Women who play male characters (in games)

[Zrak]

I've been avoiding talking about objectification because I'm not academically familiar with the precise meaning and use of the concept Wheres WarKitty, ThunderCat, or maybe Lena when you need 'em?

Like most terms that are used across multiple disciplines and discourses, "objectification" isn't particularly consistent beyond the vague idea of treating a person like an object; even the meaning of "object" differs in different discourses. Discourses derived from the analytic traditional generally use "object" in reference to the idea of treating a person like a thing, as in "inanimate object." Discourses derived from the continental philosophy/critical theory tradition tend to see "object" in a more linguistic sense, as in "direct object," in which it is opposed to "subject." Generally, the two overlap a great deal in practical purposes, as both center around ideas like instrumentality, denial of agency, denial of subjectivity, &c. They differ in how they present the mechanisms, causes, and implications of this treatment. To speak broadly, I think the actual treatment of people is more emphasized in the analytic tradition, while my own background in critical theory instead tends to focus on the apparatuses which normalize that treatment, though both aspects are still important to both discourses.
In most of my academic experience, the term is used to refer to treatment at the societal level, rather than at an individual level; I rarely see formal academic work that discusses how a man objectifies a woman, but rather how women are objectified at a societal level. Obviously these things aren't really mutually exclusive, since society is made up of individuals and all, but I've still usually seen the term used in a more macroscopic sense. For instance, though theories of self-objectification must inherently act on the level of the individual (since they discuss how an individual might come to objectify him- or herself) they typically refer to the broader social attitudes, practices, and perceptions that the specific individuals who objectify themselves internalize.

[Lamech]

On the brain differences tangent: First thing to understand about the brain. Every thought, every memory, every emotion, every feeling, every belief has some corresponding physical part in the brain. All of it. The thing that makes people say "I am male/female" is physical.

So the fact that their are physical differences between males and females in the brain? Duh. There couldn't not be. It doesn't mean its innate.

[Fates]

For the same reason we tolerate universal Dihydrogen Monoxide addiction, any -vorism, sleeping, or any other fundamental-to-life situation - we can't do a damn thing about it short of (maybe) replacing everyone's brains and bodies that lacks these sorts of primal needs and behavior. It's also something used in all aspects of life - from tool design to invention to innovation to any form of resource acquisition to social networking to acquiring and holding employment (Though the end goal changes each time). Fortunately, people are strongly sympathetic and empathetic, as well as capable of suppressing primal instinct and urges when it's necessary or beneficial for greater goals.

Also, "How do I utilize this to benefit" is the fundamental building blocks of everything everyone does.

Still waiting to see that evidence- thusfar, I can say I find your generalizations quite offensive. As far as I know, there's no real proof that these male mental processes you're describing are genetically rather than culturally based, or indeed universal in men- and I am skeptical of the suggestion that I am some hyper-sexual automaton.

[Poison_Fish]

Word Salad here has reminded me that this is as great as a time as any to mention how brains are not so static in their function. Oh, also that sexuality is far more complex then cell respiration.

[Math_Mage]

*shrug* Even if some degree of objectification is inevitable, there are important issues of degree and response to work on. Ignoring that would be like saying we should embrace Rob Liefield because some degree of visual sexual dimorphism is inevitable in fantasy character art. So I don't think that's the discussion-ender people seem to be treating it as.

[Zrak]

On the brain differences tangent: First thing to understand about the brain. Every thought, every memory, every emotion, every feeling, every belief has some corresponding physical part in the brain. All of it. The thing that makes people say "I am male/female" is physical.

This assumes the acceptance of a very simplistic theory of modularity. I, personally, don't really think such a theory is supported by the available evidence. An increasing breadth and depth of data from traumatic brain injuries and other "experiments in nature" supports both distributive processing and neuroplasticity, or at least calls strict, static modularity into question.

[SiuiS]

For the same reason we tolerate universal Dihydrogen Monoxide addiction

It's not really an addiction is it? Having water is part of being a living thing. You're not addicted to water, you are water and sustain that.

You are not sexual gratification and do not sustain your existence of being sexual gratification by maintaining a certain level of it.

we can't do a damn thing about it

Wrong and tautological. This discussion is about why you dont do something about it. "I don't do anything about it (predicated on there bein. Thigs which can be done) because there's nothing that can be done about it" is contradictory.

short of (maybe) replacing everyone's brains and bodies that lacks these sorts of primal needs and behavior.

Wrong. There is a difference between killing and murder. There is a difference between eating to live and gorging. There is a difference between meeting your physical needs (which are much lower than you seem to think; you will not either and die or suffer lasting harm through lack of sexual congress) and requiring other people to understand that you are a predator and will revel in your predatory behaviors despite any lack of necessity to the contrary.

It's also something used in all aspects of life - from tool design to invention to innovation to any form of resource acquisition to social networking to acquiring and holding employment

How does this affect the design of a hammer, a wrench, a screw driver?
How does this affect the idea of using a dice pool for the abstraction of success without regards to the specifics of targeting?
How does this relate to the engineering and physics which allowed space travel?
How does this relate to maintaining employment in a faceless fashion through networking online?

