Post by Kitten4u on Apr 16, 2009 23:21:51 GMT -7
I mention this is the c-box a lot. This semester I had to take a lovely BS course known as "Women and Race in Gaming" (I'm majoring in Game Design and Development). It's a women and ethnic studies course, and I personally think it's a freaken sin that these kinds of classes even exist. This week we had to write a journal about something. Normally she gives us a prompt but she didn't this week, so I wrote the first thing that popped into my head. Naturally that turned out to be a rant because people don't seem to realize exactly how silly some of the stuff they complain about is. Anyway, this was basically written to the teacher, so that's what all the "you"s are. Edited a bit to hide my age.
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Well, we don't have a promt for this one so I'll admit that I don't really know what to write about. The general questions that you mentioned don't really give me that much to think about because I must admit that I don't really like most of the readings. I feel that they over exaggerate most of the time or they focus on completely trivial things. The women in games are frequently over-sexualized. Yes, that's true, but I honestly have to ask who cares? People prefer looking at pretty women than they do ugly ones. I think everyone knows this already and I don't see why so many people have a problem with it. If a woman thinks that all she's valued for is her looks then that's a personal problem. Society doesn't push these things on woman any more than they do men. I guess that's what bothers me so much about a lot of these discussions and articles is that they only assume these things happen to minorities and women when it happens at least as much to men. I guess it's just socially acceptable to hate white men now, which is a shame.
There's been something in advertisements that I've found interesting and it relates to all this. The men are almost always stupid. They will say something to embarass themselves and their wife will almost always look superior. This never happens with women in TV commercials anymore. If someone dared to do the stuff that all these white men put up with to a woman they would be lynched. I remember there was one where the man asked if his wife if she was watching her weight. She asked why he was asking and if she should be. He, obviously embarassed, mentioned that the box of the cereal she was eating had all this healty stuff in it. She asked him what else the box said and he responded "The box says shut-up Steve." Could you imagine the backlash Cheerios would get if they reversed the roles? I honestly question why all these men put up with this stuff when women will complain about women in media being pretty. I just find it so ridiculous.
Of course, that's actually reasonable compared to some stuff I've read about asexuality. If you insult a gay person now-a-days you might as well burry yourself alive. That's all fine by me, no one should hate another human because of their sexuality. However, I'm asexual and several people have told me that I must have some kind of mental illness or that I must secretly be some kind of sociopath because I'm not attracted to either sex. Well, that and they ask if I'm actually just gay and I'm afraid to admit it or they say that I must have really talented fingers. Both imply that I'm secretly want sex when I really don't. The former is totally stupid because if I was gay why would I hide it? Gays are accepted now whie asexuals are not. I would have to be some kind of moron to lie about my sexuality only to be harassed about it. I've stopped entire conversations by mentioning I was asexual. Heck, I happened to mention this to my older sister at dinner once and she said that it wasn't appropriate dinner conversation when she had asked me only a week earlier if I was gay. I went to the doctor a few weeks ago, and I had to fill out paper work. For whatever reason they asked what my sexuality was on the paper work. There were three options: Male, Female, Both. There was no neither option. When I was doing a discussion a few weeks ago I found a thread in a forum that asked if asexuality even existed and then proceded to talk about asexuals the same way people used to talk about gays. They said it was a mental illness or it occured because of some kind of truama. They said it was just a choice, or people said they were asexual to hide their homosexuality (which as I said before is just stupid). Of course they did this in a very "intellegent" and "dignified" manner which just made it more insulitng. Most villains in video games are asexual, and villain sex is often described as cold and passionless while hero sex is described as exactly the opposite. And yet, no one ever talks about this. They're too busy babbling about how women and minorities are opressed when they're not.
Oh, but there's another issue that's commonly ignored too. I mentoined this in class once. I never finished high school and I started college at 16. No one ever took me seriously until I turned 18. When we were forced to do group projects no one would never let me talk. I had to shout and bully them into submission in order to say anything at all. It's a good thing I'm good at that kind of thing or I would have never gotten to say anything at all during these discussions. Once it was taken to the extreme where one group literally refused to work with me and I was too much of a wuss to talk to the teacher. Though, the teacher was doing similar things too. There were lots of extra credit oppertunities where all we had to do was fill out surveys. But guess what? I had to be 18 in order to do those surveys, so I never had an oppertunity to get any extra credit. Anyway, this group downright refused to work with me. I told the teacher that I think there might have been something wrong with my e-mail or that their sceduale just didn't fit mine because that's what I wanted to believe. Sadly, I was stupid and waited until the day the project was due before mentioning this, so she naturally didn't believe me (to be fair I wouldn't have believed me either) and I got a zero on the final project which dropped me a full letter grade (that I couldn't make up because I couldn't do any of the extra credit she offered). And I'm sure these things were based on my age. I've been working with the people in this class for years now. My e-mail used to have "problems." I frequently wouldn't recieve e-mail that "they sent" to me, though I was smarter about it and actually told this to my teachers. Once again, I just claimed that they were "problems" because that's what I wanted to believe. After I turned 18, all of a sudden my e-mail had no "problems" anymore. Though, I'd prefer if you didn't mention that in class at all because I'm still too much of a wuss to deal with this directly, plus I haven't had any problems with anyone since I've turned 18. But it goes beyond just me. People never seem to listen to kids because "they're just kids." Kids are treated like they're less of a person than adults and I think that's just wrong.
