Women who play male characters (in games)

[Aotrs Commander]

Absolutely. And, it could possibly reduce the pressure put on guys to try asking girls out, knowing that they could instead take actions to advertise themselves (Such as taking care of their appearances to the same extent women do! - that is a form of advertisement) and let interested women come to them by reducing the pressure and expectations on women that they are to wait for a male to approach them.

It still largely baffles me that this has not already become more mainstream (probably because I don't frequent places where this is a common occurance), as certainly the attitude in most fictional interaction in the books and TV shows I watch seems to be more even. (I am, yes, excluded games and the sorts of movies I watch, where in the thinsg are skewed more).

I would imagine, if there was some cataclysmic event that created some terrible reality inversion that caused me to suddenly take an interest, I would damn well expect suitors to come to me, because I'm fracking awesome. (That said, such a catastrophic reality inversion would be more likely to destroy the universe entirely, which would be a more welcome result. *shudder*)



Perhaps humans should take a leaf out of the book of some spider species, where if the male (replace with "human making an attempt") gets his approach wrong, the female (replace with "human that is the target of approach) will kill and eat him.

The threat of sudden, painful and unavoidable death would I think, curb the effect of random catcalling significantly, because "hey [derogatory title], nice [portion of anatomy]" is a pretty stupid thing to die screaming for.

Funnily enough, that is theoretically how I discourage people from Taking An Interest in me.

(I say "theoretically" since no-one (well, aside from Lixie, but it's LIXIE) has even been stupid enough to make an attempt. But, it never hurts to have a plan, of course, because one can never underestimate how stupid humans can be...)



Vaguely on topic, then, I have a roughish even split between male and female characters, slightly more females in CRPGs, slightly more male on tabletop on a statistical analysis - mind you, I play far less than I DM these days, so it's a statistics of small numbers issue, really. Like some people earlier in this thread... or was it an other one? I take an entirely arbitary decision of the gender of my characters, laying about as much meaning to it as height and hair colour.

You might say, then, that my female characters would be ill-played like females, to which I would point out that they are equally ill-played as my male characters, as the differences between male and female behavior are several orders of magnitude less different from the behavior of Bleakbane's characters to the behavior of actual real people anyway.

Hell, a numerous amount of my characters (at least start out as) are thinly veiled homages/parodies of popular culture.

(see: Shikue Ryushin, the Naruto-ninja (mechanically a cleric-monk completely reflavoured and basically providing me a legitmate reason to shout "believe it" a lot and annoy everyone), the Sage (the Doctor), Judge Caine (he has sunglasses), my favourite RP character of all time HelJen (who started out some fifteen years ago as a homage to my favourite character of all, Jubilee), Dixton (a near-direct personality clone of Discworld Noir's Lewton, complete with hard-boiled dialogue).

Or a straight-out barely-more-than-a-characature, like dear old Undead obessed Invagrion the neutral necromancer, (known for his penchant for bringing his animnated Undead with him wherever he goes, because they aren't evil or anything, but occasionally disguised as a robe golem) or over-the-top "huzzah!" Arcanus the sorcerer or laser-obessed Athrinel the laser cleric (woefully accuracy-impaired cleric of the goddess Photonia) and in the same party, her collegue Sendrithil Icerime the wizard, a figurative and somewhat literal ice-queen.

So you can't actually accuse me of playing my female characters badly... because I play ALL my characters equally badly!



Also because of the Hobbit, my next fantasy character is totally being a female elf rangery-sort of person, because Tauriel.

[JadedDM]

Funny you should mention that, JadedDM.

Man, if only I had read that article back in 1995, it might have spared me a lot of pain.

[Frozen_Feet]

Reads like more stuff from Laasanen's comment sections.

[SaintRidley]

The threat of sudden, painful and unavoidable death would I think, curb the effect of random catcalling significantly, because "hey [derogatory title], nice [portion of anatomy]" is a pretty stupid thing to die screaming for.

Funnily enough, that is theoretically how I discourage people from Taking An Interest in me.

(I say "theoretically" since no-one (well, aside from Lixie, but it's LIXIE) has even been stupid enough to make an attempt. But, it never hurts to have a plan, of course, because one can never underestimate how stupid humans can be...)