(Though the end goal changes each time). Fortunately, people are strongly sympathetic and empathetic, as well as capable of suppressing primal instinct and urges when it's necessary or beneficial for greater goals.

Then why are you saying you should ne'er have to suppress those instincts and urges and that I should adapt the entirety of my life and gender, that all of us should, to please YOU?

Also, "How do I utilize this to benefit" is the fundamental building blocks of everything everyone does.

How does online argument benefit you?
How does knowing the difference between glaive and bardiche benefit you?
How does having the exact appellation Scow2 benefit you?

Like most terms that are used across multiple disciplines and discourses, "objectification" isn't particularly consistent beyond the vague idea of treating a person like an object; even the meaning of "object" differs in different discourses. Discourses derived from the analytic traditional generally use "object" in reference to the idea of treating a person like a thing, as in "inanimate object." Discourses derived from the continental philosophy/critical theory tradition tend to see "object" in a more linguistic sense, as in "direct object," in which it is opposed to "subject." Generally, the two overlap a great deal in practical purposes, as both center around ideas like instrumentality, denial of agency, denial of subjectivity, &c. They differ in how they present the mechanisms, causes, and implications of this treatment. To speak broadly, I think the actual treatment of people is more emphasized in the analytic tradition, while my own background in critical theory instead tends to focus on the apparatuses which normalize that treatment, though both aspects are still important to both discourses.
In most of my academic experience, the term is used to refer to treatment at the societal level, rather than at an individual level; I rarely see formal academic work that discusses how a man objectifies a woman, but rather how women are objectified at a societal level. Obviously these things aren't really mutually exclusive, since society is made up of individuals and all, but I've still usually seen the term used in a more macroscopic sense. For instance, though theories of self-objectification must inherently act on the level of the individual (since they discuss how an individual might come to objectify him- or herself) they typically refer to the broader social attitudes, practices, and perceptions that the specific individuals who objectify themselves internalize.

That's a good point. This may also be why it's so hard to make headway when examples require moving down to the individual level. Hmm.

I at have been missing the important points this whole time.

On the brain differences tangent: First thing to understand about the brain. Every thought, every memory, every emotion, every feeling, every belief has some corresponding physical part in the brain. All of it. The thing that makes people say "I am male/female" is physical.

So the fact that their are physical differences between males and females in the brain? Duh. There couldn't not be. It doesn't mean its innate.

That's rather useless application of knowledge, don't you think? Technically two 10"% identical models of a thing. Will have different molecules.

The trends of function as evidenced by scans across a very broad rage of people and time show that female minds are more alike in function to each other than they are to male minds, and male minds are more alike in function to each other than to female minds, such that there is a definable trend and you can make an accurate guess towards gender based on this data.

[Avilan the Grey]

We'Women who have grown up seeing that the Dominant social caste perform an action against the inferior social caste, and decide that they will emulate that action (especially since it is justified with "what? Come on, it's a compliment!" All the time) should not be used as an example of why it's okay. It should be used as an example of socially integrated behaviors.

In other words "Women are better than men and anything they do that isn't perfect is men's fault", "Women's sexuality is all deep connection and love and sensuality". Also "Women has no agency and no control over their own decisions".

Sounds not only wrong, and a bad way to explain away natural behavior, but also very very sexist.

[Lioness]

In other words "Women are better than men and anything they do that isn't perfect is men's fault", "Women's sexuality is all deep connection and love and sensuality". Also "Women has no agency and no control over their own decisions".

Sounds not only wrong, and a bad way to explain away natural behavior, but also very very sexist.

Well that wasn't what I got from that at all. Way to get bitter and assume the worst instead of critiquing why women would emulate problematic patriarchal behaviour.

Of course everything women do wrong isn't men's fault. You're confusing "men" with "dominant social trends".

I'll write you a more detailed response later, but I've gotta go cook. To hold you over: no, that's not what she said.

[Ifni]

The trends of function as evidenced by scans across a very broad rage of people and time show that female minds are more alike in function to each other than they are to male minds, and male minds are more alike in function to each other than to female minds, such that there is a definable trend and you can make an accurate guess towards gender based on this data.

Can you cite references? I'd be interested to see these. You earlier said it was "feminine" vs "masculine" that mattered, and I'd be interested to know how they defined those.

(I'm a woman with very masculine-coded skills and interests, and have been told outright that I can't be as good at math as I am because I'm female, and the solution was for me to deliberately fail math tests to bring reality into accordance with their expectations (I was a child at the time and the person telling me this was my school counsellor). So I am a bit twitchy about "men's and women's brains are fundamentally different", it gets misused a LOT.)

[SiuiS]

In other words "Women are better than men and anything they do that isn't perfect is men's fault", "Women's sexuality is all deep connection and love and sensuality". Also "Women has no agency and no control over their own decisions".

Sounds not only wrong, and a bad way to explain away natural behavior, but also very very sexist.

How the hell did you get any of that from what I said? And show your work, because it looks an awful lot like you're torquing things into an agonized pretzel to fit simply because you assume we are on opposite sides of a line in the sand.

