But is she still . . . stylin‘?

8dayswithoutme going out with my real-life haremettes. yes, I have real-life haremettes.

8dayswithoutme what can I say? I’m pimpin

8dayswithoutme seriously, I could be getting so much ass here. just saying.

8dayswithoutme can I have the 2011 award for pimpingest aninerdloserblogger?

Yes. Yes, you may.

8dayswithoutme I should probably stop referring to classmates as “hey, harem-boy!” though

bakatanuki You need one on each side to balance out the tsun and the dere

giapet Then they wouldn’t be side ponytails, they’d be pigtails.

moritheil Are you proposing that @giapet unleash twintails?

bakatanuki Exactly. Are you ready for the greatness?

moritheil If @giapet goes as far as twintails, will she go as far as twin drills?

giapet Not sure I could mold my hair into drills =p

moritheil I’m not sure anyone can, actually At least, without model glue.

omonomono they’re called hair extensions.

giapet I’ve seen FEATHER extensions, but drills?… o_o

omonomono they iron the hell out of the extensions first, then attach drills

moritheil So if @giapet does this she’ll be on the cutting edge of cosplay?

omonomono you make a silly point

moritheil It’s a silly cause. I’m not going to say it’ll cure cancer.

giapet How did this get even sillier than where it started?

First Carr writes, “I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name.”  While this objection is perhaps understandable, he then goes on to say people have “no real business – beyond a basic prurient interest” in knowing what is being done and said in their name.

Are we talking about democracies, still? Are these governments of the people, for the people, and by the people? This article just mentioned the biggest reason aside from mere curiosity that people might be interested, and then deliberately overlooked it in favor of invective.

Understand that public interest is not entirely abstract. For example, does the name Henry Kissinger ring any bells? Some people are still pretty furious about the deals he cut, and would have liked to know something about them before the corpses started piling up.  We trust our officials to do things for us, but that trust doesn’t have to be blind trust.

Anya_fennec: He does have a point about how information will be more closed among those who use it though

So what should Assange do? What should a man do, who has information about, say, a government killing civilians?  Should he do nothing and let things go, in the hopes that maybe those who perpetrate it are going to be less tight-lipped about it in the future?

I agree that Wikileaks supporters are no saints.  (I’m not surprised by it, nor indignant, as Carr seems to be.)  I agree that the choices are far from optimal, and I’m hardly interested in defending every leak, but to argue against the very idea of openness on the grounds that people will anger the big bad elites and they will stop being nice is completely counter to the point of democracy.

If Carr doesn’t care about things like whether or not his government is providing training and material support to dictators who butcher peasant families (as allegedly happened with Kissinger), then it’s his right to ignore this stuff. But it’s not his right to sign away the interests of every other voter.  We shouldn’t assume that everyone who might care is acting out of “prurient interest” when we’ve already brought up more responsible motivations.

But I must admit that there are times when the feminist paradigm is questionably applied.   Go Make Me a Sandwich is a blog that strives to critique gaming products from the feminist perspective, which is surely a sorely needed bit of feedback.  Some of its more recent assertions, however, have left me scratching my head.

In “League of Legends: So MUCH character design fail” the author voices her frustration with anatomically improbable character designs.  In doing so she makes a number of assertions that, upon closer examination, do not quite hold up.

“I might not be so annoyed if there were at least a good variety of designs. Only, there’s really not. Female LoL champions tend to come in one flavor: breastacular.”

Certainly there are a great many LoL characters designed with emphasis on their unnatural assets.

The other thing that really stands out to me when I look at these character designs is how incredibly unoriginal they are. Soraka is just a boobular draenai with a horn, Nidalee is a rip-off of Pathfinder’s iconic sorceress Seoni, Leona looks like female warriors from just about every kMMO ever, and Evelynn is a total Starfire knockoff. She even has red hair!

I have to say that the lack of originality is another mark against the character designs.

Given that League of Legends is meant to have immediately recognizable characters that are in essence stand-ins for more familiar, iconic characters (what TVTropes calls “Expy” characters), I personally can’t blame designers for going the generic route.  LoL is not about world immersion and questing; it is about nihilistic, largely mindless team violence dressed up as sport.  This particular critique, anyhow, falls in the realm of personal aesthetics and not in the realm of feminism.

