Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I've only played the second one: do they actually let you see the main character at any point yet?

 

The third game, where you are cast as the savior of a tribe of South Asian islanders and fight crazy pirates by the way, has this guy as the protagonist.



From the new protag I'm hoping they've learned their lesson and won't lay on the exotika quite as thick. But I'm still expecting some "Open your heart to the way of the dragon" nonsense.

Also, why is there, like, a thousand people assuming that Lupita Nyong'o will be cast as a villain on the EP7 thread. Aside from the obvious I mean?

 

The third one did. Actually, the third one was very character-driven, which was funny because the main character was an unlikeable douche. Plot summary: a privileged, spoiled white kid goes to an isolated island for a party and gets kidnapped by pirates along with his friends and two brothers. His older brother, an ex-military guy, helps him escape but gets killed, and the whole game is the main character turning from a whiny little jerk into a jungle-hardened badass as he tries to rescue everyone, which sounds boring but actually surprised me. It focuses a lot on the (somewhat) realistic implications of what living on an island where you're doing a lot of drugs and killing a lot of people would do to a man's mind, i.e. turning you into a complete sociopath who begins to forget why he's killing and just looks for the next lineup of corpses.

If the fourth one has a similarly subversive story (and terrific open world), it'll have my money at some point.

 

Maybe it's because she looks like she could do a good Ventress?

 

I was just thinking this

 

A Ventress in her 90s? Because that's what she would be.

 

I don't doubt that she's a versatile actor, but Lupita's similarities to Ventress begin and end with "no hair". It's like casting Karen Gillan as Mara.

 

To be fair to her, Karen did once pull off a good police woman outfit, and an Emperor's Hand is kinda like an officer of the law too, and Mara's outfit had similar... qualities, and this logic is falling apart faster than I can type full stop, so I will end here.

 

I don't know how many people saw Karen as Nebula in GotG, either.

 

Not that much of a problem since Ventress is not Human.

 

Yeah, there's some serious satire at work in Far Cry 3. I think it's actually pretty important that the hero be an upper-class white dude in this case, because it's really making a subversive meta comment about the violence in videogames debate, taking the conversation about something which is, in reality, very insular and theoretical, and playing with the concept in real life. I think anybody who plays Far Cry 3 with the idea they tried and failed to make a likable protagonist has really missed the point, honestly (for that matter, it's also a meta-comment on white saviorism, which examines it by putting it into play in an awkward manner). It's more hamfisted and over-the-top, but I think its angle actually resembles some of the literature from the first half of the 20th century which attempts to deconstruct modern man... the likes of Hemingway or Fowles, who attempt to examine the troubled narcissist or tyrant by getting as intimate with him as possible.

There are elements of Far Cry 3 which were clearly too smart and belie that the game was meant to push buttons, and it burns my butt that people want to silence that sort of examination; thoughtless lack of diversity is what we're trying to combat... not series which deliberately play with expectations.

 

Though mind you of those 466 major movies something like 20 where actually good.

 

Are we sure there are tons of women wanting to make movies and having corporate gatekeepers preventing it? Or could this be a genuinely testosterone-driven field? I know that's a weird path to go down and should be taken with a grain of salt, but it's a well-documented fact that many people undergoing hormone treatments have expressed a notable difference in the way they're motivated to express themselves creatively once testosterone is in their systems.

Because there's a large number of female indie directors like Kelly Reichardt or Catherine Breillat who don't seem to want to make major features.

 

That's like looking at this and asking whether women want to be president.

 

But it's not, because they do. That role is of universal importance, so representation should be universal. However, people aren't voting on who directs films, and personally I really don't think film is as universal as most people who, for instance, post on these boards might think.

I just don't think inequality of outcome represents inequality of opportunity. There are tons of very wealthy female producers in the entertainment industry; how does it make sense that women are prohibited from directing if they're being put into even more studio-centric high-paying roles as producers? We're either stifling their careers or their creativity, but both can't be done with identical methods...

Yes, it's partially because major directors are grandfathered in for big studio projects which need directors, but with most of those we're talking about throwaway films that had no leadership in the first place and turned out horrible. But there is no doubt in my mind that there are far more men out there with screenplays that they really passionately want to produce and direct than there are women in that same situation, just as there are more women working as contemporary visual fine artists. I don't necessarily believe in gender roles---as in, roles imposed by an external force---but I do believe in biological differences conventionally associated with sex (which can be present in either gender, but still remain strongest in one or the other). It gets my goat to see smart, thoughtful people deny the clearly-proven effects of sex-associated hormones on human brain function. Just because some people misuse that idea to reinforce negative ideas, it doesn't mean it's false.

EDIT: Get me here... I'm not saying women aren't as good at expression. I'm saying testosterone and estrogen have massive effects on the emotional call-and-response which comes from needing to express something, and what METHOD is then chosen to express it. I talk about this with my wife all the time, and she talks about it with her artist collective all the time. The stigma around looking at men and women as anything but absolutely equal in spite of biological differences is stupid. It's overcompensation. Not all forms of expression are equally satisfactory in all sorts of chemical makeup.

 

Not anymore stupid than using hormonal differences as an explanation/excuse for decades of ingrained sexism.