Also because of the Hobbit, my next fantasy character is totally being a female elf rangery-sort of person, because Tauriel.

Tauriel's probably my favorite part of the second Hobbit. She'll definitely be informing my future characters, that much is for certain.

[Coidzor]

Reads like more stuff from Laasanen's comment sections.

Who and/or What?

[Closet_Skeleton]

But the entitlement is a part of it, because that's why they get angry or violent.

I've literally contemplated murder suicide after being rejected by a girl and any effect of entitlement was either subconscious or non-existent. Knowing that there was nothing I could do because they were perfectly in the right to not be interested in me just made me more frustrated with my helplessness. I didn't blame anyone else, but that lowered my self esteem and made me feel more angry.

Emotions can be affected by social pressures and cultural values but they can't be outright created by them.

Raise someone to believe don't deserve to ever find companionship and they'll still get angry when their potential happiness lies beyond their control.

Pretending anger is a fixable bug in our social programming is dangerous nonsense. Its something we have to learn to live with.

[Aotrs Commander]

Y'see, I'm trying to make an appropriately fascetious comment, but I'm actually too distracted by trying to work out exactly what it is about her expression that's so unsettling.

The gormless of the expression? The empty eyes? The vapid gape? I dunno. Whatever it is, it's quite creepy...

Perhaps it's a combination of her expression and the repetition of the loop, but all that's giving me is the impression someone has lobotomised her and she's doing that repetive action disorder-thingy you sometimes see in mentally-disturbed badly-treated captive animals (which probably has a proper name for both humans and animals, of course, but I'm a necromancer, not a psychologist.)



Also, I have a rocket launcher. That's not a euphanism: it's a Lich-portable SK-series Snake Guided Missile Launcher armed with the latest Aotrs SK-4 warheads with a 6000m atmospheric range and a warhead better than most 21st century cruise-missiles plus missile shields and the launcher is sufficiently big and sturdy, it can be used to beat whales to death; which is wielded with sufficient force to make use of the same sort of capillary action you use to stab a straw through a potato, only using the barrel and a, say, human body.

Just sayin'.

[Avilan the Grey]

The gormless of the expression? The empty eyes? The vapid gape? I dunno. Whatever it is, it's quite creepy...

Not to start another argument, but I definitely disagree with your description of her. The eyes are far from empty, for example.

[Aotrs Commander]

Not to start another argument, but I definitely disagree with your description of her. The eyes are far from empty, for example.

I think we've sort of established I don't look at people in quite the same way as most humans, or indeed most sane beings, or even quite a few insane ones, so a reasonable degree of preceptual dissonance between me and Things That Are Not Me is probably not entirely unexpected...



It may well be entirely just me that after watching that for more than a few seconds is going "that's just creepy," but that just sort of proves the point, doesn't it...?

[Avilan the Grey]

I think we've sort of established I don't look at people in quite the same way as most humans, or indeed most sane beings, or even quite a few insane ones, so a reasonable degree of preceptual dissonance between me and Things That Are Not Me is probably not entirely unexpected...

Well your eyes seems to constantly explode outwards...

[Frozen_Feet]

Who and/or What?

Henry Laasanen is a rather infamous Finnish sociologist, mostly known for his pet-theory of Sexual Economics and his book "Naisten Seksuaalinen Valta" (eng. "Sexual Power of Women"). I paraphrased the basics earlier in this thread. Contrast and compare with the Cracked.com article posted.

[SiuiS]

on average, women desire sex less than men,

What?

Of course, Laasanen is a whiny brat, which is an achievement from a middle-aged man. So I'd take everything he says with a grain of salt.

Oh.

Don't know what 'scarecrow' means in this context but I'll take your word for it that somehow that makes it less reliable than the anecdotal evidence you were offering two posts ago

There's a difference between "this is" and "this is how it seems and here is why".

Why would you think that?

Because it fits?

No idea.

If my society has codified romantic mores I have no idea what they are.

Touché.

Chimps, Gorillas, Baboons, Mandrills (for example) all have social climbing and social skills as the no. 1 goal. For example female baboons can prefer a lower-strength male to become clan leader, if he is good at the social game (care for the kids, volunteer with flea-removal without being asked, etc) and will both mate more often with such males AND actually help them organize coups to get the top position.

