I wish more feminists were more like you, then. But I think it would be hard to argue that the things FC listed weren't advocated by feminists as feminism, and you were cleared out of the room.
I'm sympathetic to people like you who may have been boxed out by a wayward media machine - in much the same way I think many reasonable LGBTQ voices got boxed out by the strident 'blockers before 18' movement sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I can't help but be suspicious that both groups suppressed their misgivings due to outgroup fear, the want to not be a 'bad ally', or were content to soak up the secondary benefits up until it looked like they might be drying up.
Two straight men can play 'gay chicken', even while being fully aware of each others hetero credentials. It's still called 'gay chicken' for a reason.
That's the lab environment. Most straight men have little patience for 'gay behavior' sprung on them in the wild, even from a friend. I feel quite sure this is something innate albeit socially mediated depending on culture and/or subculture.
DTulpa
13d ago
I don't want to weird out my friend. You could say "No true friend would care if you're a closeted homosexual and why would you want to be friendly to such a person", but the fact of the matter is that many friendships are conditional on one not giving somebody else the ick.
And the need to not signal homosexuality is infinitely stronger when it comes to women, if for different but much more obvious reasons.
The only people who could be confused by this are a very small minority of women and asexual aspies.
DTulpa
14d ago
It's fine for a character to gloat and talk out of his ass. In an RPG, can I call him out in dialogue?
I can tell arrogant Mr Euro that nobody gives a shit about his country and USA #1 if he wants to talk that way on my turf (no offense to Europeans, just making a point). Can I do the same with Musa? All I've read indicates that you're kind of saddled with this guy for much of the game with no real way to push back or drop him.
It's like when an RPG has a self-announced trans character who clearly functions as a mouthpiece for normalizing transness or to extract sympathy, and my only responses consist of "That's so great and brave for you, m'lady!" or choosing another topic. Being gagged like that is frustrating.
If I can't talk back to these people because the dev is squeamish about writing 'problematic' dialogue or risking the gaze of game journos, then at least give me the option to kill them for whatever reason I feel like.
DTulpa
1mo ago
DTulpa
2mo ago
This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?
I've never been convinced on this.
DTulpa
3mo ago
He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.
That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.
Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".
DTulpa
3mo ago
I think wokeness was on the ascent prior to Trump descending the escalator. While it did get turbo-charged under Trump, it also clearly revealed itself and was increasingly unable to sanewash its prescriptions through anodyne description (ie. "Do you seriously take issue with an academic approach to female representation in media? Seriously, a problem with academics?"). Without Trump, I think the poison pills could have gone unnoticed for longer.
And 2024 is not 2016. There was a period where culture makers could more freely indulge their fantasies of a mythical Modern Audience that would monetarily reward their tainted output. In the time since, we have had major, recurring flops across multiple industries, and some clear indicators that audiences aren't chomping on this hook. There will be some token displays of staying in the fight, but this experiment has mostly failed. Important money men will want to pivot away.
DTulpa
3mo ago
Mine was a unicorn shitting glitter or something.
I really, really hate it.
DTulpa
3mo ago
His recent episode with the Triggernometry guys had discussion on it. He thinks it was ill-advised for a political event, but... eh, predictable consensus is that this is nothing.
DTulpa
3mo ago
Within 24 hours of Tony's joke, I saw the Kamala campaign go all-out with some rhetoric to help/'save' Puerto Rico. Like they saw this as a moment to seize and run with, but it just radiates opportunism and desparation.
There's an insufferable, overprotective maternal vibe the Dems give off when talking about blacks or LGBTQ or whatever else. Extending that act to a stale PR joke is quite a look, and I don't know anybody who is impressed with it.
My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?
I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.
I don't have much sympathy for the various creative professions getting their oxen gored. Partly because social media has made me lose respect for many of them, their output quality is not commensurate with their whining, and I won't be sad to see them needing employment elsewhere. But also because I can't even see my own regular 'office job' being spared once the tech is good enough. I'm rather clear-eyed about the inevitabilities of this stuff. But I also foresee further alienation that humans may learn to live with but won't necessarily solve.
I think many women are lovely enough right up until you hit a hair trigger about Trump, politics, or whatever. And the tragedy of this situation is that this obstacle seems misguidedly imposed from one side of the gender dynamic. To quote a line from a pop song I can't really remember: "You're standing in your own way".
