Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved

Gay male gamer joins a Halo game using an openly gay handle and records the homophobic abuse hurled at him by the other players. It starts off with the usual ‘You’re a faggot, faggot’ but by the end they’re talking about hanging him.

‘Enjoy’!

Because it’s been exactly five years since the end of high school: Two teenage guys in my graduating class talk about giiirls, recreated from memory

Anthony is reading one of those interchangable mangas about a teenage boy who finds a subservient robot girlfriend. Keith is sitting next to him. Keep in mind that both are legally adults by this point.

Anthony
It has their measurements in it.

Keith
Uh huh.

Anthony
Waist, breasts and…? What’s the other one?

Keith
Hips.

Anthony
There’s no difference between waist and hips!

Keith
I dunno, then.

Verity Lambert

Verity Lambert, the first female producer to work with the BBC, has just died. As she worked on Doctor Who, material on her is quite easy to access, and, indeed, I own quite a lot of it. Unfortunately, almost all of it relates to her work on Doctor Who, with precious little attention paid to her position as one of the few women with any power in the BBC. One of the things that does come to the surface is that she wasn’t taken terribly seriously; publicity material from her tenure refers to her as a “28 year old girl”, one of the surviving actors circa 2005 says he didn’t believe she was in charge “because she was so pretty” and you can read a vintage Daily Mail article about her here, in which one of the sub-headings is “Shapely” and half of it’s actually about the script editor She was set to receive a lifetime achievement award from Women in Film and Television, having previously received the WFTV Business award and the WFTV Contribution to the Medium award.

I do have quite a nice interview with Paddy Russell, one of the first women directors with the BBC – she was possibly the very first; I’ve never been able to find out for certain – in which she’s quite open about the sexism she had to deal with both on set and off, which I’ll get around to posting here one day.

Whilst I am directly responsible for creating and perpetuating a climate of bigotry and hostility, I am automatically absolved of any responsiblity if things go too far

Or “Lowtax in a nutshell”.

Full Jade Raymond story covered here and here by better writers than I.

And now, let’s look at how Lowtax handled this, because it reveals much about how these guys dodge responsibility when somebody actually calls them on their bullshit:

No double standard here AT ALL

I look forward to the fair and balanced portrayal of alcoholism in tomorrow night’s edition of Sixty Minutes.

Pronoun discussion goes slightly berserk; Gamers in internalised sexism shock

My memory is probably less than accurate because I haven’t played Dungeons & Dragons since high school, but as far as I recall, the most recently released books handled gendered pronouns in one of three ways:

• Alternating between male and female pronouns throughout.
• Explaining rules using examples involving the characters rather than the players, so Lidda the halfling has her equipment and her hit points, while whatever the half-orc’s name is has his strength score and his experience points.
• Always using male pronouns, but with a disclaimer at the beginning about how it’s just a convenience thing and you can replace them with female ones in your mind (how magnanimous).

Games Workshop’s Warhammer books, true to their past form, don’t bother with any of the above and consistently use masculine pronouns without so much as a pseudo-apology. Given the relatively large number of women involved in both the company and the fandom, you’d expect them to at least put ‘being vaguely gender-inclusive’ somewhere down the bottom of their to-do list, but clearly most of their effort is going into finding new synonyms for ‘destroy’.

Somebody on a forum notices this. He jokingly points out that, if you take the rules absolutely literally, women aren’t allowed to play it. Embittered twit responds!

“Cool off, it’s just the internet”

How many standard online harassment tropes show up in this story?

Teenage (1) girl (2) with weight (3) and self-esteem (4) issues has a MySpace profile (5) which is on the receiving end of an organised campaign of harassment (6) where she’s called a fat (7) slut (8). She kills herself. People responsible for harassment don’t feel that guilty, because she was already fucked-up to begin with (9) so it’s not really their fault (10).

This is why ostensibly-satirical trolling sites disturb me so much; you can’t justify this kind of behaviour on the basis that only people who were sufficiently damaged to begin with will react badly, and therefore you aren’t responsible. It’s not “good fun” or “character building” to have a bunch of anonymous scum abuse and threaten you, and the oft-repeated idea that people need to toughen up rings utterly hollow when you consider the targets. An overweight teenage girl with anxiety issues and ADD is going to get the “guts” to shrug this off from where, precisely? (We should also note that justifying this as “comedy” is either fundamentally misguided or a deliberate smokescreen; people losing their dignity is only funny when they had too much to begin with. Laughing at somebody who was already being shat on is just sadism).

