WARNING: Post might offend.dsheinem wrote:Do you think this kind of thing is ever a good idea? Is it reasonable/acceptable in certain circumstances but not in others?
The short answer is "no". No it is not acceptable, period. It's not reasonable in certain circumstances but not in others, it's simply not acceptable, period.
The long answer is that we (the global, all of us kind of we) have allowed vocal minorities to dictate what gets said, how it gets said, and who gets to say it. We've allowed "offended" to be this catch-all bucket of immediate knee-jerk pandering backpedaling hoo-hah. We've allowed the LGBTQ+ community to toss an awful lot of invented, nonsensical, unnecessary language and terms out there that allow various members of that community to be "offended" at pretty much any portrayal of themselves or their identities that they don't like, AND for them to act as if they're on some sort of superior moral high ground to boot. Basically, we've allowed the language police to control words, thoughts and attitudes that are far beyond their individual purview. Political correctness to save people's feelings has gone too far.
Enough. ENOUGH.
The author tells the story however they want to tell it. For example, "A Song of Ice and Fire" is an absolutely tawdry tale filled with some of the worst attitudes and behaviours towards women I've ever read. Many passages throughout the books read like they were plucked directly from the mind of a pre-pubescent, narcissistic, green-around-the-gills boy. Either GRRM has some sort of Peter Pan syndrome and writes what he knows, or he's a damn genius who is so gifted at his craft that he made me think the first thought was a possibility. Yet, disgustingly depraved as the books are, isn't Game of Thrones one of TV's current darlings? I don't see crowds of pitchfork holding malcontents threatening to burn everything GRRM owns to the ground if he doesn't go back and re-write massive portions of his story. Of course you don't, because that would be ludicrous. It's his story, he can tell it how he wants to. Changing it would be silly, because the change vs. original text would float around forever and fuel the debate as to why it was written and why it was changed ad nauseum...
...kind of like GL having to suffer over Han/Greedo who shot first. There are two different cuts of the film that tell two different stories, and no matter how much he moved forward with his revisionist version of history, the original source still exists and keeps the debate rolling. He voluntarily revised his own story while IGNORING what everyone else had to say about it, because it was HIS DAMN STORY. He probably falls asleep every night after bathing in a huge tub full of fanboy tears, cried because all of his endless meddling and tinkering. What does he care? His story. Like it or don't like it, it's his story, not your story. JKR says Dumbledore is a gay man after the publication of the series is complete. Her story, her character. Legions of her fans were outraged. Oh my god, how disgusting, what a pervert, and he teaches CHILDREN, won't somebody please think of the CHILDREN. I must have missed the gay sex chapter in Harry Potter. Which is unfortunate, because I can totally picture Dumbledore in BDSM gear in a secret dungeon at Hogwarts, getting it on with other wizards. Whatever. What's JKR to do, re-write the books and make sure Dumbledore specifically states that he's into the ladies? Get real.
Yet video games somehow are held to a different standard, quite possibly because they are more easily updatable than a book, or a movie, even though the original version of game sans modification will always exist in the same way as the original books or movies. Perhaps it's because games are interactive, and rather than imagine the finer points of the story you get to experience them in a weird first-hand/third-hand mashup. I don't know. In the first case, we're talking about a "transmisogynistic" limerick. Except, there's no such thing as "transmisogyny". If anything, wouldn't it just plain old misogyny, since "trans women are women"? No wait, that doesn't make sense either.
There's a narrative that persists in the transgender and greater queer community that stems directly from modern queer theory: "trans women are women", and "trans men are men". Except that's not true, and it's a gross perversion of the language in order to try and normalise something that many people can't, won't or don't want to normalise. In fact, it's dangerous to trans and queer people, because many of them actually believe this to be true. It is not.