HOwever the POINT of this is to prove that among apes and higher primates (like us) (Oh and a lot of birds too, although that is less relevant) the instinctual behavior when it comes to mating and relationships is this: Male struggles for acceptance, female judge and more often than not goes "nope!".

The purpose was NOT to claim that "Nature is all hippe-dippey".

That's not instinct, though. It's a learned behavior. If someone, even a chimp, notices a thing and changes to accommodate it, that is not instinct.

(I'll just go link to the other thread now where Frozen_Feet schooled me on exactly where instinct falls in the spectrum of organic life and motivation.)

Not sure how to respond to this, because you have obviously added values to the word "primate" that really doesn't belong there.

Ah, no. No value was added to primate. Quite the opposite; merely (adverb; "just, only") means nothing above or beyond.

I am "merely" a primate.

No you're not. You are a primate, but you're also more. You have meta thought faculty. You are purposefully engaging in conversation across light and fire trough webs of metal that you can understand the drives of and create yourself.

A mere primate would eat ants out of a hill with a stick. Effective, but magnitudes away.

So are you, unless you are sent here by an alien race, or built as an android.

<_<

>_>

Primates are the family of mammals we belong to, and to be even more exacty we are apes. Not "merely" apes, we ARE apes. Very very smart apes. But the distinction between human and animal is a false one, one we have made up ourselves to feel better about ourselves.

1. The distinction between animal and human had been rather rigorously studied and definitely exists. Faculty for metathought, and all that.
2. You are quite literally saying a word, ignoring what that word means, and using the modified version you've created to make a point. I don't know how to respond to that except by pointing it out.

[QUOTE=Aotrs Commander;16813027]Y'see, I'm trying to make an appropriately fascetious comment, but I'm actually too distracted by trying to work out exactly what it is about her expression that's so unsettling.

The gormless of the expression? The empty eyes? The vapid gape? I dunno. Whatever it is, it's quite creepy...[/auote]

I'm gonna say gormless.

She's got that look where she is 1)smiling because 2) she is mocking 3) a look of attraction. It's a parody that you see through because the parody artist is snickering.

[SaintRidley]

Also, I have a rocket launcher. That's not a euphanism: it's a Lich-portable SK-series Snake Guided Missile Launcher armed with the latest Aotrs SK-4 warheads with a 6000m atmospheric range and a warhead better than most 21st century cruise-missiles plus missile shields and the launcher is sufficiently big and sturdy, it can be used to beat whales to death; which is wielded with sufficient force to make use of the same sort of capillary action you use to stab a straw through a potato, only using the barrel and a, say, human body.

Just sayin'.

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Just sayin'.

[Avilan the Grey]

1. The distinction between animal and human had been rather rigorously studied and definitely exists. Faculty for metathought, and all that.
2. You are quite literally saying a word, ignoring what that word means, and using the modified version you've created to make a point. I don't know how to respond to that except by pointing it out.

1. I think you are using a different definition than I am. We do not stop being biological beings that has evolved further than any other primate just because we can think about thinking. Truly modern science points out that the "clear line" between humans and animals is getting more and more blurry every year. Elephants recognize what death is, and even recognize bones from their own species even if there is no skin or meat left on them. In fact, they often seem to actively mourn and touch bones of elephants when they come across them. Does that mean they are something else than Proboscidea?

2. What word would that be?

[Aotrs Commander]

Spoiler

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Just sayin'.

You should probably ask SiuiS about what happened to ponithilid on the last occasion someone dared me to inflict violence upon them...

[Scow2]

No you're not. You are a primate, but you're also more. You have meta thought faculty. You are purposefully engaging in conversation across light and fire trough webs of metal that you can understand the drives of and create yourself.

A mere primate would eat ants out of a hill with a stick. Effective, but magnitudes away.

You demonstrate great ignorance of the intellect of animals, who are a LOT more clever than we gave them credit for in the past.

In order for morality to be worth anything, it needs to be practical and viable. A morality system that leaves everyone miserable and self-loathing because it completely clashes with the underlying foundations and primal drives a person is built on and adapted to (Instead of working with and in harmony with those underlying foundations and primal drives) is not practical or viable.

