henke on 10/7/2012 at 09:56
Quote Posted by Vivian
Right, putting women in something or not putting women in something has nothing to do with sexism. Is Das Boot sexist because it doesn't have any women in it? no. Would it be more sexist if they stuck a big-boobed valkyrie in the engine room wearing high-heels and makeup? Yes. If you put men and women doing equivalent roles with the same practical demands in the same thing, but the women have to dress sexier, then that's sexist.
/thread
Only 5 pages and 110 posts before someone summed up the issue in as few words as possible, AND managed to do so without insulting any other forum members in the process! I believe that's a new TTLG record. Well done Viv. :)
DDL on 10/7/2012 at 10:09
I'm pretty sure I went to fairly extensive lengths to explain exactly what I meant, with reductio ad absurdum examples, even. What you really mean here is "putting women in something or not putting women in something does not necessarily correlate with sexism", which is not even close to "has nothing to do with". It's not just whether or not X is present, it's also how X is depicted.
This is almost entirely the same as your minstrel example: A show with a realistic blend of ethnicities and no offensive stereotyping is (presumably?) less racist than one an all-white cast, which in turn is less racist than one with an all-white cast pretending to be ethnic stereotypes. This is not the issue.
A better analogy for our situation here (though given that we're already -apparently- conflating sexism and racism, we're fairly off piste already) might be a show that features a realistic blend of ethnicities but that also features some arguable stereotyping. Whether this is more or less racist than a wholly aryan lineup is a more difficult question, yes? On the one hand: yay diversity. On the other: boo stereotyping.
And the degree to which each of those aspects actually features in the show has a huge influence on where the show might fall on the more/less racist spectrum. Does that make sense?
Coming back to armour-zealots, I guess what I find most surprising is the focus on the physical: I'm mostly of the mind that people can be of all sizes and shapes, and criticising a given fiction for having huge tits is basically saying "huge tits are a ludicriously sexist trope"...which isn't terribly nice to those women who DO have huge tits, especially since many of them are pretty fed up of the things anyway.
Breast size should not ideally be an indicator of anything other than breast size. If we assume that any body size and shape is permitted, it doesn't really matter what size the tits are.
What concerns me more is behaviour: if you're a person fighting in a war that features fucking lascannons and rocket launchers, you are not going to go out in a croptop and leather thigh boots, are you? Thus, if they were depicted as doing so, I would find that highly indicative that the depiction is solely to make them look sexy: there's really no other reason to wear a bikini to a gunfight. As it happens, they wear giant suits of chunky armour, which I thoroughly approve of. Plus hey: if they DO have huge tits under that armour, at least they're wearing appropriate support. ;)
Obviously there are potentially finer narrative constraints within that (like the propensity to not wear helmets), but this is a problem with the fiction as a whole.
Does that make sense?
Koki on 10/7/2012 at 12:55
Quote Posted by Phatose
Yeah, this is an odd place for a sexism in WH40K discussion, seeing as there is 1 woman in all of Space Marine, and zero sexiness to it.
Except the long hair, no helmet and pretty face with a makeup you mean.
Phatose on 10/7/2012 at 13:46
I can hardly fault them for having a woman with long hair, as there are an awful lot of those. No helmet....but really, IG armor is so worthless it's amazing any of them both with it.
Makeup though? I thought that was blood and grime.