Can you cite references? I'd be interested to see these. You earlier said it was "feminine" vs "masculine" that mattered, and I'd be interested to know how they defined those.

I can try to relocate the last link. The first one was a good while ago.

And they're used prescriptively, I suppose? The idea is that a cissexual woman and a transsexual woman have more in common in the brain than a cissexual man and a transsexual woman. Chasing the keystone, of which comes first and how you define woman and female and gender and whether there is causation or correlation or coincidence etc., quickly leads to seemingly solid leads turning to mist in your hands though. The answer can't come until you're done dissecting the very concept of language. What is a gender, etc., etc., etc.

The findings are sufficient to say that a transsexual woman is a woman, however, because the brain is not unidentical to a woman that the viewer already accepts as a woman. This conversation got hairy last time though, ending with "I can't point t to or explain the difference, but there just is one!" And a lot of hurt feelings, so I don't suppose this is the thread to really go into it on? In fact in going to edit some of that.

(I'm a woman with very masculine-coded skills and interests, and have been told outright that I can't be as good at math as I am because I'm female, and the solution was for me to deliberately fail math tests to bring reality into accordance with their expectations (I was a child at the time and the person telling me this was my school counsellor). So I am a bit twitchy about "men's and women's brains are fundamentally different", it gets misused a LOT.)

I hope you gave them a properly womanly shoryuken to the delicate facial architecture, then. u_u

[BeerMug Paladin]

The point of a logical fallacy is that they make visceral sense until you break out the equation they're based on. Of course people will use them. They occur naturally as a result of needing mental defragmentation. People accrete over time. They often don't compile because of it.

Hmm....

They occur naturally...

I shall begin using logical fallacies immediately.

[SiuiS]

Hmm....

I shall begin using logical fallacies immediately.

Oh hoho! Good catch! XD

[Lorsa]

Because the new Lara Croft model was put forward as being a good example of a well-made female I thought this nice little image could be relevant. I don't think it shows the latest one though.

Spoiler

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I tried to find some good in-game screenshots from the latest game because it seems she looks a tiny bit different depending on the angles and the scenes. In general I think she looks just lilke someone I could run into at school or at the gym or just walking down the street. In some screenshots she looks like she has almost no shoulder muscle though, which are the most important (you need some very specific type of training to get large bulky biceps). On other screenshots you can at least see some trapezius defnition, so that's good. Looking at the history above the actual model is most definitely a step in the right direction and maybe just 10% away from being perfect.

I guess it's still an open question though why she hasn't learned to put on some clothes to avoid being cold. There's certainly enough dead guys around that she could've stolen a jacket from.

(I'm a woman with very masculine-coded skills and interests, and have been told outright that I can't be as good at math as I am because I'm female, and the solution was for me to deliberately fail math tests to bring reality into accordance with their expectations (I was a child at the time and the person telling me this was my school counsellor). So I am a bit twitchy about "men's and women's brains are fundamentally different", it gets misused a LOT.)

That's horrible. Where do you live? Can you report this counsellor in some way?

I've had female professors lecture me about multi-variable analysis and quantum mechanics and whatnot so to claim that just because you're a woman you can't be good at maths is a statement that completely disregards reality.

Funnily enough, I had this course once that had some electronics labs where the supervisor assumed my two female friends automatically needed his help and kind of ignored me, who had much larger problems than they did (because I suck at practical stuff), because he assumed that a guy should be able to handle it. We reached an agreement that this fairly old teacher/professor was a sexist jerk and that we didn't like him.

[SiuiS]

The most recent Lara is sexually defined, but not solely defined by it, no. She has pants, for one. Cargo pants! They happen to snugly hug the parts you're staring at often, but that's actually a consequence of having a good, full range of motion. She's hot, but that's sort of secondary.

Those, though? The other ones? Those are pretty terrible. Do you have any idea how much those gunstraps will chafe? Thank god she has the Appropriate Hip Structure to have a nice butt and also thighs which are wide but separate! Without that thigh gap she'd be lighting a small fire every twenty yard dash.

Guys find that sexy, right? Hot pants and inner thigh callouses?

[BeerMug Paladin]

I find amusement that for how much improved that image is, her actual costume is still very heavily based on the rather silly original costume. I get that's a part of her iconic image and all, but if you're willing to tone down the chest, why not lengthen the shorts a bit as well?

[cobaltstarfire]

Guys find that sexy, right? Hot pants and inner thigh callouses?

I'm sure there are plenty of guys that do, well maybe not the callous part At least she won't get her clothing caught in anything huh?

My first thoughts looking at the side by side of a bunch of Lauras was first *in a silly mental voice* "booooobs" and then "those shorts look really uncomfortable."

[Ifni]

I can try to relocate the last link. The first one was a good while ago.

Thanks! I'd like to see them, so I know what the actual status of the science is - it's hard to argue in ignorance.

And they're used prescriptively, I suppose? The idea is that a cissexual woman and a transsexual woman have more in common in the brain than a cissexual man and a transsexual woman. Chasing the keystone, of which comes first and how you define woman and female and gender and whether there is causation or correlation or coincidence etc., quickly leads to seemingly solid leads turning to mist in your hands though. The answer can't come until you're done dissecting the very concept of language. What is a gender, etc., etc., etc.