Is this kind of filtering 'working'? I guess you could say it is on an individual level, although I think even that's questionable, as I believe a lot of women are missing out on good catches with this zero-tolerance approach. Is this a good dynamic for dating writ large? Probably not given the endless bitching about it and the metrics getting fairly sloped.
A smaller irritant in the mix is watching the fuse on this behavior run down. I know women now in their late 30s or early 40s who suddenly pine for 'traditionally masculine' types, with their younger and luckier cohorts marrying red-hat yokels that take care of them - after years of setting up razor wire around that type of guy. You wish they'd gotten the act out of their system earlier. By comparison men will swallot a lot from their partners as long you're not screaming in their face or getting nasty about what TikTok has you mad about this week. A moderate 'blue hair' could be entirely dateable to most woke-averse men (assuming decently attractive and yada yada) as long as being political isn't the front and center of their being or a lense everything is seen through.
I used to see more couples in my life argue about politics without it ending in breakup or divorce. It seemed normal to me: you bicker about the 8 PM news a bit, you silently roll your eyes at thing your partner said, then you go to bed together before the next day of life's experiences - you know, the important part. To see this done away with so trivially is sad.
Are you interested in converting Republicans en masse overnight, or chipping away at this distrust over time? If you're hoping for some audit to prove the election's integrity and get everybody to issue a mea culpa that same day - good luck. I think you're setting yourself up for the "Gosh, they're so unreachable" conclusion you seem to be angling for. And I'd expect said mea culpa to arrive at the same time as the many others I'd want from Democrats by now - which is never.
Best you can hope for is people quietly dropping it out of embarrassment, in much the same way many Republicans quietly stopped supporting the War On Terror when that albatross got too fat.
I'm more suspicious of Hollywood's activities lately than you are, but I'll grant that the money men are likely signing off on wokeness and subversion under the hilarously wrong belief that there is a Modern Audience waiting to be tapped like a goldmine. It's what looks like doubling down in the face of failures that raises my eyebrow. But we'll see how that shakes out soon enough given the time delays inherently baked into producing a work.
I'll also throw in that it looks like there is a schism/rebellion between the bean-counting side and the creatives - or even creative Leads and their subordinates. From another sphere: If the CEO of Ubisoft really wants to assuage concerns about political messaging in his products and deny that's their intent, he will reliably face mini-revolts and public shaming from his very own employees that are dead set on 'doing the right thing'. I very much believe that the latter does not care about profit (at least as much) and is comfortable failing sideways out of the company's carcass to other dev houses where they can repeat it all again while barely losing any skin, if at all. And to boot, they do very much hate me from what I can tell.
If those people largely comprise the tools we have to work with, it may not actually matter what an executive's intentions are.
DTulpa
4mo ago
Everything I've heard and read about this film sounds like it's almost apologizing for audiences liking the first one so much.
DTulpa
4mo ago
Yes, it still means nothing. It's just that very few men would even use the word, or have those experiences described in such a way in pop media.
DTulpa
4mo ago
It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness? People will still call it Fort Bragg out of reflex. It also sounds cooler than 'Fort Liberty'.
And is there anything truly terrible about consciously refusing to use its new name if you think the entire sentiment animating "NAME CHANGE FOR JUSTICE NOW" is toxic?
DTulpa
4mo ago
And yet my experience with old people is that they fight tooth and nail not to be dropped at a home, and the ones there lament not being able to stay at their real homes or with family.
Preferable to dying in a street, but not what I'd call 'utopian'.
DTulpa
5mo ago
I actually watched that debate and was stumped by that consensus. I didn't think he crushed her or anything, but he was the clear victor to my eyes.
I think it's worth considering the 'fly factor' for that. The image of a bug stuck to his head wrote all sorts of jokes in the aftermath, and it would be enough to do him in.
Leaving aside that I think "equality between men and women" is a fairly empty balloon with a lot of details to be filled in - you must appreciate that the kind of feminism promoted in the meanstream are the materials we have to work with.
I respect your position on an interpersonal basis. But it doesn't really mean much outside of that. I think my disposition is still fairly liberal in the 90s/00s sense of the term. And I can fully see the argument that 'liberalism' today is far more authoritarian and fails to live up to its own namesake. But at a certain point, I am wasting everybody's time if I insist that wokescolds aren't 'liberal'.
Maybe that could change, and it will fold back on itself and meet me where I planted my feet a decade ago. I will have reclaimed 'liberalism'. But in the meantime, I'm not going to fight how the term is used in most conversations. I might put down an asterisk, but the conversation must proceed.
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