Well, that turned out to be more of a rant than I originally thought this would, but this is the kind of stuff I think about every time I do something for this class. I just can't comprehend why people waste their time focusing on this unimportant details (such as women wearing what might as well be a bikini in a game) when there are real problems affecting people. Of course, this doesn't mean that women and minorities don't have problems, they're just not any worse than the problems white men have to deal with (and white men don't get a white male studies to complain in). Viva la revolution I guess.
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Well, we don't have a promt for this one so I'll admit that I don't really know what to write about. The general questions that you mentioned don't really give me that much to think about because I must admit that I don't really like most of the readings. I feel that they over exaggerate most of the time or they focus on completely trivial things. The women in games are frequently over-sexualized. Yes, that's true, but I honestly have to ask who cares? People prefer looking at pretty women than they do ugly ones. I think everyone knows this already and I don't see why so many people have a problem with it. If a woman thinks that all she's valued for is her looks then that's a personal problem. Society doesn't push these things on woman any more than they do men. I guess that's what bothers me so much about a lot of these discussions and articles is that they only assume these things happen to minorities and women when it happens at least as much to men. I guess it's just socially acceptable to hate white men now, which is a shame.
There's been something in advertisements that I've found interesting and it relates to all this. The men are almost always stupid. They will say something to embarass themselves and their wife will almost always look superior. This never happens with women in TV commercials anymore. If someone dared to do the stuff that all these white men put up with to a woman they would be lynched. I remember there was one where the man asked if his wife if she was watching her weight. She asked why he was asking and if she should be. He, obviously embarassed, mentioned that the box of the cereal she was eating had all this healty stuff in it. She asked him what else the box said and he responded "The box says shut-up Steve." Could you imagine the backlash Cheerios would get if they reversed the roles? I honestly question why all these men put up with this stuff when women will complain about women in media being pretty. I just find it so ridiculous.
Of course, that's actually reasonable compared to some stuff I've read about asexuality. If you insult a gay person now-a-days you might as well burry yourself alive. That's all fine by me, no one should hate another human because of their sexuality. However, I'm asexual and several people have told me that I must have some kind of mental illness or that I must secretly be some kind of sociopath because I'm not attracted to either sex. Well, that and they ask if I'm actually just gay and I'm afraid to admit it or they say that I must have really talented fingers. Both imply that I'm secretly want sex when I really don't. The former is totally stupid because if I was gay why would I hide it? Gays are accepted now whie asexuals are not. I would have to be some kind of moron to lie about my sexuality only to be harassed about it. I've stopped entire conversations by mentioning I was asexual. Heck, I happened to mention this to my older sister at dinner once and she said that it wasn't appropriate dinner conversation when she had asked me only a week earlier if I was gay. I went to the doctor a few weeks ago, and I had to fill out paper work. For whatever reason they asked what my sexuality was on the paper work. There were three options: Male, Female, Both. There was no neither option. When I was doing a discussion a few weeks ago I found a thread in a forum that asked if asexuality even existed and then proceded to talk about asexuals the same way people used to talk about gays. They said it was a mental illness or it occured because of some kind of truama. They said it was just a choice, or people said they were asexual to hide their homosexuality (which as I said before is just stupid). Of course they did this in a very "intellegent" and "dignified" manner which just made it more insulitng. Most villains in video games are asexual, and villain sex is often described as cold and passionless while hero sex is described as exactly the opposite. And yet, no one ever talks about this. They're too busy babbling about how women and minorities are opressed when they're not.
Oh, but there's another issue that's commonly ignored too. I mentoined this in class once. I never finished high school and I started college at 16. No one ever took me seriously until I turned 18. When we were forced to do group projects no one would never let me talk. I had to shout and bully them into submission in order to say anything at all. It's a good thing I'm good at that kind of thing or I would have never gotten to say anything at all during these discussions. Once it was taken to the extreme where one group literally refused to work with me and I was too much of a wuss to talk to the teacher. Though, the teacher was doing similar things too. There were lots of extra credit oppertunities where all we had to do was fill out surveys. But guess what? I had to be 18 in order to do those surveys, so I never had an oppertunity to get any extra credit. Anyway, this group downright refused to work with me. I told the teacher that I think there might have been something wrong with my e-mail or that their sceduale just didn't fit mine because that's what I wanted to believe. Sadly, I was stupid and waited until the day the project was due before mentioning this, so she naturally didn't believe me (to be fair I wouldn't have believed me either) and I got a zero on the final project which dropped me a full letter grade (that I couldn't make up because I couldn't do any of the extra credit she offered). And I'm sure these things were based on my age. I've been working with the people in this class for years now. My e-mail used to have "problems." I frequently wouldn't recieve e-mail that "they sent" to me, though I was smarter about it and actually told this to my teachers. Once again, I just claimed that they were "problems" because that's what I wanted to believe. After I turned 18, all of a sudden my e-mail had no "problems" anymore. Though, I'd prefer if you didn't mention that in class at all because I'm still too much of a wuss to deal with this directly, plus I haven't had any problems with anyone since I've turned 18. But it goes beyond just me. People never seem to listen to kids because "they're just kids." Kids are treated like they're less of a person than adults and I think that's just wrong.
Well, that turned out to be more of a rant than I originally thought this would, but this is the kind of stuff I think about every time I do something for this class. I just can't comprehend why people waste their time focusing on this unimportant details (such as women wearing what might as well be a bikini in a game) when there are real problems affecting people. Of course, this doesn't mean that women and minorities don't have problems, they're just not any worse than the problems white men have to deal with (and white men don't get a white male studies to complain in). Viva la revolution I guess.
