Tag Archives: aesthetically displeasing

This is what conservatives want for our children

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As usual, the world that “pro-family” conservatives want to build for our children is markedly disturbing:

Israeli-SchoolchildrenFor the sake of conversation, we’ll assume that a) this picture is real, and b) it depicts what it’s being touted as depicting, which is an armed Israeli schoolteacher. From what I’m given to understand, this scenario is common in Israel, so the picture isn’t unbelievable by any means.

If you’re a decent human being, this picture should depress you. The necessity of carrying a rifle around while teaching children is tragic. The “necessity” is also arguable (guns have never proven effective as a means of defense), but we’ll leave that aside for now, because even to the extent that it is necessary, it’s a deplorable and regrettable situation. It represents a failure on the part of the state of Israel to conduct its foreign affairs in a manner that doesn’t endanger its own children.

Conservatives, of course, will never see it that way, because they view Israel as being surrounded by a horde of Muslim barbarians. They view violence against Israel by those Muslim “barbarians” as inevitable. I, by contrast, view Israel as a bully and an imperialistic wannabe that regularly abuses and starves the people whose land it stole, and then acts victimized when those people retaliate.

If that teacher is herself a decent human being, she is hopefully unhappy that she must carry a rifle around in the course of doing her job, a job that is not supposed to be in any way militarized.

What’s disturbing about the American conservatives who are passing this photograph around in response to the Newtown massacre is that it excites them. They want a world in which we must tote rifles around while attempting to teach our children. This is the world they want our children to live in.

That’s fucked up. It’s fucked up that they so zealously attempt to defend the “innocence” of children against the knowledge that people have breasts, penises, and vaginas, but want just as zealously to teach their children that people maim and murder each other for the shittiest reasons, and that Real Amuricans are always prepared to maim and murder as well.

(h/t Roy Edroso)

Gearbox Software: We’re not sexist, but women suck at games and also graphic rape is badass

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This story’s over a month old, so for that and other reasons I’m not going to go on a rant about it. The fuckupery here should be self-evident. The story, as briefly as possible, is this:

[T]he Mechromancer skill tree that helps video game newcomers is formally called Best Friends Forever. But Borderlands 2 lead designer John Hemingway referred to it numerous times as “girlfriend mode”.

Borderlands 2, just so we’re on the same page, is developed by Gearbox Software. Gearbox Software, just so we’re on the same page, is also responsible for this:

Duke Nukem Forever box coverSo I’m seeing a trend here. John Hemingway was not actually personally involved in the production of Duke Nukem Forever, but the fact remains that Gearbox seems to foster a disturbing tolerance of misogyny.

But as with white people in matters of race, you can’t really be sexist if you just say you’re not:

“There is no universe where Hemingway is a sexist,” Pitchford added.

Yes, yes there is: this universe. But don’t worry, some of his best friends are black women:

“All the women at Gearbox would beat his and anyone else’s ass.”

Well said (re: Mass Effect 3)

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I’ve deliberately avoided wading into the waters about the ending of Mass Effect 3, if only because I’m pretty sure nobody cares about my opinion on it. Suffice it to say I fall on the “displeased” side of that spectrum. Anyway, Ethan Gach sez:

To my mind, to disparagingly call those consumers who are petitioning BioWare for a new ending “entitled” is not only extreme, but misguided. It fundamentally misunderstands the business relationship that gaming companies have actively sought to foster with their customers. Companies like EA expect consumers to spend extra money for content that is arguably part of the “core” gameplay experience. Why shouldn’t consumers seek to shape the kinds of DLC that are released in response? For while some are arguing that frustrated consumers are asking BioWare to sacrifice its creative vision and authorial integrity, the truth is that most video games already did that a long time ago, and of their own accord.

Old white guy doesn’t approve of your sex life, news at 11

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CNN has run yet another entry in the “people are having enjoyable sex, better sound the death knell of civilization” genre of op-ed. I was actually surprised that this one wasn’t written by a woman – don’t get me wrong, I don’t think women are any likelier than men to feel this way. But the media loves running op-eds by prudish women, often women who identify as feminist solely so they can concern troll about how maybe all this sexual freedom is just downright bad for women, who propagate the notion that women don’t actually enjoy sex.

