Can we talk about the misogyny ?

Rusalka

fidsah wrote:

Ghast wrote:

It is pretty disappointing. Keep in mind that we you can count Marvel's current female writers on one hand.

I'm happy that new characters like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk now have health equal to that of the stronger male characters. The three weaker Widows and the low-health Storm variants just made me roll my eyes. There's an inexplicable (rationally) tendency to make female characters more fragile in games without really thinking about it.

The rationality would be that females have a tendency to have less testosterone (a steroidal hormone that causes all sorts of fun things, not the least of which is increased muscle mass and strength) being that men produce about 20 times more of it on a daily basis. I'm not sure what rationality there'd be for ignoring basic biology.

...We're talking about one woman who's had her DNA fused with alien DNA, one woman who was given an entirely new, green, oversized and superstrong body as a result of a transfusion of gamma-irradiated blood, a woman with a mutation that lets her control the weather, and a woman whom the KGB injected with an experimental serum that slows her aging. And you don't see a rationality for ignoring basic biology? What's the rationality for ignoring basic biology when Johnny Storm sets himself on fire and doesn't die?

BearVenger

fidsah wrote:

The idea that people can use language because they're part of an "in group" that has "permission" to do so has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with bigotry, because they're just building a wall around themselves and screaming over it about how equal they are while everyone else can't do anything they can, because it's theirs. The fact that a girl can do something and it's okay, but a man doing the same thing would be "sexist" is flat out inequality and bigotry in it's own right. That's saying women can do stuff men can't because of their gender, which opens the door for men to do things women can't because of their gender. Might as well ship em back to the kitchen after a few iterations of that utopia.

Big props to HailMary's response a few posts later.

I just wanted to add the selective memory that comes when someone in the "out group" notices someone in the "in group" doing something that would be taboo for an "out group"er to do:

"OMG! He just used the n-word! How come they get to say it in all their music, but if I did..."
"That guy just said 'us queers!' I would be yelled at, but it's okay for them..."
"She just called her friend 'sexy!' If I called my female friend that, I'd be getting Tasered!"

First, just because someone can do something that I don't like, don't feel comfortable with, and don't believe builds people up and affirms their worth, I don't feel repressed or shortchanged.

Second, I'm grateful that as a professional adult white male, whenever I do or say anything, people rarely ever point to it and make it a giant, sweeping generalization of everything that is typical and permitted of white males across the culture. I wish everyone had that privilege of being judged for themselves and not as a shorthand for their larger group.

Oh, and to bring it back to the game, Moonstone was pretty tanky for a 2* character. She's right up there with Thor and Ares.

Unknown

Expalphalog wrote:

Ghast wrote:

Expalphalog wrote:

Ghast wrote:

A strong woman thinks that being called a girl is insulting? That came from someone with an Y chromosome who gave zero thought to the sentence before moving on.

I think the fact that the OP was insulted enough to call attention to it is evidence enough in my favor.

'Splain please.

You implied that a strong woman would not find being called a girl insulting. I was merely pointing out that the thread creator (presumably a strong woman), found it insulting. Ergo, a strong woman finding 'girl' insulting is not just something from the mind of a bad male writer.


However, as above, I have already reversed my position so bear in mind that I am not further arguing the point, merely explaining my previous statement per your request.

I meant my question to be "A strong woman thinks that calling people girls is an insult?" I can see how your reaction is appropriate given the way I phrased it poorly. My intent was to question why Widow would say it in the first place.

Unknown

Rusalka wrote:

fidsah wrote:

Ghast wrote:

It is pretty disappointing. Keep in mind that we you can count Marvel's current female writers on one hand.

I'm happy that new characters like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk now have health equal to that of the stronger male characters. The three weaker Widows and the low-health Storm variants just made me roll my eyes. There's an inexplicable (rationally) tendency to make female characters more fragile in games without really thinking about it.