Do pay attention, however, to this line:

Soraka is just a boobular draenai with a horn…

It’s a throwaway remark, but in her preceding article on League of Legends, the author writes:

Look at how far her spine is arched, and how far back the arm farthest from the “camera” is. I’m not sure that’s even possible without double-jointed shoulders. Anyway, we were feeling silly and decided to see if real humans could replicate the impossible spine arch of this pose

If we’ve realized that Soraka is not human (which indeed her backstory takes special pains to note, and which is emphasized by the giant horn on her head) then why would we assume that her joints are subject to human limitations?  Heck, if she’s based off of dranei, her knees don’t bend the normal way either!  I can understand objections to ridiculous attire and behavior in females, as they may train the mind to see such things as reasonable, and we may have a vested interest in preventing that, but surely we are not in danger of training people to think that their own elbows (which are, after all, identical for both genders) bend differently?

I can pronounce with some authority that if this character were sitting for a traditional portrait, there’s no effing way she’d be able to hold that pose long enough for her portrait to be painted.

Yes, well, she’s a) not human, and b) clearly in the middle of doing things. I see the magic lines as implying an action shot that happens to be rendered like a painting, like an anime still, not an attempt at an authentic painting that someone could plausibly be posed for.

with Orianna we’re getting ROBOT UPSKIRT which is about fifteen different kinds of stupid.

I mean, give me a fucking break

Maybe . . . this is just a thought, but maybe the robot isn’t best read strictly along the paradigm of “let us examine everything for sex appeal, and look no further”?  I mean, if we allow for some degree of verisimilitude, and the rest of the female outfits are largely “stripperiffic” (which is a valid concern), perhaps the artists were under the impression that this is what passes for normal clothing in the LoL universe.  In that case, wouldn’t a female robot designed in that setting emulate how females in that setting dress?  That’s not stupid in and of itself; it’s just consistent with a world of impractically skimpy clothing.

 And best of all, Kayle’s alternate design is also completely badass.

THIS. OH MY GOD THIS.

Seeing Kayle next to all of these other wannabes makes me so sad, because if characters like Kayle were the norm in gaming, you’d definitely see a lot more women joining the hobby.

Yes, brilliant . . . until we realize that Kayle looks like a man.  Is this an inadvertent slip?  In another article, the author writes about the game Dark Souls in a way that makes it clear it is deliberate:

I feel like I literally cannot express how much I love these designs and want this game to be a good game. I mean, holy shit, people! The women are wearing exactly the same outfits as the men. THE SAME. When does that happen? Never. Or almost never. I’m over the moon.

Your ultimate desire for women to attain power, equality, and recognition is to have them dress up like men?  How very Freudian, or more to the point, how very image-focused.*  Let me ask the question: is it more feminist to propose a world in which women must ape men in order to be recognized as fellow humans, or to propose a world in which a woman can kick ass even in a frilly pink skirt, if she so chooses?  Why is it that we are okay with the assertion that men must respect women regardless of their appearance (i.e. dressing slutty is no excuse for disrespect), and simultaneously hung up on the appearance of female characters (so their garb being too revealing is invariably a horrible failing on the part of designers)?

The author’s choice of ultimate examples underscores something very important she has forgotten: LoL characters must be immediately identifiable.  When that character is one inch tall on a screen, how will the gamer viewing it immediately identify class and gender?  Answer: heavy use of exaggerated stereotypes (mages get staffs and flowing robes, tanks like Kayle and Leona get swords and heavy armor, and so forth.  Note that amongst the men, very few wear heavy armor either, though there are far more close combat characters – their designs tend towards gladiatorial loincloths and heart protectors, the better to show off their muscles.)  In fact, that’s probably why there are such improbably large breasts: they have to be that large in order to register at all at the scale at which the game is played.

Is the author even aware of these practical considerations?

My only exposure to LoL is having watched my brother play a match one time, so I can’t say I’m too conversant with the game.

So, no.

Don’t get me wrong – there are ridiculous character designs in LoL.  Evelynn is a magical assassin stripper in high heels, for example.  (One of her voice-overs is, “It’s difficult to do this in heels.”)  But some of these criticisms just don’t stick, and I can only guess it’s due to the author’s lack of familiarity with the context.

