Yes, labels need to go. But what also need to go are:
Your embarrassment to get involved in women’s fashion.
Your need to state that you’re “a very straight very manly man who is about as rough and tumble as guys get.”
If you exercised your “secret passion,” what’s the worst that could happen?
Love your post.
I see two areas where lazy thinking creeps in (sort of highlighted by your less lazy answer.) Both ways ignore the real differences in brain structure between the sexes. There are also real hormonal differences (and we can see differences in thinking even within the same sex based on hormone levels.) There’s broad statistical distributions with significant overlap. It’s lazy thinking to assume that a society without external bias will show no difference in choices made by the sexes when there are real underlying differences. It’s also lazy to assume away that distribution by just lumping people into a binary like/dislike.
With STEM, I think the theory is that we would like more people in STEM so we can beat China/drive down wages/fly to Mars/whatever.
Lots of guys in STEM. At this point, a good chunk of the guys with an interest and aptitude for it are already in it.
Not a lot of ladies in STEM. Maybe there is a way to bring them in and swell the ranks.
The answer is a lack of character on my part that I am keenly aware of. I have certain areas in life where I have not been as strong as I should have been, as I get older I have been better able to deal with them.
I know there are a lot of “manly” interests that I have no interest in simply because I have not been exposed to them. I’m at that point in my life where exposing myself to new things just for the sake of it doesn’t appeal to me, so it is unlikely I’ll ever have an interest in them.
But the same can be said for some stereotypical “womanly” activities. It’s not that I have an aversion to these things. It’s just that I have not experienced them to know whether I really like them. Because I’m not “girly girl”, sometimes it is just easier to say “ugh, I wouldn’t like that!” rather than actually experiencing it first-hand before forming a judgment. (To wit, I had my first pedicure two weeks ago. It wasn’t bad at all! It was actually kind of fun. Maybe I’ll even do it again.)
I think if more girls were taught how to fix cars and be mechanically-inclined from an early age, more girls would grow up to be grease monkeys. Especially if they see other girls and women being grease monkeys. If more boys were taught how to cook and be more domestic, more boys would grow up to be house husbands. Especially if this wasn’t considered “weird”. I don’t think socialization explains everything, but I do think it explains a lot
How do you know it’s not efficient? If 85% of the potential buyers of your video game are males and you know that having female heroes wearing chainmail bikinis will raise the sales by 20% in this group, it doesn’t matter if those chainmail bikinis turn off almost all female potential buyers. You’re still going to sell more by having female heroes wearing skimpy clothes in your ads.
I’m not convinced that the marketing departments of major companies don’t know what they’re doing.
But the potential buyers of the video game are 50% males. That’s the basic fail.
A bird in the hand. Selling potential isn’t easy, chain mail bikinis are a sure thing.
But it’s also lazy to assume that any difference in distribution between the sexes are the result of brain structure/hormonal differences. Certainly, those play a role in some cases, but the dynamic between culture and biology is complex and it’d be a mistake to believe that our particular cultural moment is somehow expressing an innate biological truth. Especially seeing how obvious it is that the “innate biological truths” that were so obvious to other generations (girls just don’t want to play sports; men are not interested in being involved fathers to small children) were, in fact, cultural.
Yes. In yesteryear it was that mostly young men played video games (although even then there were some women around.) Now:
About half of gamers are women
Nearly half of all women are gamers
Women now make up almost half of gamers
But:
Forbes’ Top Video Game list for 2015
At an admittedly brief glance, I see nothing but a plethora of white males - not one single female protagonist.
And then they wonder why they can’t get more women into things! You are still appealing to the same old tired demographic that you always have been.
Oh, yeah, just for shits and giggles: the Assassin’s Creed controversy:
Ubisoft Cut Plans for Female Assassins
Half the population of the planet would have cost them too much. Cry me a fucking river. I stopped buying the AC games after this and I was a huge fan. Of course, their next game ended up sucking anyway! 