You can use the same arguments as to why there aren't as many women in STEM fields. Fact of the matter is that women aren't encouraged to go into STEM fields. They're told through words and actions that science is not a place for girls, and they're told this from a very early age. So they grow up and switch majors to something more "female friendly," like teaching.

(Disclaimer: I wrote my Master's thesis on this subject.)

 

In terms of the film industry specifically, I don't think it's necessarily a power differential--you're right about the producer level being more evenly-balanced. Don't take this the wrong way, but I think the problem, if one chooses to see it as one, is exactly the POV you're expressing; "major studio film" generally translates into "action", and "action" generally translates into "masculine". While you can unpack from that the larger issue of huge tentpole movies almost never being anything other than action films, there still remains the problem of women being seen, at least subconsciously, as inadequate action directors. I can agree that it's at least partially an innate biological bias (the same way women are kept out of STEM or the military or what have you), but I think society has evolved to the point that we should be making a special effort to rise above our base hormonal impulses in the name of equal opportunity.

 

Oh, but also, if this:

...was in response to this:

Yeah, no. I guarantee you Kelly Reichardt and Catherine Breillat do not want to be bound to studios.

So that's the thing here: Really, this only proves that men make more studio garbage than women. There are lots of female indie directors, because working independently is a more open form of expression which can transcend the tangibility of the medium to some extent and reach a more nuanced place. And women are perfectly free to do that. Seriously. But there's something about big dumb Hollywood productions which men are much more willing to whore themselves out for.

Did writing your Master's cause you to see parallels in places where they don't exist? Because this is not the same, for reasons which you yourself just explained: The existing cliche in STEM fields proves the imbalance. You can't take something which is clearly represented by an existing cliche and compare it to something which isn't. Young girls watch movies, just the same as young boys. Have you ever heard of a girl being told that making movies is only for boys? I haven't. We're not talking about an ivy-league boy's club here; we're talking about a media institution which is overwhelmingly liberal. Case in point: The abundance of female producers.

Because we're not just talking about careers. We're talking about creative expression. While the right circumstances (i.e. independent production) appeal at a fairly gender-neutral level, you simply can't prove that the particular experience of working on a studio film has equal appeal regardless of brain chemistry. In fact, I'd wager that many of the women who are actively invested in moving women into leadership roles in the film industry are determined to do that specifically by working independently and hoping for acclaim without compromising their visions. In all likelihood, men are more willing to compromise, as they have nothing to prove for their gender.

So then aren't we just talking about garbage? I don't think there's any regulating garbage. I don't think garbage-makers are even literate in this issue, by virtue of the fact that they're making garbage. It seems to me that there are better things to do than try to get more women to make garbage movies...

 

I'm not familiar with Reichardt or Breillat; I was responding to the first sentence of that particular post. Certainly there are plenty of people of all genders who see the Hollywood system as BS, but that's another topic entirely, because I'm just as certain there are plenty of female Michael Bays out there as well.

This actually made me think of something--to go back to my presidential example, there's a school of thought that female leaders would make the world more peaceful because they'd be less biologically predisposed to war. Do you think that's nonsense? Because I sure do. But I could argue in favor of it by the exact same logic: society thinks men make better leaders, so they make men leaders, said leaders bomb each other, so clearly there's something about war that makes men more willing to do it.

And because you've made the point of distinguishing between politics and creative expression, I should note that this line of thought is totally disconnected from whether women "should" be leaders or directors. It's the same logic that would've been used fifty years ago to say that women were happier in the kitchen. I'm not putting that POV on you, I'm just saying that it doesn't have a great historical track record as far as what women and men are "suited to".

 

if you're taking about transsexual people here i would be a bit cautious about drawing any conclusions from their experiences; there really has not been that much legit research done and a lot of it is contradictory from what i have read. like i know there's been anecdotal articles and stuff floating around about this lately but it's... let's just say i would personally take them with, like, a whole quarry full of salt

posted from my phone

 

I am a man. I hate testosterone fueled environments. Does that make me a woman?

Oh, wait, no it doesn't. People are different. This idea that women couldn't be directors is nonsense. I know a lot of women with, if you excuse my turn of phrase, far bigger balls than I've got. I'm a wuss. If they wanted to be a director, it's not their gender holding them back, it's the chauvinistic nonsense and gendered nepotism claiming they're not good enough for it.

Damn right. I may not be American, but the idea a woman couldn't be a decent president... what nonsense. If people still think that today, that's absurd when the most powerful "man" in Europe right now is called Angela.

 

Well in the US, the "women are more peaceful" meme is typically used by certain women to suggest why they should be in charge.

But it's still nonsense.

Another thing--okay, let's actually grant the hormonal thing as being a definitive empirical reason for women to be less suited to directing, say, Expendables 4. Let's go nuts and say that men are five times more suited to it. The disparity in that infographic between an equal representation of female directors and what actually happened is about 90%--men are directing ten times as many movies. And that's out of all big studio movies, not just tentpole action; even if women refused to ever direct action movies, they should still have a much greater presence in that data than 4.7%.

 

Gary Oldman why did you betray us