William Bennett

Pictured: The lovechild of Andy Griffith and William Shatner

But no, this one is written by an old white man, namely William Bennett. Now, I thought we as a society had moved beyond caring about what old white men think about our sex lives, but then, I suppose that hope was quashed when the GOP and the media decided that the opinions of a bunch of old white male virgins should have any impact on legislation concerning women’s reproductive healthcare.

The op-ed as a whole is a dizzying and deeply confused mixture of sex-negative buzzwords, beginning with the well-worn condemnation of “hookup culture” (and the accompanying finger-wagging at college-age women for letting men take advantage of them like that, don’t you know you’re supposed to demand a suburban house and two kids and a life of housewifery in exchange for sex?) and quickly spiraling into a Kubrickian wormhole of flashing colors and rants about BDSM until suddenly you’re in a hotel room and you’re not entirely sure how you got from there to here.

The op-ed seems to have been sparked by something he read Maureen Dowd (of course) say about that really awful new book that everyone with a taste for tacky literature is reading, 50 Shades of Grey.

Dowd cites the remarkable success of the trilogy among Generation X women — the contemporaries, allies and beneficiaries of the modern feminist movement. And yet, the narrative flies in the face of women’s progress.

This is one of the red flags that tells you a person isn’t actually interested in ushering in a post-patriarchal era of liberation from gender oppression, but just using superficial feminist language to concern troll about what women are doing with all this freedom we’re so magnanimously giving them. There’s no distinction in such a person’s mind between “woman” and “feminist.” Suddenly all women, especially all young women, are held accountable for the goals and direction of feminism.

It’s akin to getting angry at a completely random black person that there’s a BET but no WET. Because obviously every single black person had a hand in the creation of BET and endorses it.

For example, a contract that the girl signs with the man stipulates that “the Dominant may flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason, which he is not obliged to provide.”

Oh, so it’s BDSM that he’s hyperventilating so much about. Funny, I thought we were talking about “hookup culture” as a whole. At any rate, while I don’t partake in BDSM myself, the kinky-ass agreement described in this paragraph appears to be entirely consensual, so I’m having trouble getting worked up over it.

If this is progress for women, what would regression look like?

I’m glad you asked! Regression, to answer your question, would look like the man being able to “flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason” without the woman’s prior consent. Are we clear now? Good.

Bruni goes on to grapple with Dunham’s loveless sex scenes and wonders whether today’s onslaught of pornography and easy sex has desensitized men to the point where they view women, to recall the words of an earlier day, only as objects.

Pornography? Maybe. Not a can of worms I intend to open right now. Easy sex? Hardly. Women have faced systematic objectification for the entirety of human civilization. They still face it today. The existence of casual sex neither contributes to nor reduces this problem.

But really all this is especially rich coming from someone who (as we’ll see later on in the column, though I assure you it won’t come as a surprise) cleaves to the patriarchal view of sex as something that women have to hold onto for their future husband. That is objectification. Believing that casual sex necessarily debases women is objectification. Believing that their sexual purity is so central to their value that to have sex with a woman outside of marriage is to sully her is objectification, and that is the position you are advancing, Mr. Bennett.

A person’s sexuality (if they have one) is part of their personhood. It’s only part, and it’s not an essential part – unless they choose to make it so – and certainly to value a woman’s sexual desirability or availability over anything else about her is objectification. But to merely acknowledge and address and interact with that sexuality, if she so desires that you do, without denying the rest of her personhood, is not objectification. And it’s very irritating to see the way conservative misogynists have latched onto the term to advance their incredibly objectifying, patriarchal vision of family values while pretending that they’re the real feminists.

Even the act of sex itself is boring to some men unless it is ratcheted up in some strange, deviant fashion — all at the expense of the thoroughly humiliated and debased woman.

Wait, what just happened? Are we now proceeding from the assumption that all of hookup culture consists of BDSM sex? BDSM is probably the best-known kink out there, but it’s still a niche. Bennett’s point seems to have gone off the rails.