Okay, but…
If half of all gamers are women…doesn’t that mean the misogynist chainmaille bikini clad nonsense is working anyway? That the industry doesn’t actually need to make ads or games “inclusive” or marketed “to women” because women *are *playing games as they are?
(I’ve seen what happens when Lego decided to start creating and marketing to girls. It’s pretty disgusting, actually.)
Are we? Or are we playing despite not having any options, and not having anything directed to us, because it’s fun and we don’t want to be left out.
I don’t want special marketing for us. I don’t want the girls in movies to be mothers, or chasing after knitting, or some shit. I just want the opportunity, like in Dragon Age, or in Mass Effect, to make a female character and do exactly the same shit the guys do, only with boobs.
How is that a wrong wish? Why are we only making things for white males?
Anyway, my point was, and I got distracted from it, is that companies claim they can’t make any stuff with women because they don’t have any women fans. I beg to differ.
I’m a lousy representative of gamers but convincing female characters (playable) seem pretty few and far between. They’re either Power Girl/bikini babe fantasy nonsense, or very evidently reskinned male characters that move, behave and speak just like one of the guys.
In games where you can choose to play a female character, have there been any where that character was… (I can’t think of any adjectives that aren’t double-meaning, so bear with me) fully rounded, shaped, modeled as a woman? Or is it that the very genre means cartoonish, Katie Sackhoff spittin’, swearin’, punchin’ types when it’s not a shrieking damsel?
I think some of what’s going on right now is that women are playing more casual games. One school of thought says that this suggests women would also enjoy playing the more elaborate, expensive, challenging games, if only they were made to feel welcome (and, honestly, it’s not so much about marketing “toward” women as is it not marketing against them). The other side says women inherently don’t like those kind of titles because all the reasons Title IX would never work.
I have a problem with neither Dragon Age nor Mass Effect. Mass Effect in particular I think did FemShep well, despite having to be persuaded to make a trailer with FemShep. But the point is, they did. In Dragon Age, sometimes I think the romances for the female characters are arguably better than the males. (The females tend to be either walking petri dishes [Isabella] or completely unfeminine [Cassandra]).
I’m not a video gamer so I don’t have many details, so I’ll ask this: Are there video games designed for women? If so, do men play those games?
Not those Stooges you lunkhead! :whack!:
Generally speaking not large-market wide release ones.
I’m certain they exist, but they’re not from the big makers, don’t get a lot of press (outside specialty industry publications), and aren’t a big presence.
There are a ton of games that are essentially androgynous in nature - most of which are basically puzzle-style games (like Candy Crush or Bejeweled or whatever) or world-building games (the Civilization series or Minecraft for example), which are distinctly different than the avatar-style games. With puzzle games and world-building games, things like female playable characters are not a consideration. On average, with a few exceptions, these are not generally what you might consider marquee titles. They’re not the big-bucks, big-impact franchises for which people shell out $60 for a new title. A lot of them are free-to-play and are monetized via in-game purchaseables.
Virtually all of the marquee titles (that people will shell out $60 bucks every few months to purchase a new expansion/iteration) are shooters or adventure or role-playing games and have playable characters. They, generally speaking, are very focused indeed on their core demographic and quite often exclusive about it. There’s a lot of . . . let’s be charitable and call it “debate” about whether women just don’t enjoy/want to play those kinds of games or if the way the games are presented/marketed/structured is essentially either driving female players away or preventing them from starting playing at all.**
My personal pet theory about it is that a large part of the reason those games don’t bother altering their modus operandi to avoid actively marketing against female players is a combination of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality - which is fine as far as it goes, but I have to wonder about a business model that’s excluding a huge purchaser market - and the fact that if game companies do make it a point to avoid actively marketing against female players, there is a very, very vocal segment of the male gamer community that bursts into spontaneous flames (often with histrionic threats and doomsday predictions) because their precious male space might be invaded. In fact, the mere mention that perhaps trying to avoid demeaning half the potential audience for a game is not such a wise notion almost always causes a vicious and impassioned backlash.
