I'm the only one who gets a talking to? Really? Whatever then, I'll just go fuck off and make everybody happy. jesus
Jesus, would you chill out, you assume to know exactly who I'm talking to? If you want to act that way fine. I didn't say fuck off, if you want me to say it fine then. FUCK OFF. There better now? Why are you getting your fruit of the looms in such a twit wad? All I asked you was to tone it down, (*bit thick*) that goes for you and everybody else.
Last edited by BrokenArts; 6th Jul 2012 at 23:25.
You did say my name.Yeah, this argument got stupid in a hurry, but why am I being singled out when DDL is just as complicit? How am I "laying it on thick" any more than DDL? It can't be just the "dethtoll is ruining TTLG" can it?
Last edited by dethtoll; 6th Jul 2012 at 23:31.
Dragon's Lair NES Remake Demo: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138312
Space Marine was fun, average though. Sexism accusations are kind of silly. In the lore women are represented well enough. Do they have to make She-Hulks to make it non sexist?
(note - the off-topic posts have been moved here)
Last edited by Al_B; 8th Jul 2012 at 13:39.
The male space marines are huge ugly brutes wearing a baroque tin-can. The sisters of battle appear to be wearing makeup, with armour that enhances their feminine figure. And massive, massive tits. Now, are we supposed to be in awe of their sheer bad-assery or are we supposed to, actually, ogle them? Or maybe both? Either way, it's carrying on the idea that you cannot have women in these things unless they look overtly sexy. Which is sexist. Durr. Let me put it this way, imagine Vasquez as a willowy raven-haired beauty with a 36-inch bust protruding over the top of her (for some reason scoop-necked) smartgun harness, coquettishly raising her shapely hips over one of her fucking high-heeled combat boots. Notice how fucking stupid that sounds?
"Imagine Vasquez as a hulking, heavily-scarred warrior, hair bleached white by plasma fire, with her bitter sneer almost hidden behind the enormous suit of power armour, crushing the face of a hive ganger beneath one of her giant power-assisted combat boots."
...that's kinda the impression the fiction has always given me. Kinda..terrifying armour zealot who also happens to be female.
(also, I wonder what Vasquez makes of this?)
But anyway, in other words (in your opinion), yes: GW did make the 40K universe more sexist by actually giving women a fighting role, rather than ignoring their existence completely?
I mean, that's fair enough as opinions go (though obviously my opinion differs), since it's a pretty easy thought-experiment to picture an entirely female-free fictional universe suddenly being peopled by "magical naked whorebots who love cock" or something. And that, I'd agree, would be more sexist than before. At the other end of the scale it's probably entirely possible to add female characters in a fashion that's wholly realistic and utterly inoffensive to absolutely everyone (possibly), so really we're just debating where we individually draw the line.
Is it also worth considering that 'sexy' is a fairly personal, opinion-based thing, too?
Giant hulking armour-clad zealots don't trip my "hell-oooo" button, big tits or not.
Perhaps I'm giving GW credit because I can imagine so many other, worse, ways they could implement something like this (again, see witch elves), but really: HOOO-AH! CHECK OUT THEM TITTIES is about the last thing that crosses my mind, which is why I'm so surprised at the (apparently) commonly held opinion that they're wearing sex-armour and that "giant armour-clad hooters = hawt".
Apart from Boob-plates, it occurs to me the greaves on sororitas armour are more slender and shapely, as opposed to the bulky and stompy style on marines.
Overall, I really don't think they're all that bad as far as gratuitously sexy depictions go. I wouldn't be particularly embarassed if female friends saw the fanart, anyway. Still it's worth acknowleding when these tropes are in effect, ie armour meant to remind us a bit us of "appealing female form". But I mean, i've not seen official artwork of them giving a come hither look, or doing a tits and ass pose. Actually they seem a bit hard-bitten and stony.
I don't think it's okay to shrug off getting it wrong in one way by claiming that, if you make any effort, you'll just get told you're getting it wrong the other way. That's a cop out.That sort of comes back to my point regarding "include no women: cause no offense, include women: get criticised to hell for not depicting them exactly right,
That said 40k doesn't currently have a lot of opportunties to add women anyway. Lady-marines would mean re-writing too much integral lore. Necrons are robots. Tau, well, we might not be able to tell anyway.