If you, as a "trans woman", sufficiently "pass" (aka your looks and gender performance are of a quality that fools males and females alike into believing that you are a born female), and you've had the requisite genital reconstruction, and you manage to get a man to have sexual intercourse with you WITHOUT informing that man that are trans at some point beforehand, you have put yourself in the worst kind of danger.
You have tricked a man into having sex with another man against his will.
Incendiary, I know, like Lord Voldemort, that is the-thing-which-cannot-be-named, and the thing that the obfuscation of the language tries so hard to cover in a quest to protect of all things, hurt feelings. Of course it's something that could get a trans woman hurt -- they have selfishly taken away the man's right to choose what HE does with HIS body, and likely confused him about his sexual orientation to boot. They have pushed their beliefs (believing themselves to be female) upon a man who has every right to believe in basic biology and not I-am-whatever-I-say-I-am. It's got nothing to do with having an open mind, it has to do with the absolute base definitions of male, female, homosexual and heterosexual. Other people are not attracted to your gender feelings, and if you managed to trick them against their will, the consequences are yours to suffer, because YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. You should have placed a higher value on your safety, and the feelings and beliefs of your partner. It does not matter how much queer theory kool-aid you drink, consent matters. Biology matters.
There's a good joke in there somewhere. Perhaps in the form of a limerick? Jokes do tend to come fast and furious the more serious a person takes themselves. I'll defer to George Carlin for a moment here:
Ohhh, some people don't like you to talk like that. Ohh, some people like to shut you up for saying those things. You know that. Lots of people. Lots of groups in this country want to tell you how to talk. Tell you what you can't talk about. Well, sometimes they'll say, well you can talk about something but you can't joke about it. Say you can't joke about something because it's not funny. Comedians run into that shit all the time. Like rape. They'll say, "you can't joke about rape. Rape's not funny." I say, "fuck you, I think it's hilarious. How do you like that?"George had a way of hitting the nail right on the head. Lots of people want to tell you how to talk. No! Just like I said at the beginning of this diatribe. If your sense of identity (whatever that is, in this case, being transgender) is so fragile, so precarious that a limerick is enough to drive you off the edge, you've got some 'splainin to do. Lighten up, smarten up. You are not beyond reproach, or beyond the reach of comedy. Just like Forlorn Drifter in the happy/sad thread. Many times a joke is positive, inclusive, camaraderie-inducing, letting you know that you're a part of the group by ribbing you. Are people honestly going to suggest to me that the author should have to remove his joke because it hurt their feelings? There's sensitivity towards trans people, and treating them like human beings, and then there's pandering towards trans people, and allowing your language to be policed while they threaten to burn all you own down to the ground. This particular example was "oops, content didn't get vetted properly, whoops, disappear"....except it did get vetted, because it was contributed, programmed into the game...and then backpedaled on when someone complained. That's nonsense. Don't like the joke, don't play the game. You aren't entitled to anything, except perhaps a refund for the game not meeting your expectations. Perhaps take that money and invest it into learning to poke fun at yourself, or at the very least not take it all so bloody seriously. Especially when, as I've elaborated, the entire context for which being offended is predicated...is not even a real thing...it's just a one-sided view on a two-sided issue.
The second example regarding Mass Effect...it's so different. All of this hoopla surrounded Mass Effect, and how your choices mattered and would affect the outcome of the story...and in the endgame, they didn't matter. They sold people on a premise, and they flubbed -- they didn't so much change the story as they added the appropriate variations dependent on your choices -- as originally promised. I will always be OK with a developer making modifications to a product to deliver what they promised.
It will never be OK for a developer to modify story content based solely on player dissatisfaction. Those players get to start a dialogue on why they didn't like it, why it didn't resonate, or perhaps delve deeper into their own belief/opinion structure and examine why the story affected them the way that it did. They don't get to have the creator pander to their whims. That was not the creator's game. They payed to play the game, they didn't pay to have a story whitewashed and told to them with every exact confirmation bias they need to validate their own truths.
That's bullshit. Always will be.