The findings are sufficient to say that a transsexual woman is a woman, however, because the brain is not unidentical to a woman that the viewer already accepts as a woman. This conversation got hairy last time though, ending with "I can't point t to or explain the difference, but there just is one!" And a lot of hurt feelings, so I don't suppose this is the thread to really go into it on? In fact in going to edit some of that.

Yeah, I was wondering if "feminine" meant "cis woman", because they are not the same thing, at least for the definitions of "feminine" I'm aware of.

I personally think similarity in brain structure is a pretty bad justification for accepting transsexual people's accounts of themselves. If a subsequent study with a different population shows the converse result (i.e. trans women's brains resemble the average male brain more than the average female brain), would you take that to mean that trans* people are wrong about their own identities? I think the answer should pretty clearly be "no".

Maybe there's a correlation between brain structure and gender identity, and as you say, it's really not clear which way the arrow of causality goes in that case. But in some sense it doesn't matter to me. I would be shocked if there aren't significant outliers - both trans and cis women whose brains are more "male-like" than "female-like". Are you going to tell those people that they're actually men? Or tell men with female-like brains that they're actually women?

I mean, based on the fact that the stimuli my brain has been exposed to for probably the last twenty years are way more typical of men than women (I'm a theoretical physicist and a gamer, with off-scale spatial/visualization abilities, and as noted, was a very obvious math nerd pretty early in childhood), I'd be entirely unsurprised if my brain showed up as "male" in those scans. But I find recasting "women can't be good at math" as "if you're good at math, it's actually because you're a man / you have a male brain, even though you think you're a woman" to be at least as offensive as the original. (Not saying you're doing this. But it's something I have seen people argue from the "male/female brain" starting point.)

I hope you gave them a properly womanly shoryuken to the delicate facial architecture, then. u_u

Spoiler: Trigger:Bullying

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Nope. I was twelve, socialized to be quiet and polite, listening to an authority figure who every anti-bullying resource had told me I was meant to trust. Calling her out wasn't really something I was capable of at that age.

I didn't actually follow her advice, because my conception of myself as "good at math" was actually stronger than my conception of myself as "a girl" (I could imagine being a boy and still myself, I couldn't imagine being bad at math and still myself), but the next couple of years were pretty awful - not directly as a result of that conversation, but because of the bullying that had led to the conversation, and the fact that the people who I'd been told would protect me so clearly thought I deserved whatever I got. (I had supportive parents, which was a lifesaver.)

And I'm pretty sure that a lot of external observers would've identified me as trans* in that period, even though I wasn't. I stopped wearing skirts and started wearing jeans + baggy T-shirts that hid my body shape, cut my hair short, started socializing almost exclusively with guys, and hated female-specific forms of address with a passion. But this wasn't a reflection of a male identity, it was a survival tactic: the bullying was basically femininity policing, from other girls, and I found that when I made it clear that I wasn't trying to do femininity at all, they largely left me alone.

Of course this is just my experience. The tactic I eventually settled on would probably have backfired horribly in other situations - trans* kids can come in for some pretty vicious bullying - and I'm not presenting it as advice. And I am certainly not denying the identities or experiences of trans* people.

I believe pretty firmly that people are the only reliable authorities on their own experience of gender and gender identity.

(When I moved to a country with very different levels of gender-role enforcement, one where I got hardly any backlash for being female + good at math, I became comfortable with wearing skirts and having long hair again, although it took a few years. For me, there was no sex/body dysphoria, or even dysphoria based on visible gender markers - but I rejected those markers because they were presented to me as part of a package that included something I was not, and never could be. Once I was immersed in a different culture, where "women must be bad at math" wasn't enforced in the same way, I became much more comfortable with a femme-ish presentation. My understanding is that the dysphoria transsexual people experience - when they experience it - does not generally work like this.)

That's horrible. Where do you live? Can you report this counsellor in some way?

It was a long time ago (late 1990s) and in another country*. Parents complained to the school principal at the time, it didn't help. I'm glad for your support but it didn't hurt me long-term (although taking her advice almost certainly would have).

*Although I unfortunately have recent anecdotes from the wealthy Western country where my family now lives that make it pretty clear that teachers telling high-outlier girls they can't be good at math is not a thing of the past**. Which leads me to give the side-eye to male colleagues who want to talk about how innate gender differences affect the number of women in the hard sciences. I think we've got a bit of work to do on confounding factors before we can reasonably address that question.

**See spoilerblock:

Spoiler

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My little sister, ninth grade, went to a teacher to say she didn't understand a concept in math class. The teacher replied, "That's okay, sweetie, we don't expect you to", and sent her away. She got Bs and Cs in every math class at that school. A year and a half later she switched schools, to my former school, where every teacher knew she was my little sister, expected her to be smart, and actually gave her answers when she asked for help. End of Year 12, in math she scored in the top 0.3% of the state (i.e. better than 99.7% of the population). It's often said that there are very few women at the top of the distribution in math (although the rate at which that number is changing suggests it's more cultural than innate), and I just wonder how many could have been in that bracket, but got the same messages as me and my sister without the corresponding chances to turn it around.