*Now, if I were to critique League of Legends, I would focus on the actions and roles of the characters, and what those imply, as those tend to be rather more important.  Reviewing the female characters listed:

Soraka – magical healer
Sona – magical musician (really Hatsune Miku, but I assume they couldn’t swing the licensing.)
Katarina – mercenary assassin
Nidalee – huntress/trapper
Sivir – “huntress” but really a support unit
Akali – magic-using ninja
Morgana – mage (fallen angel)
Miss Fortune – hired gun
Kayle – knight in armor
Leona – knight in armor
LeBlanc – mage
Cassopeia – exotic, scantily dressed snake-woman mage
Evelynn – assassin/mage
Janna – mage
Caitlyn – sheriff with a rifle
Ashe – bow hunter (also, barbarian queen)
Vayne – hunter (crossbow)
Orianna – robo-girl
Irelia – soldier
Lux – mage
Karma – mage
Annie – mage
Trist – gunner
Poppy – knight in armor

Do we see a pattern here?  Of 24 women, only three are intended to be capable of going toe-to-toe with an enemy and fighting them in the traditional, culturally approved, “valiant” route.  An astounding eleven of them – nearly half – are mages of one stripe or another, and most that are not use guns or crossbows – weapons that do not rely on the user’s physical strength.  I would argue that this unnecessarily reinforces the stereotype, already present in fantasy, that women are always “weaker” and must rely more on cunning to win.  This, I think, is LoL’s greatest sin against feminism: in creating a world where many of the characters were not human, leaving them free to default to gender equality, they still opted to create characters that suggested females were physically disadvantaged compared to males.

Whew, that was long.  Now, I wonder if there are any disabled veterans’ advocacy sites complaining that Urgot’s image is unflattering to those with prosthetics.

anya_fennec: orange forgot about me ~_~ my life has no meaning

Ya’ll know me still the same ol’ trap
But I been low key
Hated on by most otaku
With no cheese, no deals and no G’s, no wheels and all crap
No aliens, no time travelers and no elves
Mad at me cause
I can finally afford to provide my nendroids with shelves
Got a dakimakura and it’s all full of holes
To add to the wall full of scrolls
Hangin up in the office in back of my house like gold
But ya’ll think I’m gonna let my blog freeze
Ho Please!
You better bow down on both knees!
Who you think leeches when you up seeds?
Who you think came after the OGs?
Icystorm, Lolikit, Metanorn and R-A-N-D-O-M C?
(And a group that said muthafuck the blog scene)
Gave you a tape full of chiptunes
To bump when you scroll through songs on Zune?
And when your RSS subs drop too soon
Who’s the fennec that they told you to go see?
Ya’ll better listen up closely
All you otaku that said that I turned gay
All obsessed with the ho yay
Ya’ll are the reason Fennec ain’t been getting no sleep!
So fuck ya’ll all of ya’ll
If ya’ll don’t like me blow me
Ya’ll are gonna keep fuckin around with me
And turn me back to the old me

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got a template of phrenic
But nothin comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of hypocrites
And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Fennec

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got a template of phrenic
But nothin comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish
And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Fennec

Art by glaceon

-With apologies to Dr. Dre and Eminem

@moritheil I’m just saying you can tell yourself you’re wearing it “ironically” all you want. It’ll still look douche-y.

I think this response is worth examining.  The meaning of art generally hinges on the interpretation of the viewer.  However, if you’re trying to assess why someone wore a specific clothing article, it’s their intent that really matters.  On the one hand, a literal wearing of the shirt means that the man is indeed a fetishist for Japanese women. It’s not hard to see why some women might consider that problematic.  (Not all women, of course – women being perfectly capable of being only interested in sex.)

On the other hand, many other rationales are possible.  One could wear it to an anime club and make the statement, “I’m such a Japanophile, I want to marry into a Japanese family so that my descendants can be Japanese!”  A man could be playing with the idea that fetishism is so ingrained in society that it could be thought acceptable to wear these shirts.  Yet another twist occurs if the shirt is worn by a Japanese man – that entirely does away with the “exotic fetishist” angle, doesn’t it?  There are more possibilities; I suppose a revealing question to ask people would be, “Do you think that there would be more ironic wearers of that shirt or literal wearers?”

Aoki is right in that many Asian women would infer a male wearer’s message to be: “I think things that offend you – and by extension, your feelings – are a great source of material for jokes.”  But is that the first and best conclusion?  Doesn’t that assume a certain amount of forethought and insight on the man’s part being exerted just to offer a snub?  It’s by no means certain that a man has worn it specifically because he understands that a Japanese woman in the West has to put up with unwanted advances from fetishists, after all.

