By Kieron Gillen on October 6th, 2009 at 7:39 pm.
We’ve covered art mod series Radiator before, both first part Polaris and the second Handle With Care. Because we are all about the art-wank. Or wanking generally, in my case. However, some people are less into splendid art-ejaculate, and Robert Yang writes about their responses over in this week’s Escapist. Of course, their problem isn’t pretension or even iffy Half-life-two-level design. It’s because you were “tricked” into playing a gay protagonist…
You might have, as some players did, invented a female persona for your player character and assumed it was the same young “lady” dating Dylan from my previous mod, “Polaris.” And then you would find out, whether from seeing the name “James” so often or from reading forum posts – that I had managed to “trick” you into playing as a homosexual male.
Perhaps that made you angry enough to go to my website and, with the proud honor of being the first to post a comment on my work, you may have hastily written the following post: “Re relese [sic] the game without the GAY!”
His response, quite reasonably, is to tell them to sling their hook. There’s lots more in the article, which is an interesting examination of how even negligible homosexual content creates a disproportionately homophobic response.
Separate from the main topic, I admit one bit really disturbed me…
It is two months ago, when an editor at The Escapist suggested that readers might not fully appreciate my game design analysis of OkCupid in “Grinding the Dating Scene” if references to my preference for dudes stayed in the article. I agreed and changed it.
I mean, I understand the reasoning, but I’m deeply saddened by it.
Not much more to say than that, really.
Pah.
06/10/2009 at 19:42 Jacques says:
Disgusting, but hardly surprising.
06/10/2009 at 19:56 damien says:
“… because we need to evolve past the same male power fantasies, those same damn games with big-muscled, half-naked men shooting their big thick … railguns … all over each other’s faces.”
so much love for the article, but that bit most of all.
06/10/2009 at 19:57 Ado says:
Indeed. I wish I was more surprised at such reactions and general homophobia in the gaming community, but saddly I can’t say I am. I believe it’s these kinds of things that lead to the perseption in society that gamers are generally immature fools.
Just try and remember it’s usually the idiotic minority that shout loudest. Once we can tune these people out I think we’ll all be better off, as a community and in wider society too…
06/10/2009 at 23:41 Howl says:
It’s the closeted minority that are the most vocal. They need to get laid, get it out of their system and move on as their projection is painfully obvious to the majority of people, who really don’t care who others have sex with.
06/10/2009 at 19:59 Aubrey says:
Not the first gay protagonist.
Duke still hasn’t come out.
06/10/2009 at 21:44 Ergates says:
In more ways that one….
06/10/2009 at 23:10 Dante says:
So many comments, and not yet a Gears of War gag?
06/10/2009 at 23:28 EaterOfCheese says:
The answer to all this turmoil is simple people.
1. Someone (Yang?) start a blog w/paypal donate link
2. Get people to send in gamertags of homophobes on xbox live
3. Mention Valve
3. Use the several hundred thousand dollars in paypal account to get japanese tv personality Hard Gay on retainer (for more info on HG’s work, see youtube, got the love of pete: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4JGn2XAH9g
4. Produce TV show for the internet. Hard Gay’s first assignment? Xbox Live users. (PSN & Wii can come later – Wii should be saved for last because of hilarity value)
06/10/2009 at 20:01 Earl_of_Josh says:
Sad. I would say Robert should have kept his preferences in the article, since from a philosophical standpoint I enjoy the idea of having hateful people feel uncomfortable and no longer want to be part of the community. But, it seems just as (more?) likely it would produce a backlash from noisy bigots, so instead of them silently hating in the background, they would be loudly proclaiming it. I hope there is an equal an opposite outrage from the gaming community *against* this sort of hatred. Games should bring people from all walks of life together, and standing up against this sort of nonsense seems like a good place to start. I’d like to think of gamers as progressive and intellectual, but then I guess I do spend an inordinate amount of time reading RPS, so my data is skewed :-P
06/10/2009 at 20:31 damien says:
“Games should bring people from all walks of life together…” so we can virtually kill each other.
maybe the core competitive undercurrents in our hobby have a tendency to bring out some of the (ugly?) tribalism left in our genes.
turning even a temporary and virtual adversary into The Dreaded Them (“…see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”) seems a natural byproduct of the fact that most games are based on some sort of conflict. that sort of Us vs. Them illusion might even (probably does) heighten player enjoyment of the game.
the sort of verbal (racial / homophobic / generally hateful) taunts and slurs one hears while gaming with other people seem to be an expression of that.
or perhaps the fact that shit-talking and slurrage is more evident as a game’s audience grows wider is further faux-evidence that people-in-general will say whatever they think they can get away with saying at any given time?
supporting example: the internets. ;)
06/10/2009 at 20:36 TheSombreroKid says:
being a douce isn’t genetic it’s a choice ;)
06/10/2009 at 20:48 damien says:
i’m probably misinterpreting your use of the term “douche” here (taking it to mean that tribalism and the more hateful aspects of human nature are douchey), but:
modern civility is rather recent in the social evolution of western man. take us back only a hundred or so years and hating the people across the imaginary border into another tribe / country / kingdom was a way of life and pretty much required for the survival of your own.
we are a relative anomaly in that we get to play games based on conflict, war and random slaughter, instead of being forced to live it by our times.
all that being said, i’d end up agreeing with you if you said that modern people really do like the sound of their own chat bubbles while they are being “douchey” to one another.