And I’ve brought this up before, but it bears repeating: I used to be friends with somebody who did this to a girl in his class, and I was totally fine with it while it was happening. We justified it by saying that she was stupid and annoying, therefore she deserved to have some guy in her class write fucking essays about how she’s a whore with a face like a shovel and post them on the internet. Only somebody drunk on unexamined privilege is capable of making a logical leap like that. I have, at least, improved in the following few years, whereas he was last seen writing an article called “Rape is Hilarious” ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE THAT’S VERY FUNNY ALSO NON-SEQUITUR SOUND EFFECTS HIYA SAYS THE MAN. I gave up half way through the first sentence.

So it’s come to this: A chatlog

Madeleine: “Subverted beautifully in a Justice League Of America issue, where time-traveling new recruit Booster Gold has caught the female villain. She asks him if he really would hit a girl. He goes ‘well… You see it’s like this…’ the next panel shows her on the ground after being punched in the face by him. ‘Where I come from equality of the sexes is a given, So we can hit anyone’ “.
Madeleine: Subverted beautifully.
Richie: Because men never hit women on 21st Century Earth.
Madeleine: Never.
Madeleine: Women sure do like to lie about it, though.
Richie: Subverted beautifully by Norman Mailer in “reality”, who stabbed one of his wives with a pen-knife in public and is remembered as a great and much-beloved character.
Madeleine: He was clearly driven mad by the nascent matriarchal conspiracy to domesticate and castrate the noble male spirit.
Richie: If anything, it was a form of satire.

PSA#12

“Dr. Brown is among those social scientists who say that being thin really isn’t about health, anyway, but about social class and control”.

They apparently needed scientists to figure this out.

This week in Australia

A quick, potentially-triggering overview of Cunt: The Movie – Last year, a gang of boys sexually-assaulted mentally-handicapped girl, urinated on her, set her on fire and throw her clothing in a river, along with a bunch of other shit, including harassing a homeless man and building chlorine bombs. We know this because they videotaped the entire thing, made DVDs of it and sold it at high school complete with end credits that mentioned their names. Obviously they ended up being caught. Repentant? Not fucking likely.

Punishment has recently been handed out. Punishment consists of… an eighteen month supervision order and participation in a rehabilitation program on “positive sexuality”. Bit too fucking late for that now, isn’t it? It’s assuming that these boys are somehow aberrant and should be treated like special cases. No. The chances of a dozen boys all of whom share the precise combination of genes that turn them into rapists who get off on degradation and violence all ending up in the same peer group are, let’s face it, fairly remote. Boys spend their entire lives, even before their hormones are working properly, being told – implicitly and explicitly – that gender politics revolves around dominance, fear and harassment. This is the extreme end of a continuum that begins with having your behaviour excused on the grounds that boys will be boys, becomes normalised out-and-out misogyny during adolescence and grows steadily worse because… it’s normalised. I’m sure we can all provide our own examples here. The first one that springs to my mind is when, during high school, a male classmate of mine mimed raping a female classmate who wasn’t in the room, because she was ugly and that was her punishment. There were no women in the room, because we had single-sex tutorial groups. Teacher doesn’t question it, students don’t question it, because it’s simply what’s expected. The site I used to run imploded for the same reason; Women were leaving the community or just not participating because the dominant culture was inherently sexist, I tried to make a point of toning things down in the area that I had influence over, and three months later I’d been forced to close up shop entirely because “Please stop telling jokes about rape” and “You are not the centre of the universe” are interpreted as human rights violations. I mean, for fuck’s sake, if you want to work on “positive sexuality”, you have to start before it gets to the point where boys think treating women like shit is acceptable in the first place. You’d think that’d be fairly fucking obvious, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t work the other way around, does it? Might want to actually tackling how rape culture works if you want to stop this, yes? Tackle cause rather than symptoms, perhaps? Mmm? Fuckbuggerbastardshitfuckjesusfuckchristbastard.

Also, man goes apeshit after passing woman suggests he may have a small penis, because it’s horrible and unfair when strangers make sexually-suggestive comments about you out of nowhere. Not that women would understand, because we are living in a climate of state-sponsored misandry. The nature of this war is a road safety campaign implying that speeding is a shitty way of proving how masculine you are. There’s now an entire site dedicated to it, including choice comments from online discussions. Some of it’s potentially-interesting; the rest is just a bunch of whining courtesy of people who can’t tell the difference between mocking idiotic drivers who put people in danger by speeding, and randomly harassing passing women because you feel entitled to do so.