They’re also blissfully unaware that the vast majority of resources for male victims were set up by feminists. They get real quiet when you point that out.

If you only bring up male victims to derail conversations about female victims, you don’t give a flying fuck about male victims. You’re just using them.

That’s so true! It’s almost as if different situations call for different reactions. It’s almost as if we have to apply subtle nuances to our understanding rather than applying broad, sweeping generalizations across the board.

I don’t think it has to be so cut-and-dry. We can acknowledge that this problem has many roots - toxic masculinity, misogyny, and guns are all culpable in this case. Acknowledging more than one root cause does not diminish the role of any one specific cause. This is a complex problem and trying to get at simple…

Yeah, but regardless of wht parents do in the home, kids have other influences. The media is a big part of how we are socialized into gender roles that can be limiting. As I said, expecting more of these companies that supply our media (and yes, costumes are media) is not a bad thing.

I’m pretty sure the letter says she’ll be taking her business elsewhere. She just elected to tell them why. If customers don’t tell companies how and why they lost a customer’s business, how are they supposed to improve?

I think it’s more about holding companies to higher standards. If we say to ourselves that gender shouldn’t matter, especially for children, then it’s okay to critique companies who aren’t in line with those ideals.

That would make it so much easier to find age-appropriate costumes, too. Like if you have a three year old, you’re not going to want to have to sift through a bunch of scary costumes to find one that’s appropriate. Instead, you go straight for the cute, lighthearted ones and no little kids get traumatized.

You’re completely ignoring the racial and religious bias at play here. Ahmed has brown skin and he is a Muslim. He’s likely dealt with bias all his life. Doing something that could set adults off would be something a young Muslim child of color would avoid - because he doesn’t know how it could turn out. He could have…

All that Arken said was that, on this issue, Dawkins and Maher side with Palin. You just sided with her, too.

I’m partial to “I’d call you a cunt, but you lack depth and warmth.”

I can see how her career might make her more sensitive to the ways women are oppressed, but I don’t think that’s necessarily why she reacted the way she did. I’d be mad, too, if someone contacted me at work and said “I know it’s not okay to say this but I’m going to say it anyway” and I just work in food service. You…

If he didn’t know it was wrong, he wouldn’t have led with “I know this is probably horrendously politically incorrect.”

Women didn’t “come in” and demand change. We’ve been gaming as long as there have been games.

That’s exactly what you’re missing. Gender shouldn’t matter. But obviously it does to these men that harass women so severely that they don’t feel comfortable disclosing their gender at all. And yet you seem to have a problem with women explaining that this is not okay.

I’m not going to sit here and debate feminist theory with you. My point is that women are saying that this is a problem and you refuse to listen, even though they’re the ones that are living it. That’s been my point all along and, if you read carefully, you’ll notice that I also said I doubted that you’d be able to…

Here’s the problem. On a large scale, what you seem to be implying is that the reaction to material audiences are finding in bad taste is somehow worse than the material in the first place. It’s not. Remember when I said that these things exist as part of a culture from which no one is exempt? That culture actively…

Rape is a common thing in video games. Generally as a backstory for female characters that need motivation to be strong. Jack’s story is not unique. She was gang raped (not on-screen - she talks about it with the Commander after) and this spurred her to become her badass self, apparently. Male characters rarely need…

But I think you just inadvertently proved a point: You can like something AND still acknowledge that it has problems. That’s what you’re seeing with gamers who are women (myself included). I can recognize that, for example, Jack from Mass Effect has a very standard and almost exploitative backstory (she’s tough…

Those passages come before the one I provided, which goes further back into the history of the tradition. Which you would know if you had read your own source.