06/10/2009 at 21:02 Vandelay says:
Go back 100 years? It really isn’t that far back.
For example, Communists.
06/10/2009 at 21:30 Dracko says:
Yeah, now we just fight our wars abroad instead of at home because that would make us “uncomfortable”.
06/10/2009 at 21:44 Earl_of_Josh says:
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. Competition, and the anonymity of the web can definitely drive people to do stuff they otherwise might never consider in any other situation.
That being said, I’m reminded of a quote from that movie about Steve Prefontaine Without Limits where Bowerman is talking about how there was more honor beating someone in the Olympic game competition, than there ever would be killing each other on a battlefield.
I think its probably a product of all this blood bowl playing with RPS folks from all over the world, but for me its not just the fun of playing a game against someone, but my appreciation of the ingenuity of another human opponent.
I guess what i mean is that we can certainly take competition and mold it into disdain for our opponent and that’ll definitely lead to some of the ridiculous trash talk you can run into online. But, I personally hope that’s the minority. It might be the games that I play cater to a different mentality, but for the most part I’ve found more respect than I have disrespect.
06/10/2009 at 21:50 MajorManiac says:
Thats just because the flights are cheaper. ;)
Perhaps we hit on something here. Because (most) games seem to play on our competative side its only natural for us to become agressive to ‘others’.
06/10/2009 at 21:58 damien says:
“It might be the games that I play cater to a different mentality, but for the most part I’ve found more respect than I have disrespect.”
excellent point. off the top of my head, contrasting the level of shit-talk between a game of red orchestra to that found in counterstrike would be helpful. they’re both almost identical games in terms of goals with similar gameplay. and yet the mentality of their players probably couldn’t be further apart.
i sometimes suspect that the lower you set the level of skill / patience required to excel in any game community, the more “problem children” you’re likely to have.
unsure if that theory plays out across the board, tho…
06/10/2009 at 22:19 Earl_of_Josh says:
You may be onto something there, I’m sure I’m not the first one to have this thought, but it seems difficult for me to picture two chess-players screaming things like “go suck a dick faggot” after a rook capture, while from what I’ve heard you might be hard pressed NOT to hear something like that during a public gaming session of Halo.
Hmm, this actually makes me very curious. I wonder if feeds from online game chats are available from anywhere? It would be a really interesting experiment to filter chat transcripts (anonymously of course) from a variety of different genres with equitable numbers of players for a variety of derogatory terms.
This would require some thought, since I can think of several parameters that could bias the data… and of course there would have to be complete transparency as to how you perform the statistics on the data for comparison, not to mention what is considered a “derogatory term”… still, that would be extremely interesting. (random sampling?)
uh… what were we talking about?? There I go, hijacking the thread. :-P
06/10/2009 at 23:13 Dante says:
An interesting point, that macho, competitive environments encourage this sort of thing. One only has to look at the world of sport to see a similar example.
Still, one would hope that gamers would be above that. We are, after all, geeks, we are the rejected, the social outcasts, must we cast out others in turn?
06/10/2009 at 20:11 Sinnerman says:
I’ll admit that I stopped playing Polaris because I was too disgusted to go on.
It wasn’t because I was uncomfortable with how intimate the character based on the mod maker was trying to be with me, although I was a little uncomfortable. It was because I had to look up at the stars and steam always forgets that I prefer to set mouselook to the only way any sane reasonable person uses mouselook when starting a new game and who wants to waste time pointing at stars anyway.
06/10/2009 at 20:13 Senethro says:
Oh, you be trying to start an inverted/non-inverted war!
06/10/2009 at 20:16 Sinnerman says:
I refuse to call it inverting because it is the only rational and moral way of mouse looking and inverting makes it sound like an alternative.
06/10/2009 at 20:59 Stijn says:
Well, the direction your mouse moves in is inverted if you use that setting. Kind of makes sense, that terminology :P
06/10/2009 at 21:09 JonFitt says:
Up is up, that’s all there is too it. Have you told your parents that you’re an inverted mouse-looker?
06/10/2009 at 21:15 Sinnerman says:
You pull the mouse back and your view tilts back. How in goddesses name could that possibly be called inverted? You people were not raised right. I fear for the future.
06/10/2009 at 21:18 TimRandall says:
I only hope that someone who thinks the natural order of things is “pull back = look down” never gets to fly an aircraft that I’m a passenger in.
06/10/2009 at 21:57 Sam says:
Since when do you control your head with a joystick?