Likewise, there's the case my friend told me about, during her training as a math teacher (this was just a few years ago, at an expensive private school in Australia); she was sitting in on a class taught by the head math teacher, and he matter-of-factly informed the class that science had shown that women had poor spatial abilities, and so the girls in the class couldn't expect to understand what he'd just said.

I've had female professors lecture me about multi-variable analysis and quantum mechanics and whatnot so to claim that just because you're a woman you can't be good at maths is a statement that completely disregards reality.

Yeah, you don't need to persuade me (I spent the last semester lecturing students on relativity.)

Funnily enough, I had this course once that had some electronics labs where the supervisor assumed my two female friends automatically needed his help and kind of ignored me, who had much larger problems than they did (because I suck at practical stuff), because he assumed that a guy should be able to handle it. We reached an agreement that this fairly old teacher/professor was a sexist jerk and that we didn't like him.

Yay, sexism: destroying women's confidence and preventing men from getting the help they need.

(I had an elderly male professor tell me that I was "quite bright" but didn't have what it took for theoretical physics. I still occasionally fight the temptation to email him my CV on my current institution's letterhead. Pointing out that my first paper has more citations than he got in his entire career would be a bit cruel.)

[Serpentine]

Mine was "well they're slowly working out how boobs actually function, then." I mean, the first 4 have the excuse of graphics limitations, but there is no excuse for #5's gravity-defying baseballs. Looks like she's gradually getting more space for her organs, as well, which is nice.
Hm... Is it just me, though, or is she getting whiter?

I feel like the "girls can't do maths" thing is a peculiarly American stereotype. My unusually egalitarian upbringing might have contributed, but I literally never even heard of it until it came up on the Internet, or possibly that Simpsons episode. As far as I know, it's just not a stereotype in Australia. Anyone from this way care to disprove that?
edit: Whoops, apparently there is a bit here still. It's that damn prescriptive/nature vs nurture thing again Scientific evidence that men, on the whole, tend to be better at spacial awareness than women does not mean that all, or even most, women are completely incompetent at it, or worse than most men. And that's without taking into account the aforementioned issues of whether they're worse because they naturally are, or because everyone assumes they will be. Why is this such a hard concept to understand?!

[cobaltstarfire]

I feel like the "girls can't do maths" thing is a peculiarly American stereotype. My unusually egalitarian upbringing might have contributed, but I literally never even heard of it until it came up on the Internet, or possibly that Simpsons episode. As far as I know, it's just not a stereotype in Australia. Anyone from this way care to disprove that?

I think even within America it's pretty dependent on where you are, but it's hard for me to say as well, cause most of my schooling was in military schools. (Not like boot camp, but schools that military children go to).

The time I did go to public schools (6th grade on) I never had any teachers who had that idea. Even my highschool chem teacher, who was an older guy and retired chemist never suggested such things. I think I just got lucky on that account, cause I'm in Texas, and I have run into the "girls can't do math/science" sentiment from peers, and even friends, but never from the teachers themselves.

[Rain Dragon]

Yeah, I was wondering if "feminine" meant "cis woman", because they are not the same thing, at least for the definitions of "feminine" I'm aware of.

(I had an elderly male professor tell me that I was "quite bright" but didn't have what it took for theoretical physics. I still occasionally fight the temptation to email him my CV on my current institution's letterhead. Pointing out that my first paper has more citations than he got in his entire career would be a bit cruel.)

I realize it's off-topic, but a lot of studies (do not have citations on hand) have found some similarities and some things unique (this sentence is deliberately quite vague, sorry) among the different brains. Nonetheless, identity as you have said has little to do with brain structure anyway and the 'brain sex' line of thought has unfortunate pitfalls.

'Men can't spell and women can't do maths' annoys the living daylights out of me. It is so... Seriously though, if someone is interested in physics I don't care who they are because physics is awesome and if I were a physics teacher I would explain it to them. Because physics is awesome.

Speaking of physics... I agree, Lara Croft is... exaggerated somewhat. Also, the basket-balls do not look all that appealing to me. They don't really look like real boobs until later on, and the recently linked recent Lara Croft looks the best to me and not thanks to a stick-thin waist and big boobs.

EDIT - Some of my wording was (and may still be) incredibad.

[Ifni]

edit: Whoops, apparently there is a bit here still. It's that damn prescriptive/nature vs nurture thing again Scientific evidence that men, on the whole, tend to be better at spacial awareness than women does not mean that all, or even most, women are completely incompetent at it, or worse than most men. And that's without taking into account the aforementioned issues of whether they're worse because they naturally are, or because everyone assumes they will be. Why is this such a hard concept to understand?!

Yeah - the school-counsellor story was not from Australia (Australia's where I moved to, and it is indeed much better there relative to where I lived when I was 12), but the anecdotes about my sister, my friend and the elderly professor were all from Australia. Sadly it's not just a US thing. (And the school-counsellor story was from a non-Western country, in case anyone's going to say it's just Western culture.)