The rationality would be that females have a tendency to have less testosterone (a steroidal hormone that causes all sorts of fun things, not the least of which is increased muscle mass and strength) being that men produce about 20 times more of it on a daily basis. I'm not sure what rationality there'd be for ignoring basic biology.

...We're talking about one woman who's had her DNA fused with alien DNA, one woman who was given an entirely new, green, oversized and superstrong body as a result of a transfusion of gamma-irradiated blood, a woman with a mutation that lets her control the weather, and a woman whom the KGB injected with an experimental serum that slows her aging. And you don't see a rationality for ignoring basic biology? What's the rationality for ignoring basic biology when Johnny Storm sets himself on fire and doesn't die?

Superhero origin stories (both male and female) are all over the map, in terms of what sort of increased physical attributes they loosely suggest--the genre requires rather a lot of suspension-of-disbelief in the first place. So if you're going to model "increased strength and toughness" for a randomly selected superhero, you should probably just pick the human baseline and add a random number to it. Some superheros are going to "roll high" and you end up with Hulk. Some are going to "roll low" and you end up with Hawkeye, who is tough enough to persist in his environment, but isn't even close to Hulk's raw physical might.

Physical strength in non-superhero men and women follows a normal distribution, but only within each sex, due to biology. Average adult male strength is considerably higher than average adult female strength, so while there is overlap in the tails (some women are stronger than some men), the large majority of men are still stronger than the large majority of women. If you take random individuals out of each data set, and "superhero" them by adding a random value to the measure of their strengths, you should still see the same general distribution--most men are stronger than most women, but some women are stronger than some men. The only way to avoid that is by introducing some global justification for suggesting that the random buff of the "superhero" effect affects female superheros more strongly in such a way that it compensates for the male baseline advantage.

(The caveat in the math is sample size, however. It might be that the total number of superheros is low enough that the strength distribution doesn't reflect the baseline due to randomness. The total number of characters in MPQ is definitely too low to be a sufficient sample, but I think the total number of superheros across all of Marvel might be large enough.)

Rusalka

Vairelome wrote:

Superhero origin stories (both male and female) are all over the map, in terms of what sort of increased physical attributes they loosely suggest--the genre requires rather a lot of suspension-of-disbelief in the first place.

I love how you say that and then still go on to argue that having too many strong female superheroes is just not realistic enough.

So if you're going to model "increased strength and toughness" for a randomly selected superhero, you should probably just pick the human baseline and add a random number to it.

...

If you take random individuals out of each data set, and "superhero" them by adding a random value to the measure of their strengths, you should still see the same general distribution

No you wouldn't, because past a certain point the difference between the original baselines becomes statistically insignificant. Say you have woman who can bench press 100 pounds and a man who can press 200 (I'm using round numbers for simplicity here, I'm too lazy to look up what the average man and woman can press). If you increase their strength moderately so that the woman now lifts 200 pounds and the man lifts 300, that's still a big difference. But once you get to the point where she's lifting 10,000 pounds and he's lifting 10,100, they're going to fall within the same error bar on the superhero strength distribution. Once you hit the level where people are throwing cars at each other or jumping over skyscrapers, the ordinary human strength they started out with is no longer a factor.

bcas76

I may be mistaken, but I believe in the offending quote Black Widow called the goons ladies, not girls.

But that's not really the point. The lazy writing, the locker room banter in in-game dialogue, the subjectively defined "strength" distribution among western men and women and how it correlates to the massively underpowered and barely useable female characters in the game, these things barely touch the overall problem. I'm disappointed in this thread; this is a conversation that has needed to happen here for a while, and everywhere often, and it's devolved into what people can call other people.

The problem isn't the misogyny, classism, and racism inherent in our white patriarchal culture and how it is perpetuated through the words we use in media and discourse, though that's certainly important. The problem is we can't even have a discussion about these issues honestly and without defensiveness. When posters say they feel objectified and are offended by the submissive, hyper-sexualized representation of women, the response can't be "well, women do it too," or "statistics say this." You can't say, "this is the way things are in comics; we just accept it and so should you." You ignore centuries of subjugation, of racial and gender constructs created to maintain a permanent disadvantaged class of women and people of color.