06/10/2009 at 22:21 TimRandall says:
You control yours with a mouse?
06/10/2009 at 22:21 Earl_of_Josh says:
Since the accident. *sob*
06/10/2009 at 20:12 Senethro says:
Anyone remember how Microsoft decided you’re not allowed to inform other people you’re a lesbian on Xbox live? Theres a sickening number of youtube rants supporting MS which tick all the usual boxes such as blaming the victim, assuming that all lesbians who publicise it are doing it for attention (esp. male attention) and “open mindedly” saying they would accept them if only they just shut up about their identity. I know, I know, its a medium which brings out the lowest common denominator, right?
I bet Xbox live circa 1950s would have had policies about not identifying that you’re black. People suck :(
06/10/2009 at 21:31 Dave says:
If only there was a way MS could prevent people outing themselves as douchebags.
06/10/2009 at 20:15 Ozzie says:
I won’t preach to the choir.
But yeah, he shouldn’t have edited out the implicit mention of his sexual preference of The Escapist article, just not to enrage some stupid fucks.
06/10/2009 at 20:16 Hobbes says:
The Escapist is doing an entire issue on “Queer Eye for the Gamer Guy” with a number of interesting articles (of which Yang’s is one). Recommended reading, imho.
06/10/2009 at 20:20 Kong says:
Sometimes I wonder how many female characters in MMOGs are actually gay? Many I guess. Good thing too. Maybe we are looking forward to a spectacular massive-multiplayer-outing one day. Any gay pride out there? Christopher WOW Day is coming! lol
Reminds me of the gang of lesbians I once knew. The girls were great fun and loved Quake LAN parties.
06/10/2009 at 20:34 jsutcliffe says:
There is a Pride event in WoW, Proudmoore Pride.
06/10/2009 at 20:37 Vinraith says:
Is there any reason to think a gay male is more likely to make a female avatar than a straight male? Who’s more interested in watching a female posterior bouncing around for hours a day, after all?
06/10/2009 at 21:35 Carra says:
Who’s more interested in watching a female posterior bouncing around for hours a day, after all?Me, me! I always make female characters. It’s the whole reason why Lara Croft is female.06/10/2009 at 23:52 Howl says:
I’m guessing it’s the other way around. Especially recently, with ripped avatars all over the place. I was playing Resi 5 with my married friend only the other day and we both commented on how outrageous our avatars assets were. Why would I play as the women when there is the lovely Chris with his impossibly big triceps and vesty top? =)
06/10/2009 at 20:24 Tom says:
I just read this a few hours ago. It’s depressing (and not surprising in any way, to a gamer who knows what gamers are like) to see this kind of reaction to a small line in a mod. Think what it would have been like if the creator had made it even *slightly* more obvious that the avatar was gay.
And as others have mentioned the “open-minded” wish that people would stop “acting” out their identities in games/online is stupidly disgusting, and quite similar to the response to this mod. Especially when you consider how, as gamers, we have to experience the heterosexuality and (often) whiteness of other gamers shoved in our faces, in every game, forum, and online match.
06/10/2009 at 20:27 Smee says:
People are homophobic shocker, read all about it
It’s relevant news for gamers of course, but labeling it as some special branch of “gaming homophobia” seems unfair in some uncertain way – surely the story is about some homophobic bastards who feel that their unpleasant worldview should be enforced in their past-time of choice, not that gamers as a whole are inherently homophobic? It seems to me that the problem with the reaction to Handle With Care and the Escapist editing example isn’t with the reaction of the gaming community, but the reaction of people.
Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive. Homophobia’s a widespread problem and it pains me whenever I see it, but whenever I hear anything about it in the gaming sphere it strikes a special chord, probably because I like games more than other items of culture and want to defend them. Of course, there’s nothing anywhere that says that games are somehow immune to that sort of poisonous behaviour.
On the other hand, Pah.
06/10/2009 at 20:28 Smee says:
(html editing and lack of edit functions make me cry)
06/10/2009 at 20:56 Vandelay says:
I think this is true. Homophobia isn’t just an aspect of playing games and gaming communities, it is an aspect of life in general. The insults and off-hand comments you hear online isn’t really too different from the kind of thing you will hear from many groups of “normal” people, be it racist, sexist or homophobic.
The difference is that we don’t treat the internet as if it were a public place. With our anonymity in tact we can say and do as we please, with limited repercussions. Using “fag” or “nigger” or “retard” or whatever prejudice you may want to incite is as safe to use on the internet as it is in your living room, surrounded by other bigoted people.
On the Internet you find out what people are really like. It is disheartening.
06/10/2009 at 20:28 linfosoma says:
Someday we’ll have our revenge!
Well…not me, Im studying game design and I like zombies, guns and cars. But somebody else will, you’ll see!!
06/10/2009 at 20:29 Blast Hardcheese says:
Hee hee hee! The way some people respond to this makes it seem like he’s implying they’re gay. Which he hasn’t done of course, so it makes this all very silly.
