(03-02-2015, 03:44 PM)Presidio Wrote: [...]Well, looks like this particular cat's out of the bag, so I guess I'll discuss it now anyways.
Men fundamentally lack the real world experience to know what it's like to be a woman in a culture of restrictive gender norms AND heteronormativity. [...]
So, yeah, this is something I notice quite a bit as I grow older. Where I take the perspective of "what would my character logically and rationally conclude at this particularly moment in time, given the sum total of their experiences, knowledge, and emotional state?", a number of people transparently use their characters as vehicles for sexual wish-fulfillment. That on its own is not necessarily bad, but it does tend to get irritating when those same people defend some really sexist depictions (being vague here because, well, it's a lot of crap) purely because they happen to find those things appealing to their libido, while completely disregarding how the characters in question would actually do things. It's bad writing and it's bad RP, and it's really annoying running into it for the hundred thousandth time.
I should note here that I have absolutely no problem with depictions of sex and sexuality per se. It's when they completely break character (or even the laws of physics, in the case of boob and bikini armor) that I start to get irritated. It is, in fact, possible to depict sex-positive women in a fashion that is neither offensive nor tasteless. The problem is that it requires perspective and empathy, two things that are in very short supply these days, indeed. Most men, unfortunately, cannot even fathom how many social pressures women (and gay men, and transexuals, and the non-binary gendered like myself) suffer on a daily basis, just because it's so invisible to them. It makes trying to talk about these things an exercise in frustration more often than not.
(I should also note that it is possible to go too far in the other direction. One of the weirder ones I run into is people who go "ugh!" at the sight of a boob slider. It's weird. Like, being able to shrink or enlarge those puppies is somehow a bad thing? Does body diversity not exist in your universe? Do you not even want to acknowledge that variable breast size is a thing? I once read someone say they didn't like seeing them in trailers because it (paraphrased) 'shows how hard they're gunning for a particular target audience', but that doesn't even make any sense because, seriously, every single person who makes a female character is going to want a boob slider. (ESPECIALLY me, because I need to go as close to flat as I possibly can, dammit!))
*ahem*
I will note that there is one thing that really does make this a sort of bridge too far: men, in general, simply have stronger libidos than women. There are exceptions (and a lot of them) on both sides of the isle, but the supply-demand imbalance should be completely obvious to anyone who is a living adult on planet Earth. Thanks to some rather backwards societal pressures and concerns about STDs (and pregnancy to a lesser extent, but birth control availability is pretty good nowadays), those sex-positive women who are okay with this situation can never truly make up for the large number of women who, well, are not. Because of this rather unfortunate fact of life, it is to be assumed that there will always be at least a bit of a skew towards appealing to male libidos at the expense of women.
But that doesn't mean I have to accept bad writing, or bad character design, or any of that. It just means I say 'oh, okay' and move on with my life when I run into it, and maybe complain about it later when I'm feeling ornery. Which, admittedly, is a lot of the time. Sorry. Runs in the family.
tl;dr: Yeah, it happens, and it sucks when it does (which is really, REALLY often), because it shows those guys just can't put themselves in the shoes of their own characters and instead just want to get off. Which is fine, just, you know, it's just bad writing. And we get to call 'em out for it.
(03-02-2015, 04:05 PM)sforze Wrote:I should note that by saying 'people first' I don't mean throwing gender out entirely - I mean, naturally, treating gender as something that informs how a character behaves and sees the world, rather than basing their entire character based off of sex-based stereotypes. That's all.
(I should also note that most of these people probably don't even realize that gender exists on a spectrum, rather than a binary, which complicates the argument somewhat.)