MPQ is just a puzzle game based on comic book superheroes. But the game exists in a culture, and it reflects the norms and biases of the culture, thus normalizing and perpetuating them. This happens everyday in all aspects of life and is rarely questioned. When someone is brave enough to challenge your prevailing notions, that's a very good time to do some introspection on your own beliefs and values, where those came from, and whether they represent the reality you see sound you. And thank you to the one guy who admitted to straight, white male privilege and the freedom to create your own identity that comes with it. Thank you for being honest.

Jeez, and to think I came here to complain about team-ups.

Unknown

Is original poster sure they know what misogyny means? I just ask because it's a little odd that they somehow took a comment that is vaguely sexist, and most likely not even intentionally, at the very worst and made the huge leap into it meaning that the game devs flat out hate the entire female gender, which is what misogyny actually means. You can argue that they're allegedly sexist and ignorant all day if you like, but to accuse them of misogyny over this is some pretty serious overreacting.

bcas76

Ralstonator wrote:

Is original poster sure they know what misogyny means? I just ask because it's a little odd that they somehow took a comment that is vaguely sexist, and most likely not even intentionally, at the very worst and made the huge leap into it meaning that the game devs flat out hate the entire female gender, which is what misogyny actually means. You can argue that they're allegedly sexist and ignorant all day if you like, but to accuse them of misogyny over this is some pretty serious overreacting.

Thank you for making my point.

Unknown

Rusalka wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

Superhero origin stories (both male and female) are all over the map, in terms of what sort of increased physical attributes they loosely suggest--the genre requires rather a lot of suspension-of-disbelief in the first place.

I love how you say that and then still go on to argue that having too many strong female superheroes is just not realistic enough.

Yes, different people have different perspectives on "how far is too far" in terms of breaking immersion in a fictional context. "Too far" can be measured on tons of different axes, too, sometimes but not always connected to how much you know about a subject. This is a matter of taste and opinion; there isn't an objectively correct viewpoint for all people.

Rusalka wrote:

So if you're going to model "increased strength and toughness" for a randomly selected superhero, you should probably just pick the human baseline and add a random number to it.

...

If you take random individuals out of each data set, and "superhero" them by adding a random value to the measure of their strengths, you should still see the same general distribution

No you wouldn't, because past a certain point the difference between the original baselines becomes statistically insignificant. Say you have woman who can bench press 100 pounds and a man who can press 200 (I'm using round numbers for simplicity here, I'm too lazy to look up what the average man and woman can press). If you increase their strength moderately so that the woman now lifts 200 pounds and the man lifts 300, that's still a big difference. But once you get to the point where she's lifting 10,000 pounds and he's lifting 10,100, they're going to fall within the same error bar on the superhero strength distribution. Once you hit the level where people are throwing cars at each other or jumping over skyscrapers, the ordinary human strength they started out with is no longer a factor.

You're right, my "add a random number" model was not a good example for illustrating my point. If the "superhero" strength factor is multiplicative instead of additive, though, the point stands.

Look, we're talking about a fictional concept here ("superhuman" strength). Are supernaturally-strong men usually but not always stronger than supernaturally-strong women? There isn't a correct real-world answer to that question; it depends entirely on the creator of whatever piece of fiction you're talking about. *Should* supernaturally-strong men usually but not always be stronger than supernaturally-strong women? On the one hand, it mirrors reality. On the other hand, maybe you want to illustrate a point about strength differences where you're emphasizing "superhuman vs. normal."

bcas76 wrote:

The problem is we can't even have a discussion about these issues honestly and without defensiveness.

Discussions and lectures are two different things. Are you willing to concede that people who largely disagree with your viewpoint *might* have something worthwhile to say? Even if you don't end up finding it convincing?