There's a study somewhere claiming to show that if you get women to play first-person-shooters for a week their average spatial awareness rises to match that of men - even a small amount of experience with related situations can really have a huge effect on measures of "intelligence". Not to mention that stereotype threat has a pretty big impact on performance as well - you can substantially increase women's performance on math tests by telling them at the start of the test that it's been designed so men and women have equal outcomes (even if this is a total lie).

EDIT: Oh, and on the other side of things, my brother had an English teacher (in Australia) who did the same horrible "I don't expect you to be good at this so I'm not going to explain what you did wrong, 'cause I don't think you can change" thing that my sister got in math. It just isn't as clear-cut an example because my brother never switched schools, so I don't have proof that he was capable of much more, the way I do with my sister - but I can still recognize the pattern. Gender stereotypes can be pretty damaging for both sexes, even if the ones imposed on women tend to act as a barrier to high-income jobs to a greater degree than those imposed on men.

[Lorsa]

I'm a theoretical physicist

Screw big boobs and hot pants. This right here is what I consider hot.

Yeah, you don't need to persuade me (I spent the last semester lecturing students on relativity.)

And you're just getting even more attractive! Seriously, Lara Croft has nothing on a theoretical physics teacher.

I'm assuming it was general relativity?

Yay, sexism: destroying women's confidence and preventing men from getting the help they need.

Yeah, isn't it lovely?

(I had an elderly male professor tell me that I was "quite bright" but didn't have what it took for theoretical physics. I still occasionally fight the temptation to email him my CV on my current institution's letterhead. Pointing out that my first paper has more citations than he got in his entire career would be a bit cruel.)

Don't fight it. It's not even cruel, you're basically doing him a favour of correcting his faulty view of reality. If he's really a physicist he'll thank you for it.

[Serpentine]

I realize it's off-topic, but a lot of studies (do not have citations on hand) have found some similarities and some things unique (this sentence is deliberately quite vague, sorry) among the different brains. Nonetheless, identity as you have said has little to do with brain structure anyway and the 'brain sex' line of thought has unfortunate pitfalls.

I want to explain my impression of it, but it requires diagrams.
I guess basically, as I understand it, "male brains" and "female brains" are both big bell-curves of likelihood that overlap to a very large degree. A man is more likely to have X brain type but that doesn't mean that women are unlikely to also have brain type, they're just not as likely to have it as men, nor as likely to have it as Y brain type.
A trans woman, in the meantime, might be more likely to have Y brain type than X, but is still well within the bounds of the "male brain" bell-curve, and there are still lots of cis men, cis women and trans men with that sort of brain as well. If there are no trans women with brains way way way down at the very end of the "male brain" bell-curve where the "female brain" bell-curve no longer overlaps, that might be significant, but... not necessarily.
So it's interesting, but it might just boil down to trans people having human brains, within normal human variance, rather than brains "of" a particular sex.
...you see why I needed a diagram

[SiuiS]

I'm sure there are plenty of guys that do, well maybe not the callous part At least she won't get her clothing caught in anything huh?

My first thoughts looking at the side by side of a bunch of Lauras was first *in a silly mental voice* "booooobs" and then "those shorts look really uncomfortable."

I meant got pants as literally on fire.

And yep! No clothes getting stuck at all. Instead she will leave tantalizing strips of skin on the briars, like a she-wolf shedding hairs from her vulva to make birthing cleaner. Ooh lala~

That's if constantly rolling across rocks doesn't pulp her first, mind~

Yeah, I was wondering if "feminine" meant "cis woman", because they are not the same thing, at least for the definitions of "feminine" I'm aware of.

I personally think similarity in brain structure is a pretty bad justification for accepting transsexual people's accounts of themselves. If a subsequent study with a different population shows the converse result (i.e. trans women's brains resemble the average male brain more than the average female brain), would you take that to mean that trans* people are wrong about their own identities? I think the answer should pretty clearly be "no".

Hmm. It was more that there is a part of functions which cause women to all themselves women which is unrelated but often correlated to possession of a vagina. But that's fair. There is no clear cut "this is the rule".

Spoiler: Trigger:Bullying

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Nope. I was twelve, socialized to be quiet and polite, listening to an authority figure who every anti-bullying resource had told me I was meant to trust. Calling her out wasn't really something I was capable of at that age.

I didn't actually follow her advice, because my conception of myself as "good at math" was actually stronger than my conception of myself as "a girl" (I could imagine being a boy and still myself, I couldn't imagine being bad at math and still myself), but the next couple of years were pretty awful - not directly as a result of that conversation, but because of the bullying that had led to the conversation, and the fact that the people who I'd been told would protect me so clearly thought I deserved whatever I got. (I had supportive parents, which was a lifesaver.)

And I'm pretty sure that a lot of external observers would've identified me as trans* in that period, even though I wasn't. I stopped wearing skirts and started wearing jeans + baggy T-shirts that hid my body shape, cut my hair short, started socializing almost exclusively with guys, and hated female-specific forms of address with a passion. But this wasn't a reflection of a male identity, it was a survival tactic: the bullying was basically femininity policing, from other girls, and I found that when I made it clear that I wasn't trying to do femininity at all, they largely left me alone.