06/10/2009 at 20:29 Torgen says:
Does this mean Robert Yang made these gamers his bitch?
(Sorry, had to go for the cheap Romero joke.)
Interesting that the homophobic gamer apparently enjoyed the game so much that he asked for a hetero version.
06/10/2009 at 20:29 wiper says:
Hurray for homophobia!
Of course, in this case it’s a mix of two things – straight-up homophobia, and the discomfort of being forced into a set role when ‘playing’ a protagonist. The latter is an issue for all games to an extent (even MMO’s, or strategy games; while the former allows you to say what you want, and the latter can avoid personalising the player at all, both limit your actions in a way – you’re always a leader of some description in the latter, and you’re always some sort of hero* in the former), but only becomes a strong issue in story-led games. Hence the mild backlash against the relationship between Alyx and Gordon Freeman. Of course, /hiding/ a facet of the player’s avatar only strengthens the jarring nature of being forced into a certain character when it is sprung, so again, had it been anything else that was hidden I’m sure it would have discomfited people.
But not nearly as much. And without the disgusting reactions, which say more than simply “I don’t wish to play this sort of character” (the same sort of reaction that leads to me, say, avoiding Gears of War), but instead denounce an entire subset of people for an absurd reason.
Ehh. People are stupid and bigoted. At least we frown upon such behaviour now. Hopefully society will just keep pulling in the right direction until there’s nothing left to frown on any more.
*in the ancient greek, morally-ambiguous sense
06/10/2009 at 22:56 Dinger says:
Woah, woah WOAH. Trust me, you do not want to bring line “In the Ancient Greek, morally ambiguous sense” into a discussion about homosexuality.
In other news, I’ve played male, female and “other” protagonists in games . Per locum a maiori I’m cool with sexual orientation and gender identity — although I have yet to see a game featuring a transsexual. Well, I’m sure there’s a Boneland mod out there, or probably even in the full game, so I should say “non-prurient” game.
07/10/2009 at 09:47 wiper says:
You’re probably right about mentioning the ancient Greeks, though it is worth noting that pederasty (which typefies ancient Greek male-male relationships) does not = homosexuality (and indeed that ‘sexuality’ as a concept was mostly alien to Greek thought). And stuff.
06/10/2009 at 20:31 wiper says:
(worth noting I can’t actually read the articles at the moment – hilariously, the French school through which I’m accessing the internet hilariously blocks the Escapist – even though the site’s entirely in English, which you’d think they’d be happy for the students to be subjecting themselves to. Gah)
06/10/2009 at 20:34 TheSombreroKid says:
remember, the internet is a free speach enviroment, the brainless and wittless can post here too, but we can also ignore them, i’ve always known there was homophobes out there, this incident changes nothing in that respect, i am sure most of them will grow up when thier balls drop and the rest will live out there lives knowing more now than ever that the world is fine with homosexuals but not with them…
…and thier tiny penises :D
06/10/2009 at 20:34 Heliocentric says:
Wait, these guys do realise why Gordon Freeman never banged Alyx don’t they?
06/10/2009 at 20:44 James G says:
While reading this I was wondering what the reaction would be if the ending of HL2:Ep3 was Gordon and Barney finally getting that beer, and then taking things a bit further.
06/10/2009 at 21:02 Stijn says:
I always kind of assumed that that couple you meet in Sandtraps (HL2 Chapter), one of them was called Laszlo I think, was gay. Guess I was the only one, or there’d have been some sort of uproar about it.
06/10/2009 at 21:53 Flobulon says:
Yeah, me too. That bit actually disproportionately affected me, emotionally.
06/10/2009 at 22:22 Bhazor says:
Not sure about them being a couple. I got more a student/mentor feel from it especially the “Greatest mind of his generation” line but they aren’t really there long enough to draw any kind of characterisation.
06/10/2009 at 20:40 Heliocentric says:
The protagonist of dead rising was gay right? Sure thats more of a target than an art mod.
06/10/2009 at 20:56 Risingson says:
There are LOTS of gay gamers (we are lots, I mean). And yes. I’ve noticed a lot of homophobia… not in videogames, but in internet generally. Clasifying something as “gay” is an example. Being surprised by something gay is a symptom. It’s just that there is still a long road to cross to normalize those things: it happened lots of times with movies, that people didn’t want to feel like a gay character. Homophobia in the most phobia sense of the term.
And homoerotic gaming is something that has been around a lot. The game I love most with a blatant gay subtext is Another/Out of this World.
06/10/2009 at 21:47 Dracko says:
Oh, here we are.
I’m not seeing that subtext. Care to expand upon that?
06/10/2009 at 21:00 Pace says:
It’s sort of funny, I had wondered at the gay theme in Handle With Care, and why he seemed to be claiming it wasn’t a ‘statement’, wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. It never even occurred to me there might be a simple explanation.
(also, I think the first-person nature of the game made the theme really hit home more than it would’ve otherwise.)
