Superheroes & representation (split from questions thread)

[Tahuti]

Actually, I've thought of a reason why Captain America shouldn't be African-American: Captain America embodies the American spirit, and nothing is so American as immigration.

The problem is that there are multiple American spirits competing for what is truly America. There is also a traditional, Deep South/Midwest America that is hardly an immigrant environment.

 

[Traitorfish]

As if all those Germans and Scots-Irish sprouted, ready-made, from the very soil of the Mississippi Valley? These people may not think of themselves as immigrants, but that's their heritage as much any Irish Bostonian, Puerto Rican New Yorker or Polish Chicagoan.

 

[Tahuti]

Would you consider the Eastern Establishment, the de-facto American aristocracy of which members lived before the foundation of the USA to be immigrants?

The Modern English nation did not exist before Jutes and Anglosaxons migrated to Britain and admixtered with the Celts (who were admittedly not many). Would you consider the English to be a nation of immigrants?

 

[useless]

The Modern English nation did not exist before Jutes and Anglosaxons migrated to Britain and admixtered with the Celts (who were admittedly not many). Would you consider the English to be a nation of immigrants?

The history of England and British is pretty much of immigration.

 

[Traitorfish]

Would you consider the Eastern Establishment, the de-facto American aristocracy of which members lived before the foundation of the USA to be immigrants?

Yes. And so did they: they were Englishmen living in America, "Americans" only in the same sense that a person might be a Northumbrian or a Midlander. The idea of American as a category separate and opposed from Englishmen didn't emerge until the War of Independence.

The Modern English nation did not exist before Jutes and Anglosaxons migrated to Britain and admixtered with the Celts (who were admittedly not many). Would you consider the English to be a nation of immigrants?

Jutes, Angles and Saxons constitute a small fraction of the collective ancestry of the English, so that's not really a valid analogy.

 

[Angst]

I realized something the other day. I make consumerist choices that preserve the cis straight white status quo. :/ The color and sex of the protagonists of artefacts matter when I make purchasing decisions. I want to be able to identify with the protagonist.

Being bi, the sexuality doesn't matter as much.

This does however support my view that it's simply impossible for white straight men to properly situate into a nonmale nonwhite body and struggle with the issues of identification that other identities do.

At least I have a tendency to play as Middle Eastern esque males in MMOs. It matters quite a bit when you're from Denmark. At least I like to think so. :/

I think she has her own idealogy (radical feminism)

Even if we assume her position is misguided or dumb, it's nowhere near radical. You just slap the monicker into your terminology to upgrade your rhethoric.

EDIT: I'm sorry I phrased it that way. I just get pricky whenever people throw out monickers like "radical feminism" and "politically correct", the first monicker most often used wrong (and negatively phrased, which is inappropriate) and the second monicker being nonsensual. Fwiw I don't think she's a fraud. I just think she's a really poor thinker and that she should quit her videos. Her presence distorts the problem seeing that she's both probably not very smart and somehow popularly representative of her position. It'd be much better for some proper thinkers to get some limelight, but I guess most people don't care about them because they aren't saying dumb stuff. It's much easier to get enraged at someone who says something wrong than someone explaining an uncomfortable truth, and it's also much easier to deprove over and over and over again - something people like doing online.

For I seriously don't think anyone in their right mind would contend that there is a problem of representation of women in the media. Games are not exclusive in this regard.

 

[cardgame]

You think negativity surrounding 'radical feminism' is inappropriate?

ha

 

[Kyriakos]

(taking my comment out cause it could have been better phrased ).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

There was a bit of social commentary in the latest Star Trek movie...

Where?

 

[useless]

You think negativity surrounding 'radical feminism' is inappropriate?

ha

In this case explain how Sarkeesian is a "radical feminist" as opposed to just a "feminist" (which i believe certain groups/people would classify as radical regardless).

 

[salty mud]

I still haven't been furnished with a reason why people feel the need to be "represented" in films and why it is such a travesty that others don't get as much screen time.

I wonder if they have this issue in Bollywood. I wonder if people cry themselves to sleep every night because white people aren't sufficiently represented. For some reason, I think not. This "everyone needs to be represented" disease is a white only illness.

 

[Kyriakos]

I still haven't been furnished with a reason why people feel the need to be "represented" in films and why it is such a travesty that others don't get as much screen time.

I wonder if they have this issue in Bollywood. I wonder if people cry themselves to sleep every night because white people aren't sufficiently represented. For some reason, I think not. This "everyone needs to be represented" disease is a white only illness.

A result of the world of art post ww2 having become a lot more infested with people with virtually no talent or knowledge of art. Many art periodicals are in reality political editions by now. Which can hardly kill artistic merit faster.

 

[brennan]

The point was that whatever the reason for the focus on S/W/M, it was there, and narrative and now, commercially, it's lazy and/or not good.

Again with the tense mixing. It was lazy. Right now it isn't lazy , it's the legacy current writers are left with. Which they are amending and some of which amendment annoys people by being in-your-face and overtly politically correct.

So far as I know, no one is making that conflation.

Traitorfish is saying so quite explicitly:

a lot of it is just sheer geek territorialism. But there's also a healthy dose of racism. A lot of people are racist, and a lot of people are sexist, and a lot of people are homophobic. The right-wing politically correct brigade would rather we didn't say that, because being called "racist" or "sexist" is embarrassing. (Being racist or sexist is fine, just don't get caught.) That's why accusations of racism as the nuclear option, as somebody put it, not because of liberal witch-hunters, but precisely because we need to believe that bigots are a fringe minority, rather than a massive, institutionally-entrenched segment of the population, because that the latter would simply be too embarrassing to countenance. Bigotry is depressingly mundane, is the thing, and a lot of that is coming through in the reactions to these changes.

