Has The World REALLY Changed?

Today, a friend directed me to a blog post from pitcher Curt Schilling.
You can find the blog post here: The world we live in, man has it changed

I'll sum it up here: Schilling, if you're not familiar is a bit of a loud mouth retired pitcher.  He's right wing, he's got some pretty unsavory political views (my opinion, obviously).  The guy doesn't believe in evolution, and "joked" that he'd been snubbed for the Baseball Hall of Fame because he's a republican. Just giving you a little background.

 However, he's also a parent and a proud one. His daughter was accepted to college, and like a proud dad, he tweeted that she was accepted to play softball at a school.  He was then inundated with the slime. What I mean by "the slime" is the rude, suggestive and downright disgusting things that people feel they are entitled to say to total strangers, particularly when those strangers are public figures.

The problem isn't that people were rude and disrespectful to him, that he can handle and has been handling for years. The issue is that this was all aimed at his young daughter.  The tweets range from "can't wait to date her" to graphic threats of rape, gang rape and murder. And they didn't just tweet them at Schilling.  Oh no, they tweeted them at his daughter.  And they sent them to her as direct messages.

Now, Schilling is shocked--shocked, I tell you!- that this sort of behavior exists in the world and that it would be directed at his kid, and that they'd say it right out loud like that.  He's suffered the slings and arrows of being in the public eye as social media has developed over the last couple of decades.  He's had insults and likely a few threats here and there hurled at home for a long time. And he's cool with that.  The problem with this situation is that he's a dude.  And until social media trolls unleashed their slime on a woman close to him, his daughter, he just didn't believe that people said things like that.  What he seems to miss in this situation is that this isn't actually about him, it's about her. And the way we, as a society, treat her for being a her.  And people have been treating her--us--pretty horribly for a long time.

Women who speak up in public places (like social media, politics, business, etc) get this sort of abuse and threats of violence (usually sexual violence) every day on twitter. EVERY DAY. If the whole gamergate fiasco taught us nothing, it was that.  But GG was hardly the starting point for abuse of women in social media, it just got more play in the news.  Lindy West wrote a piece in December 2014 that expresses this fairly nicely for The Daily Dot.  She wrote the piece after her own experience of trying to report abusers and harassers on Twitter (spoiler alert: Twitter did almost nothing).

This isn't about one father trying to protect his daughter, it's about allowing all 'other' people, in this case specifically women, to speak and exist freely on social media. It's about believing women when they report the abuse. Note that Schilling was never threatened with rape, only his daughter. This is about the toxic masculinity that we teach men, about the way we devalue girls and women for being female, and about the way that it's okay for men (and boys) to view women as objects and tools. In this case, Schilling's daughter was literally used as a tool to offend and shock him by threatening her.

Believe it or not, social media is an extension of our own societal views (like it or not) being expressed publicly. It's not about these specific guys, it's about the way that we think it's okay for men to treat and interact with women.  The language these days is more graphic, that I will grant you.  However, the truth is that the only thing that's really changed about the world isn't that men say these things or how graphically they say them.  What's changed is that they can say it so loudly and so publicly.  Social media has given everyone a megaphone.  A re-tweet or favorite by someone with more than handful of users allows these sentiments to be expressed over and over again, revisiting a trauma or abuse on an intended target.

Maybe the world has changed: women and minorities are speaking up and speaking more.  And the abusive language is getting more graphic and more intense.  But if a guy like Schilling can experience it, and hopefully use it to honestly evaluate what led to his daughter being used as a tool or an object, and he can stand up for those women and minorities and their right to speak without threat, then the world will continue to change for the better.

Better a Diamond With a Flaw than a Pebble Without

There is an aphorism among philosophers, often attributed to Voltair whose poem, La Begueule contains the line "In his writings, a wise Italian, says that the better is the enemy of the good."
This refers to what is commonly known as the principle of the golden mean, or the middle between extremes.  An excellent example from Aristotlean thought would be that courage is a virtue, but its extreme, recklessness, can be dangerous.  I bring this all up because I've been thinking about it since Blizzard announced the upcoming release of their new first person shooter style, team oriented game, Overwatch.