06/10/2009 at 21:00 Andrew Milne says:
I long for the day where the fact a character is gay doesn’t matter. Nobody thinks anything of it, its like saying they have blue eyes or freckles, its just part of the character and everyone accepts it. It should inform our understanding of the game not drive people to mail bomb the authors.
I’m not saying that because I want to belittle the reaction to the mod, but because the reaction is the furthest we can go from where we want to be.
Lets not even start on the way “gay” appears to have been adopted by a large number of gamers to describe any and all behaviour that they don’t like or how “gay” is bad but “lesbian” is something to make sly remarks and wink at each other about.
06/10/2009 at 21:36 Dave says:
That one is kind of confusing. My sibling, born female, was a lesbian who called things ‘gay’ in a disparaging way. But now he identifies as male, and so I don’t know whether I’m now allowed to be outraged when he does that.
06/10/2009 at 21:44 DK says:
“Lets not even start on the way “gay” appears to have been adopted by a large number of gamers to describe any and all behaviour that they don’t like or how “gay” is bad but “lesbian” is something to make sly remarks and wink at each other about.”
Please don’t call those people “gamers”. “Idiots” would be more appropriate. “Intelligence Impaired” if you want to be PC.
06/10/2009 at 21:08 Risingson says:
I think that the way it’s not indiference, Andrew, as that is too close to the “I’m not interested in your private life” kind of statement. Phew. Sometimes I think that we still have a LONG way to travel…
And I blame videogames for that education. That apparently innocent homophobia that has appeared once and again has never had a counterback, so the lesbian/gay character has never been considered naturally (with exceptions like Longest Journey, where, funny enough, there are those “your sex life has no interest to me” statements), but in a very negative way. And better not start to think about transexualism or travestism, because that makes me feel depressed. Designers and publishers should be a bit more responsible of what they are selling, I think.
06/10/2009 at 22:55 Mil says:
Is not being interested in your private life bad?
06/10/2009 at 21:12 Poita says:
Being disgusted by gayness in general is as natural a reaction as being disgusted by the notion of incest. Even the best scientists have found no evidence of how being gay benefits the spiecies; as every natural tendancy does in one way or another.
I’m not saying that you guys are wrong on this. I’m just saying that it’s just your opinion that it’s wrong to be disgusted by gayness whether it’s homosexual or lesbian. You are starting from the assumption that it’s natural and therefore right/valid. The question is still not decided, certainly not scientifically. So those who are anti gay have just as much righ to their opinion and position as do those who are anti incest. With what level of maturity and civility they choose to express their opinion is another matter. I get the sense though that your real problem is with their actual position on the issue rather than their lack of civility and sensitivity.
06/10/2009 at 21:25 Dracko says:
How’s that bigotry working out for you?
06/10/2009 at 21:32 dancingcrab says:
@Poita
Your logic is incorrect. Incest is harmful to the human race in a way that being homosexual could never be. Inbreeding leads to mutations; i.e. congenital birth defects and such. [EDIT for clarity:] This isn't the case with homosexuality or homosexual intercourse. It has nothing to do with natural or not natural, it about the human condition, your willingness to accept that which is different to you. To be open-minded and fair.
Your opinion is, in my opinion, simply one of bigotry. I believe in people’s rights to express how they feel, but please don’t wrap up your silly argument in layers of nonsense.
The Dude abides.
06/10/2009 at 21:39 pillxthrills says:
So would one who is disgusted by such ‘unnatural’ things should be disgusted by videogames and clothes, since I’d reckon these things are pretty unnatural too.
Besides, you’ve built yourself a pretty strawman there, which needs burning. I don’t think the notion that incest is ‘disgusting’ tends to exist because it’s ‘unnatural’ but because it often involves coercion and abuse of superiority. Frankly, the analogy between incest and homosexuality doesn’t hold up.
You state at the end that we should be upset over the rabblerousers’ lack of manners, but everything you say previous defies that sentiment. The “acceptability” of being homosexual (or asexual or what not) does not rest on ‘natural ways’ because, come on, like anything you do is natural anymore.
06/10/2009 at 21:45 damien says:
“Even the best scientists have found no evidence of how being gay benefits the spiecies; as every natural tendancy does in one way or another.”
this all walks a very creepy line. paedophiles and homosexuals have often been tossed into the same basket and i’ve always found the reasoning for this to be a straw-man. “male paedophiles CAN have sex with boys, so ALL homosexuals wish to do the same…” i get as uneasy around “logic” like this as i do with people who use crime statistics in the US to bolster racist arguments (usually while blissfully ignoring the economic rather than racial aspects to those same statistics)
also, is our “worth” really based upon how we benefit our “species”?
do people who either haven’t reproduced or who just refuse to reproduce trigger the same repulsion?