Looking for calculated insults seems to be a particularly masochistic form of sabotage, especially if you aren’t the intended audience. Perhaps seeking faults is justifiable behavior on a date, but there are surely many other contexts to run into someone wearing this shirt.  I think that in manga/anime fan circles, there are a lot of people who would genuinely not understand beforehand any anxiety such a shirt would cause women around them, merely thinking it hilarious or cool, and that this is a very different phenomenon from deliberately wearing a shirt to discomfit others and being an asshole.

Aoki continued:

@moritheil @owen_s @kiriska @jake_w @edsizemore i have yet to hear a single JP gal say that she’s charmed when she sees that on a guy.

Jake_W added:

@debaoki And for good reason, I think. That shirt reeks of creepiness and desperation, even when not worn seriously. 

Certainly anyone can refuse to date anyone for any reason.  I’m not saying that the shirt has to be seen as a plus, universally, and I don’t know precisely how it feels to a Japanese woman in America to see a man wearing this shirt.  But here it seems there is a rush to jump to the worst conclusion.  I can agree there is a lack of social skills if that shirt is worn on a date, and that is not usually a plus – but being unskilled is not being malevolent. I don’t see that there is something inherently creepy or desperate about wearing a shirt with an absurd message in a general setting – it’s funny because it’s an absurd invocation of stereotypes, and only if you are willing to deny them any decency do you assume they literally mean they don’t care about women as people and only care about specific body types.

Turning it around – does a software engineer get very upset if his date wears an “I <3 nerds” shirt?  Should he?  Does a black woman get upset if her date wears a shirt indicating a preference for black females?  Should she*?  Would an atheist be bothered by her date wearing a shirt proclaiming that he can’t stand to date religious women and only wants to date atheists?  In all of these examples, wearing the shirt strikes me as a little weird, but a far cry from desperate or creepy.  (Incidentally, this is the sort of shirt I think could be ironically worn on a date: “My marxist-feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard.”  On a literal reading it’s threatening, but it’s really absurd, and serves as a good litmus test for humor.)

[*A major issue in America. Black women have written numerous articles accusing black men of being more interested in other women, and decrying the situation.]

All this analysis is taking things rather seriously, but no more seriously than the detractors already take it: Aoki herself labels it a deal-breaker on behalf of all Japanese women, and starrycloud9 believes the shirt is responsible for rape.  I think these assessments are missing the most salient point - more time is wasted on dating due to effective fakery than due to excessive and clumsy honesty.  If a man really does think that women getting offended is funny, and that is the reason he wears it to a date, we aren’t doing the women he dates any favors by telling him to not wear the shirt.

This article was originally written on December 8, 2010.  Since then, new variants have been created.  Maybe girls could wear a variation to show that they have a sense of humor about such things – “now seeking a gaijin boytoy”?  Would that resemble real life too much?

Of course, one hears about women wearing the original shirt, as just a shirt.

In a new study, the only group participants found as untrustworthy as nonbelievers were rapists.

One of the main issues in studies of behavior and stereotype is the desire to avoid telegraphing to the subject what he or she is “supposed” to do. But in explicitly selecting “religious” people from the USA via an internet survey company, Gervais – a foreigner – may have been unconsciously prompting them to act more in accordance with common stereotypes of religious Americans.

Furthermore, the way in which the questions were asked is definitely not as it was explained on Jezebel.  Jezebel would have the reader believe that the test subjects, for no particular reason, homed in on atheism to explain immoral or selfish behavior.  But that isn’t exactly what happened; read the study setup and you may find that the participants were, well, set up:

Across subjects, we manipulated the target groups to which the man might belong by asking participants whether they thought it more probable that the man was a teacher or a teacher and (a) a Christian, (b) a Muslim, (c) a rapist, and (d) an atheist. In this way, we evaluated the degree to which people find an untrustworthy description to be representative of atheists, relative to a majority religious ingroup (Christians), a religious outgroup (Muslims), and an unambiguously distrusted group (rapists).

Let us presume that the average person, knowing both positive and negative examples of Christians, is willing to consider being religious a positive, negative, or neutral matter.  Being asked how “strongly religious” they are by the very terms of the study, Christians, who consider being Christian at least neutral, are primed to consider being atheist not a neutral matter, but a negative matter: it clashes with their avowed identity, and they feel an obligation to act out that identity.  (Studies have shown that reminding people of cultural, ethnic, or other stereotypes produces a similar reversion to type, even if that stereotype is seen as negative.)