You can see the cinematic trailer for the game on Youtube here.
You can see the gameplay preview also on Youtube here

There are a couple of great things people are saying about this game:
It's all new intellectual property (IP).  No recycled Starcraft, Diablo or Warcraft characters.  No more Azeroth, Sanctuary or Koprulo Sector.  This is a whole new place, new story and new characters.
And it's gorgeous.

here's the final poster for the game (obviously (C) Blizzard)

The characters are rich, the roles are interesting, and I, for one, can't wait to play it.  Blizzard is getting some great and well deserved initial feedback after introduction of the game concept at this year's BlizzCon.  The one thing that seems to have really resonated among the folks in the circles I follow is that there are so many female characters.

Blizzard isn't the first game studio to put women in the game, obviously.  But they very obviously made an effort to include a variety of playable female avatars in this environment of controversy, particularly on the heels of the Assassin's Creed fiasco of "animating female avatars is hard."  And all of the GG foolishness (which I'm not going to recap here).

However, an interesting counter point has arisen to counter the praise being given to Blizzard for these characters and it's a valid one.  Look carefully at the 5 female characters in the poster.  I'll show you three of them here:

 

So, here's the problem: All 3 women have more or less the exact same body type.  Impossibly tiny waists, obvious chests, pretty sexual in the way that they stand.
  More women characters, but only one female body. I won't lie, it is a bit disappointing.

   While I completely understand that games are an escape and I want to be something different or unusual while I play a game, it's disappointing that in many games, even in WoW, my only female options are an ideal of somehow a perfect female body.

 I will probably never look like that.  And that's okay.  I can say that, because at 43, while my body is far from a perfect ideal of the female figure, it's mine, and it's brought me this far. It's taken me a very long time, but I finally love this body, even with all its imperfections.  I also love the things about it that are great, and the things I'm improving all the time.  Body acceptance is an important part of self acceptance, we all get that.  And I'm not asking for games to give me a chunky middle aged lady gasping her way through a battleground (that certainly wouldn't fit with the story in any way).  But, given that Overwatch also includes a simian style male, a robot and a dwarf, I'd like to see that variability given to the female characters as well.  I think we all would.

Look, my username is based on an archetype of the girl who isn't really interested in role playing games but wants to play in order to spend time with the boy she likes, so she plays a healer.  It's a longstanding joke in our family: my boyfriend at the time convinced me to try World of Warcraft, told me I could be his healer girlfriend.  Given that I'm a physician in real life and was his girlfriend (now his wife), it was sort of the perfect joke on an archetype.

But here's the greater point, I do not dismiss this game out of hand, and I think that neither should you or anyone else.  I do not think that it should be used as an argument that there really hasn't been progress in gaming (as seems to be what I'm seeing on the tweets by some pro-GG, anti-SJW types).  It's actually quite the opposite: there are female avatars that are playable and they play very different roles (not just healer girlfriends).  

So, yeah, what I would say about this game is pretty simple: Blizzard missed the target, but they hit the tree.  And that is powerfully, meaningfully important.  In arguing "yeah but the body type is inappropriate, it sucks!" we would be allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.  So very much time is spent focusing on the extreme, we're missing the common middle.

Is Overwatch perfect?  No.  Is it striving to get there? Yes. And the journey is as important as the destination in many cases: that's where the growth happens.  That's where the ideas change.  That's where we learn to work together as a team.  This game, and by no means is it the first to do so, is helping to take us down this path, and should be lauded for doing so.  Should it stay here?  Of course not, but this is the start, and this race is a marathon rather than a sprint.

This game is what I would certainly consider to be a flawed diamond, but a diamond nonetheless.

An Open Letter to Disney Channel and "Girl Meets World"

I have an 8 year old daughter.  And that means that she loves Disney.  We're not one of those No Television or Social Media <tm> families.  We watch TV.  We go to movies.  We end up consuming a lot of Disney: the princesses, the movies, the tv channel, the shows, the whole damn thing.
Most of Disney is pretty solid: we like seeing diverse families, we like the family friendly fun, we like that they're okay with LGBT folks.
But lately, watching the Disney channel, I've been increasingly disappointed.

It started with the show "Kicking It" about a guy who runs a karate dojo and the kids he teaches.  That's all well and good, other than the fact that there is a character, I'm not kidding, named Bobby Wasabi.  He's pictured to the right.  If you hadn't noticed or can't see the image or live in the 1950s you might not realize that he's a white guy who is doing what is commonly referred to as 'yellow face.'  Using Asian stereotypes in the form of his makeup, his stick on 'fu man chu' beard, his wig and his over the top Asian dress.  I was offended enough by this that I made the kid stop watching the show.  I'm not sure if they're making new episodes, but we still see the occasional ad for episodes, so possibly they are.  But we don't watch it.

