One should never underestimate someone in high heels (and a wig).
https://youtu.be/-yvU6sifwkI?t=61

Kenneth Zucker practiced reparative therapy, which is extremely unethical. I already posted some links earlier in the thread, but here are some links (which could very well be the same ones).

Also, I don't think any of his former patients have high opinions of him.

http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/kenneth-zucker.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/News/Drop%20the%20Barbie.htm
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2016/02/placing-ken-zuckers-clinic-in.html

I wonder how long before that triggers feminists?

like

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/06/09/feminists-freak-out-over-miss-nevada-suggestion-women-learn-self-defense-n1849213
&
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386267/feminists-say-roofie-detecting-nail-polish-actually-also-rape-culture-katherine-timpf

Guys, I am concerned. Watch video to understand.

https://youtu.be/miEM_J4o1z4
Look, I don't remember where I found it, but a group of specialists in child development warned that gender theory was detrimental to children and even harmed transgender people.

dtgreene, that does NOT help your case. he was lied about what he was. Dr. Money used a very unfortunate incident to confuse an innocent victim of circumstance. & I don't see how the current drive (by some) to confuse more children of what they are can end any better.

To be quite honest, I have only partially kept up with this and caught tidbits here and there. While I am certainly open to the idea of this being the case, I find myself still skeptical because I am having trouble finding direct evidence other than hearsay. Considering one patient has already been caught not actually being a patient and speaking badly of Zucker, it would seem a smear campaign took place making other testimony questionable.

I would certainly be interested to see any official review and observation of the practices he had in place. If I get a chance, I'll check out some of his officially published research and maybe gain some insight there. So far though I can only find blogs or magazine articles based on people who claim to be patients or activists, and as we've seen, that can be incredibly unreliable.

Anyway, I am not going to risk derailing this thread and so I will certainly concede this example until I can research it a little further. This just goes back to my closing statement though in a previous post. There is so much conflicting information and outrage/hatred to sort through that it makes discussions difficult for these kind of topics.

Your last sentence is the most based argument I have seen in weeks.

You shouldn't... for one, these topics are unfortunately now On Topic - and not even because of dtgreene... that said greene has an obvious bias in these topics which somewhat clouds their logic. Much as I respect them for their beliefs, I don't find it commendable when I see them let their emotions get the better of them.

Parent - child relationships are grey rather than the black and white oppressor power dynamics that are assumed as universal when discussing these topics by activists of either side. I suspect personal experiences play a part in the undue extrapolations. You can see very clearly for example, how arguments from anecdote are mentioned so often - as you know, anything can be proven via emotional appeal. In this case it's literally for the children. I'm sure transphobic activists can find examples of tragic consequences due to actions they disagree with and consider unethical...

Such arguments should not be given much weight, regardless of the side argued for, and the underlying truth is closer to where you started - certainly when it comes to the firing and the "independent" report that lead to it. The psychological / neurological debates about how to approach a situation where a child expresses some opinion / preference on gender are significantly less clear - despite dogmatic approaches by extremists. There was a pretty good article trying to offer a rounded view of the controversy posted. Let me see if I find it for you. If you want to go into primary sources a primer of sorts should help you get bearings.

Here you go. This is another great example of the kind of SJW activism causing real damage. Gaming is peanuts compared to the importance of these issues.

The question I have is, why is this even problematic to begin with? Why is being feminine such a bad thing and why must women mimic male patterns? As a woman, nothing about the way the girl sits in the video suggests she isn't confident like the male character. To me, she is simply sitting as many women do, knees bent and together. Just browsing pictures of men and women on a picnic will show how many women enjoy sitting in a similar fashion.

So, what is the problem? The only one I can see is Anita taking a very standard situation and projecting her negative feelings/values onto it, feelings that not everyone shares.

I do enjoy how she later rants on about the "male gaze" though. Sorry, but both genders gaze at each other. It is part of what makes us human and desire one another. I mean, are we really going to argue this Kraft salad dressing ad (probably nsfw) isn't for women to gaze long and hard at? We all do it and to imply otherwise is disingenuous.

This may come as a shock, but women kicking ass in high heels can be seen as fun. There is something empowering about being both feminine and badass at the same time. Not to mention, as has already been shown, women can fight and maneuver well in high heels if they are adept with them.

This is one of the main problems with Anita. She implies a lot of these things are a serious issue for women and act as though she speaks with authority on the matter. She doesn't. Many women love this kind of stuff and do not find it problematic. Earlier today I was talking to my friend about Overwatch and inadvertently ended up browsing cosplay pictures related to the game. Know what? There is only one woman I could find dressed as Zarya, the muscular female character, but countless women dressed as Widow and Tracer who wear skin tight and revealing clothes. While not a scientific study, this certainly suggests women in general prefer sexy and fun over all else.

As for wanting something actually controversial, I already touched on this not too long ago but never saw a reply. I apologize in advance if I missed it though. Check post 7183 if you would like to see how much Anita misrepresents the medium and lies to fit an agenda. I would link it directly, but when I double check that the link is correct it is sending me to the following post on the next page. :/

They are scientific frameworks within which the debate as started by Anita Sarkeesian takes place and outside of which it usually does not. To make it more explicit, when people fall back to ad hominem attacks, they very explicitly leave the debate ("lies", "crook", "con artist", "dishonest", "social justice warrior" etc.).


You know that's not my form of the argument. The intent isn't 'malicious' per se. The intent is – and you may see how clear cut the cases are in this video – to provide jolts of sexual excitation for the straight white male player. Pointing that out usually gets you a "that's not true" or a "yeah so what". The latter explicitly acknowledges that jolt (that's, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers' argument). But let me put a Kurina quote in here quickly because it concerns the very same thing –


As at least Shadowstalker may have come to understand in the meantime, "sexy" characters aren't problematic; neither is erotic content in games for adults. There's ample sex positivity in Sarkeesian's team and the people who support her, and Sarkeesian herself has stated that games are an ideal medium to investigate sex and sexuality.


