Dang, I feel like I've done some serious harm to this thread... better do something, quick! Uhm, Anita Sarkeesian is a dumb bitch and the RPS guys have vaginas! Am I right, MEN?

There, that oughta do it. Right back on track.

http://sports.cbsimg.net/images//visual/whatshot/Zimmerman062812.gif

This is not a statement that has any basis in anything, but I think homosexual relations were much more common in ancient Greece, so maybe to some degree culture can influence even such things as sexual preferences.

But sexual contacts were much more casual then, so homosexual intercourse might've had nothing to do with actual orientation.

But even if that was true, I don't see any single problem with that.

The main argument in that video seemed to be that women are judged by their appearance (e.g. not getting as good jobs etc. if they are not beautiful), while the same doesn't happen with men.

That argument falls flat on its face considering that e.g. tall men get more salary and better careers than short and feeble men. So yes, men are also judged in the labor market by their appearance. Maybe a bit differently than women, but still. That's why e.g. leg surgeries to get more height are so popular in China, where millions of fresh graduates are seeking job.

Overall, beautiful and more handsome people, both women and men, have more doors open and get more opportunities in life. So what else is new?

Nope, the argument was that it's not a problem in the same way for men. Men aren't expected to meet beauty ideals based on their sex -- it's not tall men that get more money, it's tall people who get more money.

Also, what about the second argument, that men have more variety to choose from?

I'd rather say "people who would like to play as female characters" have less choices.

For me, the distinction "men play want to play as male characters and women want to play as female ones" simply doesn't work.

You are right, of course, but in this instance it was specifically about how the portrayal of men in video games affects men.

You're using elements from thousands of years ago which involves so much conjecture they're pointless. Did the Greece have more gay people or was it simply not a taboo? Did more people experiment back then due to a lack of taboo? Or maybe these days we have the same amount, but it's just harder to admit it due to social stigma? I think homosexuality is NOT determined by culture but experimentation is.

Yes, I think that's true. homosexual intercourse back then was more of a "fun thing to do", so it didn't have much to do with actual sexual orientation, a concept which was rather unkknown back then.

Pedophilia on the other hand, seems to be a purely cultural concept. A concept I wholesomely agree with, but not so long ago banging 14 year olds by 50 year old was acceptable, at least among nobles. Age of consent still is purely arbitrary number based in cultural grounds mostly.

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/07/15/size-does-matter-taller-men-earn-more/

"Unfortunately, a recently published study by the international research firm Wiley-Blackwell revealed that taller people, particularly men, earn more money."

Overall, people just prefer to be around people who are beautiful/handsome, young and healthy looking, tall (particularly tall men), slim, intelligent, social, funny etc. They like to be less around people who are ugly, fat, dumb, humorless, asocial etc. I don't see the point of raising only the women beauty as some kind of problem case of these. These appearance bias things affect a lot also men. That's just how the cookie crumbles.

And men do have meet certain ideals in their appearance. Handsome, young and healthy looking men get a different treatment in the society.

What more variety? In games? Publishers will publish any kind of games that sell well. If a game with a sexy hunk protagonists suddenly sold like hotcakes because all hetero females and gay men bought it, they'd make more and more such games.

Frankly, I think most women wouldn't simply care for such games. Overall they seem to like Bejeweled, The Sims and Farmville much more.

No. But I still believe in evolution.

Well duh. One doesn't really need to "believe" in it, it's a fairly simple and obvious concept. That's like saying that you "believe" in gravity.
I'll tell you the climax of the story either way: the guy was from the Unites States, just as I had suspected. From what I have gathered over the years about this particular country, there seem to exist sport teams of different kinds in most (if not all) schools there. Members of such sport teams are the fabled "jocks" I've been hearing about for years, and as far as I know, they tend to be generally popular with the opposite sex. That's the stereotype anyway. With this in mind, it is fairly trivial for a guy to claim that women (that is: girls) fawn excessively over athletes. A sociologist would've probably conducted a study, a poll or something; an anthropologist would have investigated... Since the author was in the evolutionary psychology camp, he simply wrapped the case by concluding that this is an inevitable consequence of human evolution, something inexorably ingrained in our DNA from the very dawn of mankind.
Keep in mind - this story is not didactic, nor indicative of anything too general, it's merely a personal anecdote of mine. Take it for what it is...

Try Internet Gaming News IGN!

Were you huffing paint? What does orientation has to do with anything?

The nutty evopsych screed is that there are persistent standards of beauty for (heterosexual) men and women which were determined by evolution, fitness for childbirth / child rearing / providing for the family and all that shit. Things like hip to waist ratio, preference for clothing cuts and colors, preference for hair length and colors, etc. And this is provably, in some cases obviously, bollocks.

There's a picture of David Hasselhoff that Cracked.com likes to use as a boner killer. On an evolutionary scale, it's an extremely recent picture. It used to be considered sexy when it was taken; now it's the missing ingredient in the religious right's abstinence education.
Other examples include:
"women have a natural preference for pink and pastel colors in general; pastels are unmanly" - wrong! Pastels on men weren't seen in ~250 years but totally did a comeback in the 2000s; pink is an early 1900 reversal;
"long hair is feminine" - hello wigs and hair metal;
"hourglass figure" - those atrocious dresses with the narrowest horizontal immediately below the tits (not to mention large T&A are sporadically considered vulgar);
fat in general - the Russian word for "thin" is literally "bad", "broken", "unfit", "useless" (khudoj);
facial hair - there was a time when it meant you were old, a hobo, binge drinking, or an effeminate villain;
tucking the shirt in - years ago, you were supposed to show your damn waistline;
appearing strong and able to protect your woman - hippies and emo, nuff said (if hippies were supposed to stand up for their convictions, emo can't stand up for shit by definition);
"fluffy skirts on women accentuate their whatnot" - see medieval Japan;
"symmetry is pleasing to the eye because it means you're not a genetic freak" - asymmetry is everywhere, don't even get me started;
"looking healthy" in general - corpselike pallor;
"looking rich" - fucking hipsters.

(Really, the only thing that has stayed constant is the beauty industry's pressure to actually *be* rich, because the whole point of the beauty industry is to sell you shit.)

So while evopsych nuts, like other self-respecting pseudoscientists, can shit out an evopsych explanation for any beauty trend you care to name (beards on men are sexy because it's their sexual characteristic! clean-shaven men are sexy because it means they have time for personal grooming and are thus neat, healthy, successful, and able to provide!), they can't actually account for changes occurring seven orders of magnitude faster than any evolutionary process can be.

edit: missed a word