Fast forward to this summer and the introduction of their new show, "Girl Meets World."  If you were or had a kid in the 90s, you might have seen this show's predecessor, "Boy Meets World."  I wasn't, so I didn't.  But it was a coming of age show that centered around the main character, Cory and his experience from elementary school through college and marriage.  It explores his relationships with his family, with his friends and his place in the world.  Well, at least that's what I understand of it from the few episodes we watched leading up to the "Girl Meets World" premiere this summer.  Cory dealt with his friends, a relationship with the girl who ultimately becomes his wife, his family, and so on. It focused on Cory but wrestled with a number of heavy issues, if the Wikipedia page is to be believed.

So now, 14 years after the original went off the air, we have Girl Meets World, where Cory and Topanga are now married and they have a pre-teen daughter, Riley.   Now, admittedly, BMW likely had a while to grow and improve, being a sitcom in the 90s during ABC's TGIF heyday.  This was back when shows were often given a few seasons to find their feet and figure out what they were and their message.  Also, in fairness, we're only 3 episodes into the new show.  I'd recap the plots for you for those 3 episodes, but there's Wikipedia, so why not let them do it?

I'll give you the recap from a mom watching this with her 8 year old daughter: Riley meets the new boy in school, he's cute, she's in love, she spends every episode obsessing over him.
It's weak.  It's beyond weak.  It's as offensive as Bobby Wasabi.  It's a parade of bad caricatures and stereotypes.

This show is supposed to be about a girl figuring out who she is in the context of her family, her friends and her new middle school.  It's supposed to be about the challenges of starting to recognize that she's growing up and needs to make the world her own.  Instead, she's a perfectly gorgeous girl who is quirky and adorable in her affects and dress.  She has her entirely too worldly aware friend, Maya (also perfect in appearance. We don't know much about Maya yet other than she's a 'bad influence' in that she doesn't like to do homework and she knows all about boys.   Then there's Farkle.  They had to call him that because "Ducky" and "Geek" were already taken.  You guessed it: he's the nerdy kid in love with the gorgeous girls who don't realize how gorgeous they are (they, of course, tolerate him and use him as a friend but don't love him back).  And of course, there's Lucas.  Lucas has no depth, other than being the new boy from Texas.  He's got an occasional country/southern accent and he serves no purpose other than to be obsessed and fawned over by Riley.

Not even a character who was developed over 7 years on television and widely lauded can survive the sexist stereotypes this show shovels out.  Cory is now reduced to a neurotic dad who doesn't want his kids to grow up and spends all of his time as Riley's teacher trying to keep her and Lucas apart, lest that boy corrupt his sweet, innocent girl.  (By the way, there's no chance of that happening yet, Riley can't get up the courage to speak out loud to him in 90% of the 3 episodes we've seen.)

Unless a meteor hits this school and Riley is suddenly charged with leading her friends to safety from the oncoming zombie hordes, or, I don't know, she takes a class other than history or expresses an interest in something other than Lucas, this show is going nowhere.
More importantly, my daughter won't be allowed to watch it.  Which sucks for me, since she seems to like it, but I can't stand the idea of showing her yet another show that tells her she is only an interesting character in relation to the boys in her life.  Riley could be a strong young character with all of her requisite 7th grade fears and problems, but the only one this show and its writers have chosen is that related to boys: the nerdy one who loves her but whom she doesn't want and the gorgeous one for whom her heart is all a flutter.  They haven't shown her worry about her grades, her classes, family conflicts, or even just fitting in with other kids (well, other than that one episode where she was insanely jealous when another girl in school shows interest in Lucas).

All I can say here is this, shame on you, Disney.  Shame on you for bringing us heroines like Merida whose main conflict and resolution have to do with her family for the right to choose her own husband, should she choose to marry.  Shame on you for showing us that an act of true love doesn't have to be romantic love, like the one Ana showed Elsa*.  And then on the heels of those strong messages, you bring a whole generation of little girls (and boys) this sexist drivel on a weekly basis. I guess you were afraid girls would learn to define themselves outside of their relationship to boys, so you had to shut that self empowerment down.
Unless this show turns around right quick, it's going to find itself in a place of honor at our house: on the "blocked" list.


*FYI, Disney, as an aside, you only get partial points for Frozen, since when Elsa decided to "be herself" she got completely tarted up in her low cut dress with the slit up the side to her hips.  She couldn't be herself in something less completely and obviously meant to be sexy?