As Bruni asked: Is this what feminism fought for? In the 1970s we were told to respect women, treat them as more than sexual objects and treat their humanity the same as ours. Is any of this still true today?

Yes, it is true, in that I can have casual sex with a woman without regarding her as a “slut” or in any way “damaged.” Which is more than you can say, Mr. Bennett.

Take note that this disheartening and dismal tableau of modern liberated sex comes not from pro-family conservatives, who have been condemning this turn in our culture for some time, but from two stars of the liberal commentariat.

Oh good lord, no. No. Just no. Maureen Dowd and Frank Bruni are not “stars of the liberal commentariat.” Sure, they’re on the New York Times‘s payroll, but so is Ross Douthat. Dowd is one of those faux-liberal, faux-feminist concern trolls I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. And Bruni is just… well, he’s just kind of an inoffensive guy who’s well below theTimes’s purported quality. But you can say that about 2/3 of their editorial board these days. Liberal stars? Neither of them qualify, sorry.

The end of Bennett’s column is the real howler, though:

Is there no alternative to the “Red Room of Pain” and Dunham’s demoralizing sexual encounters?

Absolutely! Consensual, mutually enjoyable sexual encounters with whomever you want, as frequently or rarely as you want, with as few or as many partners as you want!

Yes, there is.

Oh good, I’m glad we agree.

In an enfoldment of immeasurable cares in a real and true love, there is immeasurable intimacy too, including a richly satisfying sexual intimacy that finds no equal or parallel in a callous and casual hookup culture.

It is worth pointing out that this desideratum — deep sexual satisfaction — is found most often, as has been empirically verified over and over again, in what is often called, derisively, traditional marriage.

Or… not.

Well, there you have it, folks: Your two options are marital sex or kinky BDSM sex that’s only enjoyable for the man. There is no other way to have sex.

1) Boobs 2) ??? 3) Death

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I get that it’s totally cliche and well-understood to point out that teen slasher movies, of the Friday the 13th and Halloween variety, seem to have a disturbing fascination with punishing young women for having sex. But there’s a side to this trend that I don’t think has been discussed quite as much, and is frankly even more disturbing to me.

While it’s annoying on a certain level that you can watch Nancy’s friend having sex in A Nightmare on Elm Street and literally just know that she’s about to die, there’s also a certain endearing quality to the way your old-school teen slasher movies tried to preach Sunday School morality even as they gleefully ripped people to pieces. It’s not forgivable or, needless to say, persuasive, but it’s amusing in much the same way that your cranky old grandfather is amusing.

But the dull predictability of sexy female deaths in B-movies up to the present day has long since worn out its welcome. And the side to this trend that I was referring to, the one that bothers me far more than it amuses me (because as to the latter, it doesn’t), is that modern B-movies seem determined to convince us that not only will psychopathic serial killers target young women who are ostensibly sluts, but that the very forces of nature themselves conspire to punish women for such crimes as necking, bathing, and not being entirely dressed. Observe:

boobs=death

 

So basically, even piranhas, crocodiles, and, uh, ghosts target women who commit the crime of not keeping their breasts under wraps at all times. I wouldn’t be inferring any kind of social commentary from this trend if it weren’t so depressingly predictable. And the fact that the women so often die while naked sure seems to suggest that the death and gore are an integral part of the porn. I think our culture gets off not only on seeing boobs, but on punishing women for letting them.

As an antidote, I recommend Teeth, a movie that punishes men for being rapists and douchebags rather than women for having bodies.

Emphasis on Twit #8: Special Ron Paul Newsletter Edition

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Via Slacktivist, some valiant soul is performing a public service and continually tweeting quotes from Ron Paul’s infamous newsletters, like a pulsing beacon of ignorance and bigotry radiating into space. Or something.

They swing wildly between racism:

typical Republican anti-woman attitudes:

and sheer kookiness:

Some of them are a little harder to describe…

Uhhhhhhh….

Michael Bay is a hack, and other unsurprising news

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What ultimately makes a hack a hack, rather than an artist, is that his or her work serves to reinforce existing norms, rather than to say anything truly thought-provoking or subversive. Turn off your brain, question nothing, thanks for your ten dollars.