[Frozen_Feet]

As far as rising above your instincts go, that's pretty much impossible. This is because real instincts are stuff like speech, empathy, sight and recognizing human faces. Real instincts are not some artifact of our animal nature that occasionally push through; they are all the sub- and unconscious processes that make your body function as a whole. If anything, it the entity you think of as yourself that is the artefact, a mere byproduct of myriad instincts working in concert.

When it comes to conditioned reflexes, the functional difference of a learned reflex when compared to inborn one is negligible. Nature versus nurture is often a fruitless argument, because no neat distinction exists between them. Suffice to say that no learned behaviour can exists without a biological enabler. However, our learned behaviours don't necessarily utilize their biological enablers in a way they were "meant to" be used. For example, riding a bicycle utilizes your instinctive ability to stay balanced and upright, which is why once learned the skill of riding a bicycle is rarely forgotten; but it would be foolish to say riding a bicycle is natural for humans because nothing like bicycles existed for majority of human history.

Now, culture certainly plays its part in primate behaviour - but one can't dismiss the paradigm of males fighting over females as "mere social construct" based on that, because homologous behaviour exists across mammal species, even ones that are non-cultural. If such behaviour is just "wrong socialization" in primates, how do you explain its abundancy in non-primate mammals? If you admit it is genetic, then how come it isn't so in primates despite demonstrable genetic links? And if it's just emulation, when and where did that emulation begin, and why does it persist and even seem to appear in cultural groups that have had no demonstrable contact with each other?

This where theory of The Patriarchy really goes and makes a full circle and returns to bite modern feminism in the behind. If you argue for universal patriarchy, like some still do, you need an universal reason. The only reasons universal enough to adequately explain the myriad different patriarchal societies are biological differences between human males and females. This digs ground from under the feet of several other statements that proponents of the Patriarchy theory tend to display.

But just because we, as a species, have tendency towards certain sorts of behaviour, doesn't mean those behaviours are iron-clad. I'm not going to bother to find the post where I explained genetic and instinctive basics of language to SiuS, but my stance basically is that gender roles in humans are similarly malleable as language. Certain basic patterns are repeated throughout humanity, but details always differ; and in sufficiently abnormal conditions, some things will get lost in the noise, given rise to systems that are very different from the norm. Language is a powerful tool because it can adapt to changing situations, and I feel the same is true of gender roles.

However, this is not rising above anyone's instincts, anymore than learning several languages as a toddler is. Existing instincts are just given new manifestations. I'll also have to note that instincts going off or haywire is not exactly desireable. Look up "Uinverse 25" and "Behavioral sink". That's a real example of gender roles of a species being altered by their living conditions. The end result was not a paradise, it was dying out. Most interestingly, the changes were irreversible. Taking a rat from one Universe and putting it in a healthy environment did not lead to readapting normal roles - instead, such rats continued their unhealthy behaviours and died.

One thing to think of is the fact that for a species, sex is a matter of life and death. Natural selection would hence suggest that gender roles tend to optimize towards those that help propagate a species. Thus, altering basic breeding psychology of a species is a good way to cause population collapse. However, if any of this makes you think humans are instinctively inclined to search for the rationally best mate to breed with, Thorstein Veblen will laugh at you in his grave. Humans are always caught in a cross-draught of looking for (biologically defined) signs of health, strenght and fertility mate, while at the same time looking for (culturally defined) signs of high status. That's what the pale skin, impossible muscles and ton of make-up are actually about. They don't tell anything of the actual fitness of a person, they don't even serve to make him or her attractive in a biological sense most of the time, but they do send a powerful signal of "I have this much free time and money to spend on useless things". That is why the woman above looks like she wants a piece of Aotrs Commander, really; a rocket launcher is a rather heavy and expensive thing to have, nevermind illegal - and what does a Lich, a being of great arcane firepower, really do with such a weapon? That's a rhetoric question, the answer is actually "nothing"; but it does tell our resident undead abomination has obscene amount of excess resources to spend on his majestic misantrophy. And that's hot.

[Coidzor]

1. I think you are using a different definition than I am. We do not stop being biological beings that has evolved further than any other primate just because we can think about thinking. Truly modern science points out that the "clear line" between humans and animals is getting more and more blurry every year. Elephants recognize what death is, and even recognize bones from their own species even if there is no skin or meat left on them. In fact, they often seem to actively mourn and touch bones of elephants when they come across them. Does that mean they are something else than Proboscidea?