No evidence of which I am aware actually presents data that the authors of this backlash actually alter their spending or gaming patterns. They just spontaneously combust on gaming forums on the topic. I am also unaware of any data that’s been gathered about how large (or, as I suspect might be the case, small) the percentage of gamers who react this way is. They do, however, clearly exist and are very, very vocal about their unhappiness over any even token gesture of inclusiveness.
** Of note is that a lot of the marquee games feature cooperative play (either required or available, but cooperative play tends to be a big draw for games in general), often with random strangers on the internet. Being a female player engaged in cooperative play with strangers is a lot less entertaining if the game has been marketed/structured/designed to be unwelcoming or outright exclusive to women. There are at least some of the marquee games where it is not actually possible to complete the game without cooperative play (World of Warcraft, for example, or the current Final Fantasy MMPORG iteration). In recent years, the bigger roleplaying style games have been making at least some efforts to move away from the unwelcoming and/or exclusive to women framework in part because they have been moving more and more deeply into cooperative-play models. I don’t know about the shooters and adventure games - they’re less my style than the roleplaying ones
I view nerdiness itself as a particularly masculine trait, especially obsessive nerdiness over some niche hobby that is basically a waste of time when it comes to practical living. I don’t know if I’d extend it all the way to the extreme male theory of autism, but I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Especially since when I meet women who are hardcore fans of these things it seems more likely they’ll end up being a tomboy (which is fine with me). The lack of women in these spheres is even more apparent when you combine it with cut throat competition, whether it’s chess, gambling/poker, competitive video games, sports, trivia, board games, games like darts or pool or bowling or whatever. Women in these spaces are bitterly fought over because they’re so rare.
How many teenage girls do you know who spent all their free time coding in their room? Just sitting down and coding for hours on end, no social life, no other real interests, just code, code, code the entire weekend? Guys do things like that way more often. It can be downright pathological.
As for video games, this is one of the more indepth studies I’ve seen. It confirms the general stereotypes. In particular, male gamers spend way more money ($333 vs. $87 per year).
A lot of guys are skeptical of the “50% of gamers are women” claim. I remember seeing those sorts of reports back in 2004 or 2005 and thinking it was BS. But then I realized women don’t play the same type of games I do, and the ones that do are mum about it on team speak for obvious reasons. It’s interesting the games you do find a lot of women in though. I met more women in a year of L4D and Diablo 3 than I did in 10 years of Counter-Strike and StarCraft. Coop vs. competitive.
Another difference psychologically is that men engage in much riskier behavior, whether it’s venture capitalists or drag racing or hard drinking or casual unprotected sex. I think this is one of the cases where evo-psych makes sense. It doesn’t pay women, evolutionarily game theory wise, to be risky. Most women end up reproducing and there’s not a way to dramatically increase the number of offspring, so it pays to play it safe and just stay alive. It plays right into a male’s strategy though. Big risk, huge rewards.
Look at what advanced degrees women choose to pursue. Much more go into social sciences and biology than physics. A lot of people crap on the social sciences, but it’s not like biology is some pleb degree that women have to settle for. It’s hard. So what else is there besides preference? Am I supposed to think physics departments are discouraging women from joining? They want to maintain the boring sausage fest, but biology departments are so progressive? It’s stereotype threat all the way down?
And I think this is tied to the reason why women are so irritated to be left out: big games are moving from being a niche market to being a major part of contemporary culture. It’s this whole segment of shared experience. Not, obviously, that everyone plays the big games, but everyone doesn’t watch TV or go on the internet or see blockbuster movies or read bestsellers, either. But most everyone does one or two of those, and they’ve become a major part of what ties us together. Only one is, well, not quite closed to women, but close. And that does matter–there’s a whole sphere of social interaction and shared experience only open to one gender. To me, at least, that seems like something that encourages men and women treating each other like aliens.