(Emphasis mine)

TF just appears to want to see bigotry. Call me old fashioned but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Sure. And it's perfectly reasonable for them to come back with "not good enough."

I agree. But when their critique descends into accusations of bigotry. They can get stuffed.

Affirming they happen...?

Not even in question, surely.

Denying they happen...?

No. Perhaps you should read it again - you appear to cotton on later:

From what I've gathered reading about this, we're not just talking about the normal background level of abuse.

Reading what? The posts from people like Sarkeesian on the subject? How have you evaluated 'normal' levels of abuse?

Oh! Now we're talking about her claiming that? Well ... sure, that's wrong.

Terriffic we agree.

OTOH, given the apparent demographics of the internet, it should be expected a feminist critical of games would get an extra large helping of abuse. Then there's the whole MRA thing, which may be the poster-child for a group that's over-represented online.

Assuming the consequent. You expect that if you assume that feminists are correct about being singled out. You have not proven that singling out.

And again, someone is mentioning MRAs when they have little or nothing to do with this.

Though I guess I'm just so naive that I think threats of rape and death are beyond the normal.

Thunderf00t was mentioned earlier - he had issues with a muslim online who posted quite threatening videos. I know other people who post in the 'YouTube atheist' community who are male and report death threats from creationists and similar. I've had people over the years on this site saying they're going to come and shoot me or that I deserve to die for various reasons.

Again: a magazine that criticised One Direction received a flood of death threats. When some guy fouled one of the little brats at a charity football game he recieved death threats.

The guy who wrote the game Fez famously received absolutely vile abuse when he was blogging about plabnned changes in Fez 2.

In fact lots of game designers report receiving death threats (note also the sexual element 'sell your body to a convicted rapist/necrophiliac' ). Hell, even the people writing that article about game designers receiving death threats say that they, the online journalists, receive death threats.

It's not in question that these are extreme in terms of real world experience. But they are remarkably common online and so it seems fairly obvious that the claim made by various feminists that they are being singled out seems obviously bogus.

So ... you're not arguing that there isn't an abnormal amount of abuse, just denying the crazy conspiracy theory?

Crazy conspiracy theory that gets these people on Newsnight to spread their warped view of reality. And no, i'm denying both that and that the abuse is abnormal.

 

[salty mud]

TF just appears to want to see bigotry.

Pretty much this. This entire thread, and by extension a lot of the PC brigade, is caused by trying to find a problem where there isn't one.

 

[Kyriakos]

Pretty much this. This entire thread, and by extension a lot of the PC brigade, is caused by trying to find a problem where there isn't one.

"A cage went out to seek a bird".

 

[salty mud]

For I seriously don't think anyone in their right mind would contend that there is a problem of representation of women in the media. Games are not exclusive in this regard.

Oh no, those poor objectified women.

Spoiler :

Please explain why this male objectification is perfectly fine and not mentioned, but female objectification is completely immoral, evil and worse than Hitler. And this is all from ONE game series. Just earlier today I watched an advert with a woman fawning over a hunky fireman who inspects her fire alarm. Perfectly fine. Now if a man was admiring a sexy, slender woman? Worse than Satan.

"A cage went out to seek a bird".

That's a good phrase, I like it.

 

[brennan]

Link to video.

 

[Traitorfish]

You think negativity surrounding 'radical feminism' is inappropriate?

ha

He's saying that Sarkeesian is not a "radical feminism", in either the formal sense of belonging to the self-identified "Radical" strain of feminism, nor in the informal sense of being particularly radical. Her feminism is pretty standard third-wave progressive feminism. "Radical", here, means "bad" or "unreasonable": it's being used purely rhetorically.

TF just appears to want to see bigotry. Call me old fashioned but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

So give me one good reason why a person might object to a black Captain American and not be considered racist. I asked, but nobody seems to have replied. And call me Ishmael, but if somebody exhibits behaviour which cannot be explained by any other cause than their holding racist attitudes, I'm gonna say that they have exhausted the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Kyriakos]

So give me one good reason why a person might object to a black Captain American and not be considered racist. I asked, but nobody seems to have replied. And call me Ishmael, but if somebody exhibits behaviour which cannot be explained by any other cause than their holding racist attitudes, I'm gonna say that they have exhausted the benefit of the doubt.

You are shortsighted:

Any fictional character has some elements which define him, regardless of the 'artistic' level of the work he appears in. They make it so that if you stray far away from the normal depiction of that character it is natural to be noted that some seemingly random change was introduced. But in art you don't change a person's traits so as to be PC or other such issues. If Thor is suddently black (as in an american movie) one has to ask if that is anything other than a gimmick, and how it benefits the artwork itself. Sure, a main hero in some comic (inspired by a nordic mythology) is now black, but does this serve any purpose which allows it to be something other than an ill-thought through gimmick?

One could have superman be a wheelchair bound person, who maybe flies along with his wheelchair. Would this really help people who are confined to wheechairs?

In general it is rare in art to introduce social/political elements and do it in a way which is poignant. Paul Klee once made a painting which is argued to be directed at a concurrent nazi ban on some kinds of art. But:
a) Paul Klee was one of the most talented painters of the 20th century, and he wouldn't be crude about it,
b) the painting itself is about an idea, not any specific human or race. The idea of not falling in line to an ominous and cruel authority.

There is an ocean of difference between such an example and a basic 'lol let's have random homosexual people in all movies cause we are liberal 21st centurions' etc

 

[brennan]

So give me one good reason why a person might object to a black Captain American and not be considered racist.

Quite simply: He's not black. Or are you suggesting a new Captain America?

Would you support a white Othello?