyline” right there!
Are you sure it’s because of feminism that women aren’t included in drafts?
Seems that more of a case of chauvism.
Hypothetically speakin, suppose a suggestion was made to include women in the draft. Would we see support from feminists today? What say you, Women of Skepchick?
Same for the Titanic.
Matter of fact, the saying “women and children first” was never a (written) rule. It was more of a suggestion that had different interpretations.
I doubt feminists of the day screamed to have first dibs on lifeboats in the case of a shipwide evacuation.
As for the “sausage fest” of FPS, that seems counter to feminism. More like narrow mindedness and more chauvism (my apologies if I screwed up the spelling).
Speaking of female enemies, what of Persephone from one of the God of War series?
True, you don’t fight her until the end, but that seems a rather well done female enemy. No reason not to have someone like that in an FPS.
Male feminists: I don’t call myself a “male feminist,” mainly because I think it sounds too patronizing (“hey there, little lady, things’ll go a lot better for you now that you’ve got us Male Feminists to protect you”), but also because some of the prominent so-called “male feminists” behave in ways I don’t want to be associated with.
I found the article a bit weird, mostly because it seemed to be all about how you can maintain your masculinist cred despite being insufficiently sexist. Since I’ve come to the conclusion that the concept of “masculinity” is ultimately entirely about training men to be oppressors, I think that the author is working at cross purposes.
Well I think the problem is that men ARE afraid to take the label because it does give them some sense of emasculation.
It shows how ingrained sexist attitudes are in our society, because really, if you do say “feminist” and “male feminist” in public, you will be open to ridicule.
But basically, think about it, it doesn’t do anything to your masculinity. If you act like you did prior to accepting the label minus any sexist thinking, then what has changed? Nothing at all!
So really, if you’re secure with yourself, it shouldn’t matter at all.
IMnot-soHO, the problem isn’t that they are afraid to take the label.
The problem is that they’re afraid to actually support feminist positions. They’re afraid to stand up and say “I’m not OK with that” when their buddies start in with the sexism-as-male-bonding thing.
That’s the first part of the problem, the second is that if a guy comes around and realizes such behavior isn’t right, he then has trouble feeling secure in calling himself “feminist”. I’ve been through the transformation.