06/10/2009 at 21:46 Bhazor says:
About this incest you keep talking about. What’s wrong with it exactly? The only real scientific reason I’m aware of is that the offspring is twice as likely to carry bad genes from the family like sickle cell anemia or downes syndrome. But this is balanced somewhat by being twice as likely to carry the good genes over such as immunities and being wicked on bass guitar. I’m not condoning incest, I just think people need to learn to justify why they oppose something rather than simply calling it disgusting or unnatural. After all the idea of smallpox vaccinations is pretty gross and definitely unnatural, jabbing a needle full o’ home grown death into a weeping child, but the outcome seems to be pretty OK.
06/10/2009 at 22:22 Muzman says:
Haha. Fail Evolutionary Biology forever.
06/10/2009 at 22:33 Poita says:
@Drako, i won’t spend much time on you. Except to say that you are a retard. Not sharing yoru opinion doesn’t make someone a bigot. If you wanna talk with the grown ups then grow up.
@dancing crab. Homosexuality is harmful if you understand the principles of energy. A species spends a lot of energy on each iteration and it gets a return on that energy by what each contributes towards the continuing line of DNA. Homosexuals and Lesbians do not continue the line. At the very best you can say that they do no good; speaking from an evolutionary point of view of course.
What you need to understand is that emotions, and especially primal ones, are a language. Feeling are not ‘jus feelings’, they serve a very specific purpose. Where verbal language has a sophistication of design in complexity and subtlety, primal emotions such as response to pain, desire, disgust etc are extremely sophisticated in that they are unequivocal, there is nothing ambiguous about such emotions. They communicate something in a way that can not be misunderstood. If we feel disgust then it’s usually for a very good and practical reason. It’s to tell us to avoid. Our DNA programs into us disgust for the notion of sex with the same gender just as it does desire for sex with the other gender. Mutations, chemical imbalance, neurological glitches or neuro path deviation due to trauma can all mess up the system and in an infinite number of expressions. Some people, including myself, happen to be of the opinion that homosexuality is a deviation from the beneficial course that human DNA is on just as tens of thousands of other physical, mental and emotional deviations happen for various medical and social reasons.
@pillxthrills. So you really think that if a 25yo girl or boy had an ongoing sexual relationship with a parent and displayed overt PDA then people would be fine with it and there would be no sense of disgust?
You need to re learn what the word natural actually means or implies dude. Cities and clothes and cars and computers are all natural because there were made by natural creatures. Pollution or using forests in an unsustainable way is un natural because it ultimately diminishes the lives of even the species that is using it. There is a natural order for things. Going against that is what is un natural, not ‘being human’.
@damian. Hmm not sure I mentioned pedophiles. Maybe you were reading a different post.
@Bahzor. So you think incest is ok. You aren’t condoning it but you aren’t really against it either. I’ll leave your own comments to themself.
The homosexual lobby and the left have done a good job at confusing the issue. They have done the same with handicapped people to such an extent that for example a deaf person who is suddenly able to have treatment to aquire hearing might actually choose never to do so because they have been convinced that their state is ‘natural’ and that having the opinion that there is a ‘norm’ is evil. The fact is there is normal and there is abnormal. Being deaf or blind is not a normal state. If possible it should be corrected. When you are more concerned with ‘feelings’ though then you become mentally and emotionally paralysed and unable to see what is normal or not. Just because one condition is more comfortable than another condition doesnt make it a right condition. There is natural and there is un natural. There is normal and there is abnormal. usually the natural and normal condition is written into the DNA and the expression of it benefits the species. The abnormal one is not and has no benefit or even a detriment to the species. So far the science on this issue points to homosexuality as being a deviation that is not beneficial.
06/10/2009 at 22:51 Atalanta says:
At the very best you can say that they do no good; speaking from an evolutionary point of view of course.
Oh, of COURSE 9_9
I was going to write a long comment on how you seem to be confused about how socialisation has real effects on how we view the world, and how cultural and societal norms can shape and change or perceptions on what is right and proper.
And then I realised that you’re an undereducated homophobe who doesn’t understand even the basics of the science he’s trying to argue, so I’m going to go make dinner instead.
06/10/2009 at 22:54 Bhazor says:
Reply to Polita
Wow. Treating homosexuals bad so they’ll suddenly cure themselves, blind people and the mentally ill being too thick to ask for medical attention and so much cod science I don’t know where to begin. Thats one hell of a comment you’ve made.
So you still won’t tell me why you think incest is unnatural and wrong then?
Actually I just thought of my favourite cod science line
“Cities and clothes and cars and computers are all natural because there were made by natural creatures. Pollution or using forests in an unsustainable way is un natural because it ultimately diminishes the lives of even the species that is using it. There is a natural order for things.”
Computers grow off trees then? I thought that was just Apples.
06/10/2009 at 23:15 Dracko says:
i won’t spend much time on you. Except to say that you are a retard. Not sharing yoru opinion doesn’t make someone a bigot.
Using a term like “retard” in all earnest probably makes you a bigoted piece of shit.
This isn’t something you can brush away with a “it’s just opinions, duder”. Opinions kill. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you can consider yourself an adult.
Hating on gays does not make you a big man.