Further, we already have one positive piece of information – the character is a teacher, generally a fairly selfless role in society.  There must be some negative element to counterbalance this given positive, or the result is essentially, “this man is a jerk for no explainable reason.”  It’s sort of a game of “which of these is not like the other?”  Being a rapist is categorically not like any of the others.  Being an atheist is not like being a religious believer, and so also not like the others (or at least, more dissimilar than being a Christian and being a Muslim.)  The pressure on the respondent is to pick something to account for the behavior.  It’s at least equally valid to look at this study and say that the respondents are surprisingly free of bias against Muslims as it is to say that they are astonishingly biased against atheists.

As an aside, I question whether rapists truly constitute a proper “unambiguously distrusted group:” while we all consciously say we don’t accept rape and abhor it, as a population this is simply not true.  Feminist studies assert that men often have mental blind spots that cause them to effectively downplay the likelihood or severity of it.  According to the more cynical of these sociological studies, this is what enables men to bond with other men and work together on matters that do not touch their personal histories.  In other words, it’s more that men are wired to mute their outrage over rape than that America morally equates atheism with violent crime.  This is a hidden cognitive bias that, if present but not accounted for, could easily skew interpretation of the results.

When deciding whether it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller, or that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist, most participants incorrectly choose the latter option—that is, they commit the conjunction fallacy— because they heuristically judge that the description sounds representative of a feminist, even though logic dictates this option is necessarily less probable. People only commit the conjunction fallacy when the target’s description (single, outspoken, and liberal) is deemed representative of the target’s potential group membership (feminist).

Well, certainly.  According to models of how our minds make sense of the world, we wish to tell tales that account for the given facts.  If making Linda a feminist makes the whole story more plausible and easier to remember, then it is unsurprising that we are willing to believe it.  If “atheist” implies “not dedicated to a fixed moral code” (falsely, in many cases, but widely believed) then it may be invoked to make a story of opportunistic actions easier to rationalize and believe.  Also, the conjunction fallacy is easy to commit where there is no penalty for guessing wrong; I would be interested to see an economic study where the participants are asked if they are willing to bet $20 on the bank teller being a feminist with no supporting evidence, or similarly on the selfish man being an atheist with no supporting evidence.

A far better study design would be to take reactions from thousands of people, and only mine the data later for the relevant reactions.  This avoids the issue of prompting people to behave like stereotypical fundamentalist Christians.  It would also be best to even out the response options so that rapist and atheist are not two options that might be perceived as too strongly dissimilar to the other options, or rather, to eliminate options which are too similar.  If testing distrust, why use “rapist” and not “used car salesman” or “telemarketer”?  Finer gradations would more precisely pinpoint the level of bias the public has against atheists without necessarily throwing everything to the apparent level of violent crime.

I really wish we could see some data on the effects of international reactions to Japanese culture.  For example, China and Korea, long customers to Japanese anime and manga, have repeatedly exhorted their own artists to match or exceed Japanese artists.  How much money went into that?  Was it successful in drawing off some of the demand?  Can we say this sort of thing actually affected the Japanese industry significantly?  In short, was it money well spent?

When we discuss the fact that sales in mens’ suits fell since 1997, does that mean there are fewer jobs, or just fewer white-collar jobs?  If the latter, what parallels can we draw with the US, where after 9/11 a lot of white collar jobs were replaced with blue collar jobs?  How well does that correlate with spending money?

Consumers were once engaged with pop culture most actively through the act of consumption — buying a CD, book, or video game — but not only have they ceased buying goods, they are increasingly not even participating passively when media is virtually free, like in the case of TV.

I wonder: is this a long-term strategic flaw?  Is it unique to the culture, or is it something that happens every time there is an economic depression and consumers have been taught to equate consumption with participation?

Anyone with a computer may publicly speculate on anime and society, but for doing research and raising all these important questions, I salute Neojaponisme.

General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh… women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh… I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
Captain Lionel Mandrake: No.
General Jack D. Ripper: But I… I do deny them my essence.

I’m not sure if Dr. Strangelove is a better fit for this demented reasoning, or Astarotte no Omocha, for the “we have ulterior motives for obtaining your genetic material” angle, but this surely is not something we expect to see in normal reality.

At the NY Post, comment logs are full of the usual incendiary postings. Some feel sympathy for the man; some for the woman. I feel bad for the kids.

When is a buildup too long?