Of course this is just my experience. The tactic I eventually settled on would probably have backfired horribly in other situations - trans* kids can come in for some pretty vicious bullying - and I'm not presenting it as advice. And I am certainly not denying the identities or experiences of trans* people.

I believe pretty firmly that people are the only reliable authorities on their own experience of gender and gender identity.

(When I moved to a country with very different levels of gender-role enforcement, one where I got hardly any backlash for being female + good at math, I became comfortable with wearing skirts and having long hair again, although it took a few years. For me, there was no sex/body dysphoria, or even dysphoria based on visible gender markers - but I rejected those markers because they were presented to me as part of a package that included something I was not, and never could be. Once I was immersed in a different culture, where "women must be bad at math" wasn't enforced in the same way, I became much more comfortable with a femme-ish presentation. My understanding is that the dysphoria transsexual people experience - when they experience it - does not generally work like this.)

It was a long time ago (late 1990s) and in another country*. Parents complained to the school principal at the time, it didn't help. I'm glad for your support but it didn't hurt me long-term (although taking her advice almost certainly would have).

*Although I unfortunately have recent anecdotes from the wealthy Western country where my family now lives that make it pretty clear that teachers telling high-outlier girls they can't be good at math is not a thing of the past**. Which leads me to give the side-eye to male colleagues who want to talk about how innate gender differences affect the number of women in the hard sciences. I think we've got a bit of work to do on confounding factors before we can reasonably address that question.

**See spoilerblock:

Spoiler

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My little sister, ninth grade, went to a teacher to say she didn't understand a concept in math class. The teacher replied, "That's okay, sweetie, we don't expect you to", and sent her away. She got Bs and Cs in every math class at that school. A year and a half later she switched schools, to my former school, where every teacher knew she was my little sister, expected her to be smart, and actually gave her answers when she asked for help. End of Year 12, in math she scored in the top 0.3% of the state (i.e. better than 99.97% of the population). It's often said that there are very few women at the top of the distribution in math (although the rate at which that number is changing suggests it's more cultural than innate), and I just wonder how many could have been in that bracket, but got the same messages as me and my sister without the corresponding chances to turn it around.

Likewise, there's the case my friend told me about, during her training as a math teacher (this was just a few years ago, at an expensive private school in Australia); she was sitting in on a class taught by the head math teacher, and he matter-of-factly informed the class that science had shown that women had poor spatial abilities, and so the girls in the class couldn't expect to understand what he'd just said.

Yeah, you don't need to persuade me (I spent the last semester lecturing students on relativity.)



Yay, sexism: destroying women's confidence and preventing men from getting the help they need.

(I had an elderly male professor tell me that I was "quite bright" but didn't have what it took for theoretical physics. I still occasionally fight the temptation to email him my CV on my current institution's letterhead. Pointing out that my first paper has more citations than he got in his entire career would be a bit cruel.)

This entire post will be referenced in the future when another "are women naturally [x] or is it societal pressure" thread comes along.

Hm... Is it just me, though, or is she getting whiter?

She's always been British. Problems with skin tone were endemic with early systems, and the dark color makes sense with her primarily underground setting simply because it makes the lighting work easier to do.

edit: Whoops, apparently there is a bit here still. It's that damn prescriptive/nature vs nurture thing again Scientific evidence that men, on the whole, tend to be better at spacial awareness than women does not mean that all, or even most, women are completely incompetent at it, or worse than most men. And that's without taking into account the aforementioned issues of whether they're worse because they naturally are, or because everyone assumes they will be. Why is this such a hard concept to understand?!

My favorite was a talk show host who have random men and women pass and pens and told them "draw a bicycle". They all did blah, but the women didn't have any clue how pedals worked. This was ten years ago or more, and the women were all forty/fifty.

The host used this to demonstrate "women just don't have the same intuitive grasp of engineering that men do. Look, you don't even have a chain here, just pedals!"

Maybe it's just women born in the fifties didn't have to ever fix bikes and probably hadn't seen one in person for decades? Maybe? Naw, couldn't be.

[Aotrs Commander]

You know, threads like this make me wonder that, when my hour comes, if I might actually take a leaf out of Timmy Turner's book and thaumatuergically transmogrify the entire populace (including all media) into some sort of generic, near-identical, phsyically nonsexual homogenus biped (universally the same shape, colour, age and build, of course).

Just to see how humans would react to be physically unable to factionalise by corporeal form. Because I'm sure the results would be truly fascinating, and I mean that in complete seriousness. How long it would be before they discover whole new ways to factionalise, or whether it would actually stop it. Be a truly fascinating experiment, I think.

Before, I, y'know, burn the planet to the ground and put humanity to the sword.

[Closet_Skeleton]

I guess it's still an open question though why she hasn't learned to put on some clothes to avoid being cold. There's certainly enough dead guys around that she could've stolen a jacket from.

I'm pretty sure she occasionally changes outfits and doesn't dress like that in snowy levels, but haven't played many of the games. Her original outfit kind of fits the game's jungle level.

The most recent Lara is sexually defined, but not solely defined by it, no. She has pants, for one. Cargo pants! They happen to snugly hug the parts you're staring at often, but that's actually a consequence of having a good, full range of motion. She's hot, but that's sort of secondary.