And the disturbing part is that, as long as you’re reinforcing those norms, you can expose children to the most vile kind of shit, and parents won’t complain. I made this post solely because these two reviews of Transformers 3 dovetailed in that direction:

Walter Chaw’s review at Film Freak Central:

Perhaps it’s time to have this conversation at some level of our culture that going into a movie deaf and blind to messages like “women are things” and “Arabs are evil” and “African-Americans are scairt” is exactly what Bay and his co-producer Steven Spielberg (for shame, man) want you to do, hope that you do, because imagine what would happen if anyone with any kind of infant moral compass were to notice that they’ve taken their 9-year-old to a movie this ugly and hateful.

And Caroline Heldman’s review on her blog:

Transformers 3 is pitched as a “family movie” and the film studio carefully disguises it as such with misleading movie trailers showing a story about kid’s toys. (Okay, I still have an Optimus Prime robot…) Young kids were abundant at both screenings I attended, taking in the images with little ability to filter the message.

I’m not one to engage in “think of the children!” rhetoric, but that’s exactly it – the conservative moralists who are constantly shouting, “Think of the children!” are probably the least likely to have a problem with exposing children to the rampant sexism, racism, and jingoism on display in Bay’s Transformers movies. Because what those moralists fear far more is raising children who think critically about such things. Because that’s not what good capitalist drones do. So remember, kids: Turn off your brain, question nothing, and give Michael Bay your ten dollars.

Sarah Palin wants you to check out her phat pipe

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Yes, there is a documentary about Sarah Palin coming out this month. If you didn’t already know that, go ahead and get that particular shock out of your system before moving on to the next one. Namely, the poster:

That’s right. They chose a lovely picture of… the Alaskan Oil Pipeline to promote the Sarah Palin movie. Me, I would have included a Hummer with Sarah Palin leaning out of the passenger side window and shooting a moose, but maybe that would be a little too obvious.

You’re trying to explain, but Rand Paul is just sticking his fingers in his ears and humming

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Senator Rand Paul

Note to Rand Paul: Tax cuts don't work, and neither does that hair cut.

Washington Monthly ran an article a few days ago entitled “Explaining ‘Penny Wise, Pound Foolish’ to Rand Paul.” And indeed that sounds like a difficult proposition, but not because Rand Paul is dumb, but because he’s not listening.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), labeled “America’s Dumbest Senator” by some, was flabbergasted. “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money,” he said. “The idea or notion that spending money in Washington somehow is saving money really flies past most of the taxpayers.”

Yes, that is some incredibly stupid stuff, but let’s pause to consider here: is it really, genuinely possible for Rand Paul to believe this nonsense? Does the senator not have a single insurance policy, investment, even a single savings account? Of course he does. Senator Paul, an ophthalmologist, ran a private practice at some point in his life, so presumably he’s familiar with the principle of spending money to make money. After all, you have to buy a bunch of ophthalmology equipment in order to run a practice, and you may even have to (gasp!) go into debt to do so.

If you were to couch the principle of spending money now to save even more money in the future in business terms, in other words, Rand Paul would agree unquestionably. And yet he’ll stand there and say astoundingly stupid things like, “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money.”

I believe that these kinds of statements come naturally to Paul, and I believe that he really believes them on some level, which does make him profoundly stupid. But I don’t believe he’s stupid because he’s stupid. I believe he’s stupid because he’s a self-interested liar.

Rand Paul doesn’t want to spend billions of dollars to prevent seniors from starving, and the reasons he doesn’t want to do that are far too unpleasant and inhuman for him to actually articulate. That’s all “fiscal responsibility” has ever been for conservatives, after all – a veneer to mask the fact that they’d rather see old people starving in the streets than let a single tax dollar go to some unwashed prole.

Why yes, we do live in a culture where rape is more acceptable than consensual sex

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Duke Nukem Forever box coverThat’s right, it’s another Duke Nukem Forever post. But I’m not really interested in discussing the content of the game itself, except briefly. Yes, it’s horrifying. That much is well established. Instead, I’d rather put the game in a certain context – a context that doesn’t justify the game or its content by any means, but does point to some disturbing trends in our culture.

