For these hot-blooded women, men are nothing more than a means to satisfy their desires!

If you hang around any tabletop gaming sites, you might have seen these banner ads for what looks like a decade-too-late Pokemon ripoff pop up occasionally:

In which I take a break from moving house to watch the goddamn GoBots movie

This was originally going to be about La Belle et la Bete, but I can’t find it right now, so I’ll watch GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords instead.

Masculinity in Alien vs Predator: Requiem

It was going to be “Masculinity and Femininity”, but the women don’t do anything. Spoilers follow, assuming you care what happens and didn’t already work out the entire plot half way through the trailer.

I haven’t seen “I Am Legend” and I feel left out.

So here is a post about Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) instead. It’s not actually that good, but it suits our purposes because there’s a bit of gender role-reversal going on compared to other horror movies.

This isn’t very interesting, but if you skip to the end there’s some amusingly shit voice acting

This isn’t very constructive, I just feel the need to get it out of my system before I do something useful.

The wonderful gender-inclusive world of Games Workshop: Short Update

In addition to all the things I articulated poorly in Cerise, I picked up the latest GW publication and they’re now referring to female painters as “paintresses”. Even though they’ve been happily called, uh, “painters” up until now. And “paintress” is two letters longer, so the ‘Oh, but if we say “his or her” it ups the word count’ excuse doesn’t work. Oddly enough, there are no women writing for them.

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:

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!

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 #11

In the amazing year 6000, the standard female military uniform will include a cleavage window and no pants.

I still haven’t done any work yet.