Well, yeah. It's fairly well established what is meant when someone makes the argument that we're not *just* animals as a rhetorical device.

[Lamech]

Natural selection would hence suggest that gender roles tend to optimize towards those that help propagate a species.

NOPE! Natural Selection doesn't really select all that well for genes that keep a species alive. It works for genes that help an animal create off-spring. (Well spread their genome.) In theory a particularly nasty trait might cause a species to destroy itself in the long run, if it helps individuals reproduce.

Now, you probably won't find a lot of self-extincting species, but traits don't need to be beneficial for the species as a whole.

[Zrak]

Well, yeah. It's fairly well established what is meant when someone makes the argument that we're not *just* animals as a rhetorical device.

Then again, making the argument that we're just animals is a rhetorical device, too. Either statement is really pretty much meaningless. As are virtually all of the various Amateur-Zoology-in-the-Playground tangents this thread has taken, seeing as pretty much none of them have been supported by any evidence of any kind or linked to the discussion in any credible way.

So, really, what I'm trying to say is that we should really probably just stop using the word "animal" for the rest of this discussion.

edit: "Are" to "have" is a new one, auto-correct.

[Frozen_Feet]

NOPE! Natural Selection doesn't really select all that well for genes that keep a species alive. It works for genes that help an animal create off-spring. (Well spread their genome.) In theory a particularly nasty trait might cause a species to destroy itself in the long run, if it helps individuals reproduce.

Now, you probably won't find a lot of self-extincting species, but traits don't need to be beneficial for the species as a whole.

Congratulations, you managed to rephrase the exact thing I said while claiming it was wrong.

And contradictory traits do crop up fairly frequently. That is why natural selection suggests optimization for propagation: contradictory traits are bred off a population, while non-contradictory traits survive to the next generation.

Focusing on invidual instead of a species is also a red herring, because when an invidual organism is good at propagating, a species is what you'll get. You can go all the way down to the selfish gene and say it's all about specific genes, rather than even the invidual; but that doesn't really change much, since on a high level, genes exist in clusters that require a living being for a host, and living beings need to create others of their kind to keep on existing. Hence, most visible optimization happens on the level of a species, because smaller units are not self-sustainable.

[BeerMug Paladin]

In regards to the humans are animals tangent, there is one important factor to note that I feel should be considered.

Humans have fundamentally altered the nature of our own existence via culture alone. We're not just simply talking about something in the realm of a troop of chimps that can change from being very violent to being tender and peaceful.

We're talking about a type of primate that builds societies many orders of magnitude larger and more complex than our initial natural habitat. Our technology impacts our culture, which in turn impacts our technology. We have come a long way simply by virtue of our vastly changed, constantly evolving culture.

While we may not be genetically dissimilar from the earliest human ancestors we are vastly, vastly culturally dissimilar from them. And so, we have to take that into any contemplation about what human nature entails.

And I'm calling it. A species making it to the moon and walking around with only their own efforts is a dividing line between 'awesome' and 'animal'.

[Serpentine]

I actually agree with Avilan on the humans-as-animals thing. Pretty much every single thing that has been put forward as "separating humans from animals" has been found in other animals - up to and including abstract thought, theory of mind and a sense of fairness. What makes us different to other animals is just a matter of degrees, not kind, and is the sort of thing that divides other animals from other animals as well - what separates cheetahs from animals is their speed, what separates blue whales from animals is their size, etc.

I completely disagree with him, however, on his assessment of "the animals", the conclusions he makes, and all his attempts to apply it to this discussion. It's just irrelevant, and sidetracking the thread.

[MLai]

God damn it, since when did this thread to turn to comment section for blog of Henry Laasanen?
And now that I've stated that, I'm actually going to delve into Laasanen's pet theory of sexual economics as it relates to the current sidetrack of discussion:

I don't know if this is your desired outcome, but I agree completely with what you've posted from Laasanen. That is quite a systematic explanation of what I've always seen as the objective truth.
And no just because he's saying something that might offend some sociopolitical views, doesn't make him a whiny brat (other things he might say that I don't know about, might make him one, I don't know). AFAIC, he said nothing controversial or demeaning -- it's just the way things work in human society around the world.
That Cracked article is basically saying the same thing (which I agree with) except hiding it in hyperbolic humor so ppl can't get all righteously offended over it. Even if I can't see how anyone can get offended over it (how many times can an article say "It's our fault"), I'm sure someone will.
And Frozen Feet's post #707 says it well also.