Unknown

bcas76 wrote:

Ralstonator wrote:

Is original poster sure they know what misogyny means? I just ask because it's a little odd that they somehow took a comment that is vaguely sexist, and most likely not even intentionally, at the very worst and made the huge leap into it meaning that the game devs flat out hate the entire female gender, which is what misogyny actually means. You can argue that they're allegedly sexist and ignorant all day if you like, but to accuse them of misogyny over this is some pretty serious overreacting.

Thank you for making my point.

I'm sorry that you feel the need to imply that my pointing out that misogyny and sexism aren't the same thing is somehow some kind of an endorsement or acceptance of either or both, just to help illustrate your own earlier point. I'll pretend that it still sounded clever though, if you really need the validation that badly.

Don't spend too much time on your scathing follow-up either, as I am officially now going to run away screaming from this thread and never look back, as I should have done in the first place.

Unknown

Ghast wrote:

I'm happy that new characters like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk now have health equal to that of the stronger male characters. The three weaker Widows and the low-health Storm variants just made me roll my eyes. There's an inexplicable (rationally) tendency to make female characters more fragile in games without really thinking about it.

Sorry, but I don't quite understand why you think that Black Widow and Storm should have more HP.
While Storm is one of the most powerful X-Mens she's not exactly tank material and Black Widow doesn't have any real super powers.
They've got about the same amount of health as Hawkeye, Falcon and Human Torch, which sounds kinda fair.
(However, I do think Captain American has way more health than what he should have. Punisher is also slightly OP.)
What made ME roll my eyes is that the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four is (almost) useless in MPQ.

And of course Captain Marvel and She-Hulk got loads of HP. It'd be weird if they didn't.

(And not that anyone is using her, but Moonstone is #3 among the two stars, with the same amount of HP as Captain America. Tied for the 1st place are the two gods: Thor and Ares.)

Der_Lex

nordhofsweden wrote:

Ghast wrote:

I'm happy that new characters like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk now have health equal to that of the stronger male characters. The three weaker Widows and the low-health Storm variants just made me roll my eyes. There's an inexplicable (rationally) tendency to make female characters more fragile in games without really thinking about it.

Sorry, but I don't quite understand why you think that Black Widow and Storm should have more HP.
While Storm is one of the most powerful X-Mens she's not exactly tank material and Black Widow doesn't have any real super powers.
They've got about the same amount of health as Hawkeye, Falcon and Human Torch, which sounds kinda fair.
(However, I do think Captain American has way more health than what he should have. Punisher is also slightly OP.)
What made ME roll my eyes is that the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four is (almost) useless in MPQ.

And of course Captain Marvel and She-Hulk got loads of HP. It'd be weird if they didn't.

(And not that anyone is using her, but Moonstone is #3 among the two stars, with the same amount of HP as Captain America. Tied for the 1st place are the two gods: Thor and Ares.)

Actually, and I'm not touching the rest of this whole discussion with my ten foot pole of privilege (phrasing!), I think Black Widow and Storm are two characters where a good case for more HP could be made, lore-wise. BW has a variation of the super-soldier serum inside her that boosts her physical prowess and toughness to superhuman levels. Storm is a trained knife-fighter who in her original Mohawk run was capable of taking down Callisto in hand to hand combat without any powers. They're both on the tougher end of the scale as far as female heroes are concerned, and, lore-wise, should both be in the Punisher region of HP.

Unknown

Der_Lex wrote:

Actually, and I'm not touching the rest of this whole discussion with my ten foot pole of privilege (phrasing!), I think Black Widow and Storm are two characters where a good case for more HP could be made, lore-wise. BW has a variation of the super-soldier serum inside her that boosts her physical prowess and toughness to superhuman levels. Storm is a trained knife-fighter who in her original Mohawk run was capable of taking down Callisto in hand to hand combat without any powers. They're both on the tougher end of the scale as far as female heroes are concerned, and, lore-wise, should both be in the Punisher region of HP.