06/10/2009 at 23:17 pillxthrills says:
Yeah, Dude.
That’s about the crappiest explanation of ‘natural’ I could have fathomed.
Cars are natural because natural beings made them where as the pollution they cause is unnatural because… it diminishes the lives of it’s creator? Okay, pray tell how exactly clothes help you reproduce? I mean, that’s the core of your argument.
I guess in the end just because you personally find something “disgusting” if it’s not effecting you directly, ignore it, and shut up. How exactly does a homosexual couple absolutely shatter your world and rip you apart? If it does, it’s not like the couple themselves directly interfered with your life, it’s because You, personally, are too much of a self-centered, egotistical bigot to realize that people probably think some of the things you do are pretty weird. Now, you could argue back that we are being bigots by not accepting your bigotry, except your intolerance actually effects other people negatively, through your perception and reactions to and of others.
Regardless, your ‘natural’ argument is more asinine now that you… clarified yourself.
06/10/2009 at 23:29 Dante says:
“Even the best scientists have found no evidence of how being gay benefits the spiecies; as every natural tendancy does in one way or another.”
Er… sorry, but you’re double wrong on this.
First off, not everything in nature benefits the species, that’s not how evolution works. It has to be a significant detriment to the species in order to be selected against. The simplest explanation is the human airway, which crosses the oesophagus, and every year because of it, a few of us die of choking, but not enough to negate our other advantages.
The latter is your assertion that being gay does not benefit the species. Homosexual behaviour has been observed widely throughout the animal kingdom, where evolution has let to select against it. Bonobo chimps, the species that most closely resembles humanity in sexual behaviour, use homosexual sex (as well as other kinds of casual sex) as a social bonding tool. The fact that it’s benefit is subtle and social rather than clear and biological does not make it any less real.
In conclusion. Don’t try to justify yourself with science until you are more knowledgeable about it.
06/10/2009 at 23:38 Poita says:
@Atalanta. undereducated homophobe. Well I’m not undereducated. You don’t know anything about my education so that at least proves that you like to speak from ignorance. Well I’m an incestaphobe and as I view homosexuality as un natural then I guess I am a homophobe yes. Phobe is the Greek word for fear and it’s wise to fear things that are un natural. Dude, I was hoping for some logical reply from you but all you gave was an emotional splurge of nothingness.
@Bhazor. eh, you actually need someone to tell you why incest is un natural and wrong?
You think natural things have to grow on trees. How old are you dude? 14? A birds nest doesn’t grow on the tree but it’s constructed by the bird. Computers are useful to us and we construct them. Our brains and dexterity is natural so the result of that is too.
06/10/2009 at 23:42 dancingcrab says:
“@dancing crab. Homosexuality is harmful if you understand the principles of energy. A species spends a lot of energy on each iteration and it gets a return on that energy by what each contributes towards the continuing line of DNA. Homosexuals and Lesbians do not continue the line. At the very best you can say that they do no good; speaking from an evolutionary point of view of course.
What you need to understand is that emotions, and especially primal ones, are a language. Feeling are not ‘jus feelings’, they serve a very specific purpose. Where verbal language has a sophistication of design in complexity and subtlety, primal emotions such as response to pain, desire, disgust etc are extremely sophisticated in that they are unequivocal, there is nothing ambiguous about such emotions. They communicate something in a way that can not be misunderstood. If we feel disgust then it’s usually for a very good and practical reason. It’s to tell us to avoid. Our DNA programs into us disgust for the notion of sex with the same gender just as it does desire for sex with the other gender. Mutations, chemical imbalance, neurological glitches or neuro path deviation due to trauma can all mess up the system and in an infinite number of expressions. Some people, including myself, happen to be of the opinion that homosexuality is a deviation from the beneficial course that human DNA is on just as tens of thousands of other physical, mental and emotional deviations happen for various medical and social reasons.”
Hah! What complete drivel.
06/10/2009 at 23:55 Earl_of_Josh says:
@Poita
First of all, telling people that they are “retards” is probably not going to get you a lot of respect on these forums.
That being said, you do have a right to express your opinion, even if others don’t agree with it as long as you can maintain some civility while doing so (I imagine if your posts are too overly agressive they’ll be reaped).
With that out of the way, I’m having some trouble with your logic. From what you’re saying, I think I understand that you believe Homosexuality is harmful as it contributes to a loss of genomic diversity? That I get. However, you immediately jump to feelings and emotions, specifically “primal emotions” where you place “pain, desire, disgust etc” together. Pain I can see the correlation, especially physical pain which is defined by specific chemical reactions mainly involving neural tissue brought on by a tangible discomfort. I lose you on the other ones though. Desire and disgust are far too broad a category of feelings to link to specific biochemical pathways. Certainly there are examples of each which we could think of that can be tied to DNA (perhaps a deficite of glucose causing fluctuations in leptin and ghrelin levels in the body, creating the feeling of “hunger”). But I’m pretty sure you can think of pathologic situations in which desire and disgust have nothing to do with DNA. For instance, identical twins, one likes peanut butter, the other thinks its disgusting. One wants red gloves, the other desires the green pair.