Orks have been written as reproducing from spores or something. I guess we could say there are female orks, that would be quite a challenge ie does anyone want savage\brutish women? Which I guess is another aspect of the sexism topic.
The most equal-opportunities armies are probably eldar, who mix in ladies in their regular troops. Some boob-plates in there too, altho eldar armour is (unlike marines) quite form-fitting in general.
Really the best move GW could make is to add more female guard, in totally regular guard armour, like that woman in the Space Marine game.
Well, pretty much anything worn by a sister of battle is going to be more slender and shapely then on a space marine, simply by virtue of not being on a space marine.
Yeah, this is an odd place for a sexism in WH40K discussion, seeing as there is 1 woman in all of Space Marine, and zero sexiness to it.
Right, putting women in something or not putting women in something has nothing to do with sexism. Is Das Boot sexist because it doesn't have any women in it? no. Would it be more sexist if they stuck a big-boobed valkyrie in the engine room wearing high-heels and makeup? Yes. If you put men and women doing equivalent roles with the same practical demands in the same thing, but the women have to dress sexier, then that's sexist.
Not that it's on the same level, but that line of argument makes the minstrel show non-racist because at least they were trying to represent black people.
/threadOriginally Posted by Vivian
Only 5 pages and 110 posts before someone summed up the issue in as few words as possible, AND managed to do so without insulting any other forum members in the process! I believe that's a new TTLG record. Well done Viv.
I'm pretty sure I went to fairly extensive lengths to explain exactly what I meant, with reductio ad absurdum examples, even. What you really mean here is "putting women in something or not putting women in something does not necessarily correlate with sexism", which is not even close to "has nothing to do with". It's not just whether or not X is present, it's also how X is depicted.
This is almost entirely the same as your minstrel example: A show with a realistic blend of ethnicities and no offensive stereotyping is (presumably?) less racist than one an all-white cast, which in turn is less racist than one with an all-white cast pretending to be ethnic stereotypes. This is not the issue.
A better analogy for our situation here (though given that we're already -apparently- conflating sexism and racism, we're fairly off piste already) might be a show that features a realistic blend of ethnicities but that also features some arguable stereotyping. Whether this is more or less racist than a wholly aryan lineup is a more difficult question, yes? On the one hand: yay diversity. On the other: boo stereotyping.
And the degree to which each of those aspects actually features in the show has a huge influence on where the show might fall on the more/less racist spectrum. Does that make sense?
Coming back to armour-zealots, I guess what I find most surprising is the focus on the physical: I'm mostly of the mind that people can be of all sizes and shapes, and criticising a given fiction for having huge tits is basically saying "huge tits are a ludicriously sexist trope"...which isn't terribly nice to those women who DO have huge tits, especially since many of them are pretty fed up of the things anyway.
Breast size should not ideally be an indicator of anything other than breast size. If we assume that any body size and shape is permitted, it doesn't really matter what size the tits are.
What concerns me more is behaviour: if you're a person fighting in a war that features fucking lascannons and rocket launchers, you are not going to go out in a croptop and leather thigh boots, are you? Thus, if they were depicted as doing so, I would find that highly indicative that the depiction is solely to make them look sexy: there's really no other reason to wear a bikini to a gunfight. As it happens, they wear giant suits of chunky armour, which I thoroughly approve of. Plus hey: if they DO have huge tits under that armour, at least they're wearing appropriate support.
Obviously there are potentially finer narrative constraints within that (like the propensity to not wear helmets), but this is a problem with the fiction as a whole.
Does that make sense?
Last edited by DDL; 10th Jul 2012 at 06:20.
Except the long hair, no helmet and pretty face with a makeup you mean.
I can hardly fault them for having a woman with long hair, as there are an awful lot of those. No helmet....but really, IG armor is so worthless it's amazing any of them both with it.
Makeup though? I thought that was blood and grime.
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