[Coidzor]

Then again, making the argument that we're just animals is a rhetorical device, too. Either statement is really pretty much meaningless. As have virtually all of the various Amateur-Zoology-in-the-Playground tangents this thread has taken, seeing as pretty much none of them have been supported by any evidence of any kind or linked to the discussion in any credible way.

So, really, what I'm trying to say is that we should really probably just stop using the word "animal" for the rest of this discussion.

Indeed, the semantic sub-tangent is rather less interesting than the pre-existing tangent we're on.

edit: A realization struck me though that I found somewhat diverting in regards to the whole "mere primate" thing. IIRC Lemurs are the "simplest" primates, and they do tend to look the most like meerkats.

I am now imagining a bunch of Meerkat Lemurs living in a manor.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have out example of the flip side and how romantic mores being codified hurts men as well?

That seems more just an example of how bad romantic-sexual mores and lessons hurt children than showing that having codified romantic mores in and of itself is harmful. It could just as easily have been the sad tale of any number of children whose emotional and sexual maturity have been stunted because they were taught that sex is evil and that their bodies are not their own but instead the property of their parents.

*Implying men are capable of respect and/or tact*

...Men don't even treat their best friends with respect and tact. You're far more optimistic about human males than I am.

Sounds like you're living in the wrong cultural group then or just got raised badly, as your experiences while unfortunate are thankfully not universal. I'm sorry dude.

Granted could also be that you've got an overly restrictive definition of respect and tact, though where you'd pick up such a thing I can't even really speculate. Certainly most *people* aren't going to be on formal footing when they're with their friends and in a relaxed setting, but that's not really a lack of respect issue in and of itself, nor is being able to speak more freely around and to one's friends a demonstration of tactlessness.

The closest I can think of is the unfortunate tendency where a group of friends could passively or actively egg one another on and say or do things they would otherwise know better than to do either on their own or in smaller groups, such as catcalling or generally whooping into the night air while the windows are down and the car is going far too fast for safety but fast enough for fun.

If two people don't respect one another, they can't really have a friendship as I would understand it. While I can recognize the flaws of my friends (though sometimes the nature of friendship makes us devalue the flaws or become at least partially blind to them) and would wish to help address those flaws if possible, I still respect them as people and as my friends despite whatever we might disagree upon or how I detest certain bad habits or beliefs and will argue against them when appropriate.

To the rest: There are a lot of reasons I'm celibate. I was taught my whole life that love and attraction are not things you can control. We've all seen the stories about the guys that think love is icky or bad or whatever and then end up falling head over heels for the next girl to walk in their friggen line of sight. And then they chase her like idiot lover-boys for the rest of the gorram story. Once you like a girl, you're stuck. If she hates you? Deal with it. Your friend's girlfriend? You'll still chase her. Screams that she wants you to die? Get back on that friggen horse.

What upsets me the most about the whole thing isn't so much the idea that love won't be requited but rather that once I get the hint that it's not returned, I can't go off somewhere else. That above all, you gotta stick to your guns and keep chasing the same girl for the rest of your miserable life. It implies a complete lack of free will, that love is just something that 'happens' and the humans are just along for the ride. Or potentially the crash and burn.

**** that ****. Love can go to hell.

Wow. I mean, sure, it's your life that you're putting up on display and making the subject of conversation and judgment, but it's damned tragic that you got such bad lessons.

Especially since even though you seem to have recognized and then rejected them as bad or flawed, you still thought they were true enough to say **** love.

Sounds like a tautology to me. "If you have problems it's because you have problems" / "If you're screwed up it's because you're screwed up"

Well, it definitely seems to have a good chance of compounding the issue. From what I recall depressed people, in general anyway, have more difficulty negotiating social situations because of their condition/energy expenditures and can end up in a negative feedback loop where their ability to succeed in social situations diminishes even as their depression grows due to a combination of fatigue and their social standing/reputation deteriorating due to their poor social performance or depression being recognized.