Anna at A Random String of Bits covers does a good job covering the nature of the content of the game, and at one point she quotes a particularly enlightening Destructoid review:

…at times, the game’s attempts to be funny come off as downright horrific. One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth’s women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they’re getting raped. In fact, they are. That’s the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies… By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

In itself none of this is incredibly surprising – though certainly it’s very disturbing. The game walks the player through the kind of scenery described above, but the game does not allow you to attempt to rescue the women, nor does it seem to understand that you might want to. (Well, you can kill them to put them out of their misery.) What kind of hero does that make Duke? Well, as Destructoid says, certainly not a likable one.

DNF takes the “damsel in distress” trope to an extreme, and not in some clever, deconstructionist way so much as just a stomach-churning way. The women in the game are literally objects with no agency whatsoever. Say what you will about Alyx Vance, but Valve at least acknowledges that women are people.

And you know something – just as an aside? I’m fucking sick of seeing this kind of shit put out time and time again with a bunch of boilerplate proclamations about how it’s “manly” and a “celebration of masculinity.” That’s the line we’re fed over and over when a game or movie comes out; the people behind them act like masculinity doesn’t get celebrated enough in our culture. It does (more than enough, by far), and I’m tired of being told that the way to celebrate my penis is by pretending that it’s what makes me worthy of regard as a human.

But anyway, in the blog post linked above, Anna said something that helped me put this vile shit in context:

I would suggest that, if we’re going to have a rating system at all, the ESRB’s rating of M is dismissive of the seriousness of rape; this game should absolutely be AO.

Well yes, obviously. But it’s not, and I agree that giving Duke an M rating despite featuring on-screen graphic rape is incredibly dismissive of the seriousness of rape. But what disturbs me even more is the kind of games that do get an AO rating in the US. The first one that jumped to my mind was Fahrenheit, which we in the US know as Indigo Prophecy. Some content was cut from Indigo Prophecy in order to avoid its initial AO rating, and that content was… a single consensual sex scene. (Well, also the shower scene shows Carla’s nipples in the non-US version.) The ESRB’s reasoning was that the sex scene was interactive, but I don’t care how interactive it is, because it doesn’t feature murdering women who are in the process of being raped. In my mind that makes it a fair bit less “adults only” than DNF.

Similar censorship occurred in the case of The Witcher. Its US release also had a lot of content cut out (all of which was later reinstated in a downloadable patch, fortunately), because there’s a hell of a lot of sex in that game. The Witcher has received criticism from some for its protagonist’s philandering ways, the way he seemingly treats women as conquests, and the way the game itself portrays those women (admittedly, there does seem to be a correlation between a woman’s breast size in the game and how likely she is to be horny for Geralt). But again, however you feel about the portrayal of sex in The Witcher, it’s all consensual. And yet that gets censored and DNF gets a pass.

Are you starting to notice a trend here? It’s almost like our culture reacts more strongly to depictions of consensual sex than it does to depictions of rape! And yes, it does, because while rape scenes may be portraying violence, consensual sex scenes are portraying women with subjectivity and agency, making sexual choices for themselves, and as we all know that’s way worse. Let’s take a peek outside of the world of video games for a final example:

Emily Browning was left fuming after her sex scene with Jon Hamm in Sucker Punch was axed from the upcoming action movie in a bid to please U.S. censors. [...]

She tells Nylon magazine, “I had a very tame and mild love scene with Jon Hamm. It was like heavy breathing and making out. It was hardly a sex scene… I think that it’s great for this young girl to actually take control of her own sexuality. Well, the MPAA doesn’t like that. They don’t think a girl should ever be in control of her own sexuality because they’re from the Stone Age. I don’t know what the f**k is going on and I will openly criticize it, happily. So essentially, they got Zack to edit the scene and make it look less like she’s into it. And Zack said he edited it down to the point where it looked like he was taking advantage of her. That’s the only way he could get a PG-13 (rating) and he said, ‘I don’t want to send that message.’ So they cut the scene!”

I respect Zack Snyder for that. And that’s pretty much all I respect Zack Snyder for. But yes, just to reiterate, consensual sex = R, while rape = PG-13. What a lovely country we live in.