Shorts are kind of an 'British explorer cliche' thing to wear. Its not necessarily about being sexy. Most women's shorts are shorter than men's ones. They may not be practical or even that common among real explorers but they at least give an impression.

[Ifni]

Screw big boobs and hot pants. This right here is what I consider hot.

Sorry to tell you, I'm asexual

(Although - I was not offended, I appreciate your posts which are generally very thoughtful, and I know you were being light-hearted, but as a rule, I don't consider "you're hot" to be a flattering response to a mention of my work. "That's cool" works much better - I'm happy to take compliments for working on awesome stuff, but really couldn't care less about my sexiness or lack thereof. And having "hotness" brought up in the context of my work is mildly annoying, because I'm aware I am going to get judged on appearance and gender, and that's not how it should be.

I went back and forward on saying this because I don't want to make you feel bad, but just a note for the future, ok? )

I'm assuming it was general relativity?

First half was special rel (in proper tensor language), then we set up Lagrangian mechanics and the principle of least action, then did an introduction to general rel. The latter was mostly working out geodesic motion in a range of spacetimes (Schwarzschild and FRW being the main examples), although we introduced the stress-energy tensor and gave the briefest possible motivation and definition of the Einstein equations. Much more "space tells matter how to move" than "matter tells space how to curve".

Although I did take my recitation section on a detour through the definition of curvature, covariant derivatives, and the meaning of the Riemann tensor in terms of parallel transport - half the class loved it, the other half ended up staring at me with deer-in-the-headlights expressions.

... ahem. I may have set a new record for off-topic-ness here. Apologies.

[Lorsa]

Sorry to tell you, I'm asexual

(Although - I was not offended, I appreciate your posts which are generally very thoughtful, and I know you were being light-hearted, but as a rule, I don't consider "you're hot" to be a flattering response to a mention of my work. "That's cool" works much better - I'm happy to take compliments for working on awesome stuff, but really couldn't care less about my sexiness or lack thereof. And having "hotness" brought up in the context of my work is mildly annoying, because I'm aware I am going to get judged on appearance and gender, and that's not how it should be.

I went back and forward on saying this because I don't want to make you feel bad, but just a note for the future, ok? )

No worries, you didn't make me feel bad. I realised that it might be taken the wrong way but hoped, considering the context and my other posts, that you wouldn't. I went back and forward on if I should say that as well.


What I really wanted to do was to make a point that men can find other things than appearance attractive (despite the stereotypes telling us the opposite) and that I in particular have always favoured intelligence over appearance.

I'm sorry that I used you to make this point and I hope it didn't make you uncomfortable.

In the end I will always be more interested in your actual work though, because while I may not be asexual, if someone told me I'd have to go my entire life without sex or never being allowed to attend a physics lecture, I'd say no to sex without even thinking about it for two seconds.


EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to say. It is awesome!

First half was special rel, then we set up Lagrangian mechanics and the principle of least action, then did an introduction to general rel. The latter was mostly working out geodesic motion in a range of spacetimes (Schwarzschild and FRW being the main examples), although we introduced the stress-energy tensor and gave the briefest possible motivation and definition of the Einstein equations. Much more "space tells matter how to move" than "matter tells space how to curve".

Although I did take my recitation section on a detour through the definition of curvature, covariant derivatives, and the meaning of the Riemann tensor in terms of parallel transport - half the class loved it, the other half ended up staring at me with deer-in-the-headlights expressions.

... ahem. I may have set a new record for off-topic-ness here. Apologies.

This makes me realise I've been slipping, and that I've actually never had a class in relativity (I do have a book just a few meters away that I should read). I've had such problems, detous and issues with my education that I've almost lost my passion.

Maybe there's some good online lectures I could watch as it may be too late to get into a class that teaches it now...

Oh. Off-topic! Right!



Oh, and Serptentine, I think you explained it quite well even without the diagrams!

[MLai]

I don't consider "you're hot" to be a flattering response to a mention of my work. "That's cool" works much better - I'm happy to take compliments for working on awesome stuff, but really couldn't care less about my sexiness or lack thereof. And having "hotness" brought up in the context of my work is mildly annoying, because I'm aware I am going to get judged on appearance and gender, and that's not how it should be.

But- but- intelligence is sexy! Maybe not for you but we can't control how others feel. If I was a woman I will say right now I want to have Brian Greene's babies (too bad he's already married, and I'm a straight guy) cuz he's just so hot on Nova.

I feel like the "girls can't do maths" thing is a peculiarly American stereotype.

Well it certainly doesn't happen in Asia.
Now don't get me wrong, Asian culture is heavily patriarchal and prioritizes boys. However, just cuz you're a girl doesn't mean you get off easy and don't have to study. EVERY KID had to study. Hard.

I find amusement that for how much improved that image is, her actual costume is still very heavily based on the rather silly original costume. I get that's a part of her iconic image and all, but if you're willing to tone down the chest, why not lengthen the shorts a bit as well?

Lara Croft wears full-length cargo pants in the latest Tomb Raider.