Why would you think that? I'm celibate because of it. Best decision I ever made that didn't involve fiction writing.

Well, there's the bit where you don't seem to be self-aware of how unhealthy you made yourself and your upbringing and your culture sound, I suppose. That could possibly be construed as a sign of harm.

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Y'see, I'm trying to make an appropriately fascetious comment, but I'm actually too distracted by trying to work out exactly what it is about her expression that's so unsettling.

The gormless of the expression? The empty eyes? The vapid gape? I dunno. Whatever it is, it's quite creepy...

Perhaps it's a combination of her expression and the repetition of the loop, but all that's giving me is the impression someone has lobotomised her and she's doing that repetive action disorder-thingy you sometimes see in mentally-disturbed badly-treated captive animals (which probably has a proper name for both humans and animals, of course, but I'm a necromancer, not a psychologist.)

The lighting definitely doesn't do her any favors, no.

Pretending anger is a fixable bug in our social programming is dangerous nonsense. Its something we have to learn to live with.

Reducing violence when men are rejected or dumped or feel like their position in a relationship is threatened is a highly desirable goal, however, so we should at least explore our options there rather than write it off as impossible before even trying anything. Or at least they certainly like to trot out that line about current and former lovers being the most likely murderer of a woman.

Reads like more stuff from Laasanen's comment sections.

Ahh. I suppose it has been a while since I re-read the article in its entirety, but it feels like it disagrees with him rather than whining that women are evil as he seems to.

One thing to think of is the fact that for a species, sex is a matter of life and death. Natural selection would hence suggest that gender roles tend to optimize towards those that help propagate a species. Thus, altering basic breeding psychology of a species is a good way to cause population collapse.

That's a bit fatalistic to jump to the conclusion that working to reduce and eliminate sexual harassment and sexual violence would lead to us no longer having the sex drive to propagate the species though. If that was even your point in bringing up altering human breeding psychology = no more humans or if you even intended to directly link altering breed psychology to humans in the context of sexual harassment.

[Lorsa]

Wow, this thread went off the rails completely. I am trying to figure out how we got here but have no idea...

I must say though that I read the "5 ways modern men are trained to hate women" and a lot of other suggestions here to how men feel and what they're supposed to do and how our natural instincts are this or that and I don't recognise it at all.

Interesting though is that Cracked put forward it as "trained to", which implies socialisation. In any case I've never felt society owes me a hot girl. I sure wouldn't mind being in a romantic relationship with a girl (preferably intelligent rather than hot), but owe me? No. Then it is claiming that there are actual occassions when women aren't thinking about sex, implying that men always do. I certainly don't always think about sex and couldn't care less how female politicians look. I care about their politics. Then it gets into the "oh men can't fight their urge to have sex" and "will always blame the girl for their erection" and both of those statements are quite far from my own experience. I never had any problems ignoring sexual attraction or arousal, it's hardly some impossible to control urge you are a slave to. Then it gets into really ridicolous arguments like stolen "manhood" (whatever that is and why I should even care I fail to understand) and that we feel powerless. Well it's true that we ARE powerless as far as romantic attraction goes. It's not like every person has a button that says "press here and I will be attracted to you". I don't have control over MY OWN romantic feelings. Sometimes I will fall for someone, sometimes I will not. I can only assume it works the same for women. So in that regard we are all powerless. But it would have been very boring if we could predict romantic attraction with 100% certainity.

Maybe it's just me, but I've often felt like all the "this is how men are" or "this is what men are supposed to do" are complete bull****. They very rarely describe me, so either it's wrong or I am not a man at all.

I think the largest problem as far as dating rules go is, like someone said upthread, that we don't really have any. Noone really knows what to do, what is expected of them and what the expected response is. Like I said, back in the Victorian era, there were clear rules for which women the men should ask for a dance, how many times they could ask a single woman etc. Similarly there were rules for the women, when they had to say yes and when they were allowed to say no and for what reasons. I by no means think it was perfect, but at least people knew what to do.

Today we have some form of diluted mess of old "rules" (misinterpreted) where important parts that made the whole function has been removed. They certainly teach you a lot about sex and procreation in school, but they say nothing about how you're supposed to get there. We're all fumbling in the dark. I think we either have to drop all the implicit diluted "rules" completely or construct a system that will work in modern society.