The male soldiers don't exhibit a "male pattern". They exhibit an ungendered one.

You can sit like a Disney Princess if you like, I can sit like that if I like. It's a female gender signifier that isn't inherently good or bad in itself. However, if I see a bunch of US army soldiers sitting like that, regardless of gender, I get cramps laughing. The animator basically went with a proper, ungendered seating posture for the male models and then desperately searched for some kind of female way of sitting. It's the same mistake many writers make, writing men as actual people and women as a caricature of stereotypically female traits.

Why the soldier should sit like she's at a "picnic" is completely and utterly beyond me.


I do see that fun in the Bayonetta games, as do e.g. feminist critics Katherine Cross or Dina Abou Karam. As to seeing it in supposedly realist ventures focusing on soldiers and other battle hardened veterans... errrr...


The form of the argument here is that games almost exclusively employ a male gaze perspective. And I assure you, would a game employ an express female gaze, this game would be deemed "SJW" material. And the feminist folks who may love that particular game would be deemed 'dishonest' because they supposedly were against sex in games yesterday.


I've written up a decently sized text immediately after you posted that, but then my telephone rang, it was the 1950s and they asked for their reverse sexism argument back. You're caught in repetitive and circular argumentative structures, in which e.g. enemies going 'poof' off the screen suddenly does not add to a certain objectification any more – just because technical constraints may be responsible for that rapid decomposition.

In short, what I saw at work there is a desire to interpret every word spoken by Sarkeesian as a personal accusation towards the designers. When the accusation was missing, which was the only thing you were looking for, you decided that the argument was missing and the argumentative structure was dishonest. But the argument was objectification, not the attribution of responsibility.

All that pointed back to Jack Thompson's form of the argument there (see above), and I didn't want to repeat that back then. Sure, if you interpret Tropes vs. Women as an attack on the industry and on gamers, you will find the arguments 'inconsistent' and even 'dishonest', because you're mistaken in your assumption. It's circular reasoning.


Authority comes from the people who support the theoretic proposal, not from Sarkeesian herself. Mostly, from the people who don't really see all this as anything particularly new. A whole lot of people. But theory remains theory. If you can not recognize the tropes with your experience as a gamer, you can not personally and subjectively validate the theory. Which, in a respectively small percentage, is damaging to the proposal after all.

So she can allege reasons why something was put in the game bringing the designers under fire in her critiques but people critiquing her cannot allege dishonesty or other stuff that has real world grounds in their critique of her?
And what are ''they''? And ofc don't confuse astronomy with astrology here. Psuedo-scientific.

So you can assume the game is specifically designed to do this, this and this; thereby reading the mind of the developer and claim it as fact? And then condemn it as sexist? I'm talking about principle here. Then why can't other ''critics'' look at a trans character in a game and spread their opinion as fact that the game is an SJW game? The principle behind this is dishonest. Its is assuming motive. If you support this, than you support the other example as well, unless you think its OK since its ''for a good cause''.

I didn't understand this at all. Anita? Sex positive? What next? Oh, in ''her team''? What about in her critiques? Its an ''ideal medium to investigate sex''? What does that even mean? More 1950s era ''you are what media you consume'' BS?

And stereotyping anyone in art is wrong because..........? Give me objective reasons and not tumblr stuff like ''its bad writing'' There is no such thing as objectively bad writing.

No one had a problem with Hot Ryu. No one complains about any of the fighting game characters with ''unrealistic'' muscles. No one complained about Raiden's naked scene in MGS2. No one complained about the male Dragon's Crown characters. No one complained about male sexualization in games ever. You're thinking up probable behaviors from some enemy concept.

I'd like to talk about this bit..
1) this "ungendered" sitting pose would called manspreading by feminists if a man sat that way in real life.

2) I see that apparently you intimately know the dev team. How else would you know about their desperations.

3) Maybe, just maybe the idea for that pose is to convey the idea she is relaxing. While she is a soldier, that she isn't just a soldier

No mater how much you are right, delving deeper into this topic would be derailling the thread: needless thing if it is so easy to open new one or move the debate to more appropriate site altogether. So in this case Kurina's truth beats yours :). In my humble opinion, as far as I can tell you both agree that the unacceptable part of the whole affair was the way how was Kenneth Zucker removed, that's important.

By the way, thanks for the links; this one and that about "tribes" too.

But allow me to drag things to less intellectual level. Last paragraph of this article match my chief personal disagreement with the general acceptance of the premise of usual "SJW" issues so well that I paste it here directly:
Anyway, if the question the researchers were trying to answer is “Does playing a certain type of video game have a big enough effect on enough players’ behavior for us to be concerned, based on this study?,” there shouldn’t be a need for such meticulous hunting for indirect effects. And if the answer to that question is, in fact, “Well, maybe playing those games has a slight effect, assuming XYZ is also true, and the player responds to a particular stimulus in a particular way, and also … ” then a more useful way to rephrase the answer would be “Nope, not really.”

Why we are fighting over factual accuracy of every tidbit in (for example) Anita Sarkeesian videos instead of talking about the relevance of it as a whole? Why answering statements like "X is sexist!" with "no it isn't" instead of "and we should be concerned, because...?".

I try to do that and everyone is aware of it. But all the butthurt over female characters and representation is centered around that any discussion of it tends to wander into it because that's really the only way the two sides can have a conversation on the matter. Otherwise, all the stuff Anita and others say is guesswork and fancy (which I think they are).