Well, I did say that I think Punisher has more HP than what he should have
Especially Storm is a very capable fighter. BW is, of course, also a great fighter, but in a battle roayle-fight an airborne Storm would kill BW in just a couple of seconds. (And in-game they're both great characters due to very usable skills.)
They should be have a great skill set, just like they have. But HP-wise I still think they should be on the squishier side.

MunitionsFrenzy

I don't think I can keep a straight face and concentrate long enough to reply seriously to the OP here, but I just wanna thank him/her for a thread that never ceases to crack me up whenever I see it.

Unknown

An adult male being called a "boy" is often insulting, I'd imagine it's the same for an adult female being called a "girl".

nordhofsweden wrote:

Especially Storm is a very capable fighter. BW is, of course, also a great fighter, but in a battle roayle-fight an airborne Storm would kill BW in just a couple of seconds. (And in-game they're both great characters due to very usable skills.)
They should be have a great skill set, just like they have. But HP-wise I still think they should be on the squishier side.

Black Widow wouldn't find herself in a battle royale. If she needed to take down Storm, she'd either backstab her or snipe her without Storm even knowing it.

Rusalka

Vairelome wrote:

Rusalka wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

If you take random individuals out of each data set, and "superhero" them by adding a random value to the measure of their strengths, you should still see the same general distribution

No you wouldn't, because past a certain point the difference between the original baselines becomes statistically insignificant. Say you have woman who can bench press 100 pounds and a man who can press 200 (I'm using round numbers for simplicity here, I'm too lazy to look up what the average man and woman can press). If you increase their strength moderately so that the woman now lifts 200 pounds and the man lifts 300, that's still a big difference. But once you get to the point where she's lifting 10,000 pounds and he's lifting 10,100, they're going to fall within the same error bar on the superhero strength distribution. Once you hit the level where people are throwing cars at each other or jumping over skyscrapers, the ordinary human strength they started out with is no longer a factor.

You're right, my "add a random number" model was not a good example for illustrating my point. If the "superhero" strength factor is multiplicative instead of additive, though, the point stands.

Uh-huh. And what if the "superhero strength factor" is a power law with an exponent that changes depending on the day of the week, the atmospheric pressure, and the hair color of the last three people that our protagonist talked to before getting their superpowers, does your point stand then? After all, it's not as if there's a real superhero factor out there that must be accurately represented. It can be anything you want it to be.

Look, we're talking about a fictional concept here ("superhuman" strength). Are supernaturally-strong men usually but not always stronger than supernaturally-strong women? There isn't a correct real-world answer to that question; it depends entirely on the creator of whatever piece of fiction you're talking about.

Exactly. There is no real-world reason for female superheroes to be consistently weaker than male superheroes. It's creator choice. They have unlimited freedom to invent any character they want and to give them a power set that ranges from "peak of human perfection" to "a million exploding suns." And if, given that unlimited freedom in a wish-fullfilment fantasy world where any aspect of reality can be changed or disregarded at will, the majority of creators still choose to create weaker women, that says something about our society and how it views women.

And that's before we even get to the issue of female superheroes who were created to be incredibly strong, yet don't get treated as such. Both She-Hulk and Captain Marvel should be able to squash Steve Rogers with their pinky, but you sure as hell couldn't tell that from looking at their stats in this game.

Unknown

Rusalka wrote:

And that's before we even get to the issue of female superheroes who were created to be incredibly strong, yet don't get treated as such. Both She-Hulk and Captain Marvel should be able to squash Steve Rogers with their pinky, but you sure as hell couldn't tell that from looking at their stats in this game.

The same goes for Thor.

Face it, this game doesn't make much sense stat or powerwise anyway. How the hell does Juggernaut damage himself? Why does Astonishing Wolverine have such strange health recovery? How the hell do strike and shield tiles even work, lore wise?