And whatever the rest of the animal kingdom does really have no impact on our society. While it's true that the only thing that differs us from the rest of the animals is scale, it's a very large scale. You couldn't even measure the difference between a rabbit and a dog with the scale you have to use to measure the difference between a gorilla and a human. It wouldn't be visible. Looking at what other animals are doing and using that as parallells or basis for human behavior is an idea I can't understand at all. We are vastly different from all other animals.

[Aotrs Commander]

That is why the woman above looks like she wants a piece of Aotrs Commander, really; a rocket launcher is a rather heavy and expensive thing to have, nevermind illegal - and what does a Lich, a being of great arcane firepower, really do with such a weapon?

Shooting tanks, obviously! A fully shielded heavy MBT is considerably harder to-

That's a rhetoric question, the answer is actually "nothing"; but it does tell our resident undead abomination has obscene amount of excess resources to spend on his majestic misantrophy. And that's hot.

...

Wha...

Buh...

Tha...

*skulldesk*

*skulldesk*

*skulldesk*

GRAAAAAGH!

Humans!

[Serpentine]

Maybe it's just me, but I've often felt like all the "this is how men are" or "this is what men are supposed to do" are complete bull****. They very rarely describe me, so either it's wrong or I am not a man at all.

I think things like that tend to be cultural trends brought down to individual levels, usually - in this case - for Cracked's hyperbolic and simplified style. It might not be wrong as a generalisation/observation of a trend, and if it doesn't apply to you then it certainly doesn't mean you're "not a man".
But hey, at least they backed up their observations with actual studies and evidence. Think about all the "women want..." and "this is how women are" and "this is what women do" "advice" that is thrown around even on this site's Relationships thread without anything but their own prejudices and subjective perspective to back it up.
tl;dr: The observed trends are at least backed up with evidence, but you're not wrong to take offence at the absolutist wording. I suggest keeping that in mind if you ever find yourself about to start a sentence with "Women" (not that I think you are likely to do something like that, but it's worth keeping in mind anyway).

WOW I BANGED ON ABOUT THAT POINT sorry rambly mood.

[Rain Dragon]

They very rarely describe me, so either it's wrong or I am not a man at all.

I feel the same way actually. Also most of the 'this is how women are' and 'this is what women are supposed to do' is really far from the truth and terrible. It has also made it hard for me in the past to view people without this bias because I simply didn't socialize very much. After I did, I discovered that most of 'this is how men are' and 'this is how women are' is complete rubbish and it makes me a little angry also. It is unfair to everybody.

Sorta on topic though, one of my friends breaks these stereotypes often and plays really, really badass female characters with only the best of backstories in MMOs with me. She had one male character at one point, but he was just a funny version of your average hippy elf.

Also on character models, I was playing with GW2 and found horns with very cool cogs, but it was only available on the female charr. I successfully made a female charr who looks kickass, but it was then very jarring to me to hear this smooth voice from her! Why do the male charr have these gruff, bestial voices and the female charr have amazing smooth lady voices? EDIT - To clarify, I just wanted a bestial lady voice out of her. She's a giant cat-wolf with horns for goodness' sake!

Ah well, back to my plant-person I suppose...

[Closet_Skeleton]

Now, you probably won't find a lot of self-extincting species, but traits don't need to be beneficial for the species as a whole.

Yes you will, because an overwhelming majority of the species that have ever existed are extinct.

Wow, this thread went off the rails completely. I am trying to figure out how we got here but have no idea...

Discussions naturally flow all over the place. The idea that a thread should stay on topic is completely artificial. That's part of why moderators need special powers.

Reducing violence when men are rejected or dumped or feel like their position in a relationship is threatened is a highly desirable goal, however, so we should at least explore our options there rather than write it off as impossible before even trying anything.

Bad treatment can be worse than doing nothing.

Or at least they certainly like to trot out that line about current and former lovers being the most likely murderer of a woman.

That doesn't mean anything on its own. If women want more chances to die in more varied ways they should get involved in organised crime more. Since domestic violence is the least easily avoidable form of violence, that statistic could just come from women being sensible.