Unknown

Rusalka wrote:

Uh-huh. And what if the "superhero strength factor" is a power law with an exponent that changes depending on the day of the week, the atmospheric pressure, and the hair color of the last three people that our protagonist talked to before getting their superpowers, does your point stand then? After all, it's not as if there's a real superhero factor out there that must be accurately represented. It can be anything you want it to be.

The "superhero" factor I was talking about is a mathematical abstraction that you'd get from aggregating the data on strength across all superheros in the Marvel universe. My impression is that male Marvel superheros are usually but not always stronger than female Marvel superheros, so if that is correct, then whatever the strength factor is, it would reflect that. Given that body of data, this strength factor exists in the same sense that "average adult height" exists, and would change as the Marvel canon changes, not randomly and certainly not by anything I can do, since I'm not a Marvel writer.

Rusalka wrote:

Exactly. There is no real-world reason for female superheroes to be consistently weaker than male superheroes. It's creator choice. They have unlimited freedom to invent any character they want and to give them a power set that ranges from "peak of human perfection" to "a million exploding suns." And if, given that unlimited freedom in a wish-fullfilment fantasy world where any aspect of reality can be changed or disregarded at will, the majority of creators still choose to create weaker women, that says something about our society and how it views women.

So...you're saying that "our society" views women as usually but not always physically weaker than men, and yet this accurate view of reality is somehow a *bad* thing? I'm just happy that more people were paying attention in high school biology class than I'd thought!

Rusalka

Vairelome wrote:

Rusalka wrote:

Exactly. There is no real-world reason for female superheroes to be consistently weaker than male superheroes. It's creator choice. They have unlimited freedom to invent any character they want and to give them a power set that ranges from "peak of human perfection" to "a million exploding suns." And if, given that unlimited freedom in a wish-fullfilment fantasy world where any aspect of reality can be changed or disregarded at will, the majority of creators still choose to create weaker women, that says something about our society and how it views women.

So...you're saying that "our society" views women as usually but not always physically weaker than men, and yet this accurate view of reality is somehow a *bad* thing? I'm just happy that more people were paying attention in high school biology class than I'd thought!

No, I'm saying it's a bad thing that our society fixates on the difference in average physical strength between me and women and uses it as a pretext to keep women in subordinate roles even in many aspects of life that have nothing to do with the physical strength of real women in the real world. Superhero stories are a relatively trivial example of this. But the fact that you think that only ignoramuses who don't understand high school biology could possibly think that comics creators might give us more strong women superheroes (and that this might be a desirable thing) makes my point pretty thoroughly.

Unknown

Rusalka wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

Rusalka wrote:

Exactly. There is no real-world reason for female superheroes to be consistently weaker than male superheroes. It's creator choice. They have unlimited freedom to invent any character they want and to give them a power set that ranges from "peak of human perfection" to "a million exploding suns." And if, given that unlimited freedom in a wish-fullfilment fantasy world where any aspect of reality can be changed or disregarded at will, the majority of creators still choose to create weaker women, that says something about our society and how it views women.

So...you're saying that "our society" views women as usually but not always physically weaker than men, and yet this accurate view of reality is somehow a *bad* thing? I'm just happy that more people were paying attention in high school biology class than I'd thought!

No, I'm saying it's a bad thing that our society fixates on the difference in average physical strength between me and women and uses it as a pretext to keep women in subordinate roles even in many aspects of life that have nothing to do with the physical strength of real women in the real world. Superhero stories are a relatively trivial example of this. But the fact that you think that only ignoramuses who don't understand high school biology could possibly think that comics creators might give us more strong women superheroes (and that this might be a desirable thing) makes my point pretty thoroughly.

Well, I'm sorry that your society treats women so poorly, and I hope that situation gets better in the future. *My* society does not "keep women in subordinate roles," nor is it fixated on physical strength differentials. Physical strength is a useful attribute, but it's only one among many useful attributes, and most of them aren't sex-linked.