I think you are mixing up social constructions with biochemistry, which isn’t completely unheard of. You keep going from “its bad for the population” to “I think its disgusting”. I think your mistake is that you are trying to tie the two together. Your argument breaks down because you’re saying you can’t help what you feel, and no one can. Except your feeling is that you are disgusted by homosexuality, and obviously there are many people (homosexuals for one?) that are not. If there was a specific biochemical pathway in the human genome that lead you to be disgusted with gays, then what is it? What benefit does that serve humanity? I would think you would be GLAD there were homosexuals, since from an evolutionary standpoint that means more reproductive possibilities for you. Also, if it were some mutation in the genome… why are there still gay people in the population? While they were off squandering their resources having non-reproductive sex with each other, wouldn’t they have extreme selection pressure against their existence?
The same goes for your arguments for things that are “un-natural” or “incest”. Social constructs, not DNA based. If you need evidence against a “natural order” check out any other community that does things different than you. Hell, if polution and clearcutting forests get lumped into being “un-natural” look out the window. Shouldn’t you feel discusted whenever you see a logger or a politician that supported the clearcutting of the pacific northwest? For incest? Check out the bible. Used to be pretty natural. And those are just human examples, looking at closely related species (whose DNA closely resembles ours) you’ll find even more examples. Hell, you’ll probably celebrate the return of big cat species like the Cheetah where their only hope of survival is incest.
07/10/2009 at 00:01 Bhazor says:
You really need to be asked three times why two consenting adults taking contraceptive precautions can’t do what the jinkies they like?
Also you didn’t get the joke then? It’s perfectly natural for a wee flu virus to spread and blossom and kill millions. Natural is not the same as good or beneficial.
07/10/2009 at 00:31 Wulf says:
Arguments like this always strike me as so ill-informed.
It’s a fact that there are animals which do from time to time engage in homosexual sex; raccoons, dolphins, bears, even penguins!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_homosexual_behavior#Mammals
That article has enough sources to be valid, and it saves me collecting all the links manually.
Basically, to insist that it isn’t natural for humans to be gay is also to insist that it isn’t natural for animals to be gay. So animals are suddenly unnatural mutations and aberrations if they practise homosexual sex? Errr… no. They’re still animals, they’re just animals that mate with the same sex, which is a completely natural occurrence with some animals.
So the whole idea of homosexuality not being natural kind of flies in the face of reality, so this is less about your fight against homosexuality being seen as natural, and more about your fight against reality. And this is a problem I see with a lot of people who share this opinion, ever fighting the good fight against the reality around them.
Now I could understand if it were your opinion that gayness isn’t natural, it would be an ill-informed and incorrect opinion, but just an opinion, but factually homosexuality is natural, if something that’s practise by animals in the wild isn’t “natural”, then I don’t know what is.
Then again though, the people who use “nature” often aren’t talking about mother nature, evolution, and all that good stuff, but more “The morality of God which I call nature.”
Geez, those penguins must really be heathens. :p
And I could go on like this all day! But I have better things to do. Seriously though, don’t try to present homosexuality as unnatural in a factual way, because that’s just a lie and it flies in the face of far too much evidence to the contrary. And it makes anyone who tries to do that clueless at best, and downright idiotic at worst.
07/10/2009 at 02:02 Ergates says:
Homosexuality is harmful if you understand the principles of energy. A species spends a lot of energy on each iteration and it gets a return on that energy by what each contributes towards the continuing line of DNA. Homosexuals and Lesbians do not continue the line. At the very best you can say that they do no good; speaking from an evolutionary point of view of course.
a) Genetic diversity has nothing to do with energy.
b) “Species” don’t do anything. The whole concept of species (and taxonomy in general) is a human construct, something we invented to make classifying living things easier. Individuals spend energy creating offspring – they do so for their own benefit (or the benefit of their genes anyway), not for the benefit of the “species”.
c). Evolution doesn’t apply to humanity any more [at the moment anyway] as there is no longer any real form of selective pressure or isolation of populations. We’ll see what happens when the oil runs out though…
d) Even if that weren’t the case, then all homosexuals are doing is excluding themselves from the genepool, and it’s not as if it’s a small genepool. If there were, about 12 humans left on earth, (6 men and 6 women), and half of them were gay and refused to have reproductive sex, then you might have a point about homosexuals being in someway harmful to the species. But we’re not in that situation, so you don’t. Or to put it another way – the point at which homosexuals not contributing to the genepool becomes a significant factor is way way past the point at which we are totally fucked anyway.
07/10/2009 at 08:35 Lars Westergren says:
@poita
“Even the best scientists have found no evidence of how being gay benefits the spiecies;”
Well, except for the fact the behaviour it is still around after millions of years of evolution, which would indicate that it is either harmless or beneficial.
Personally I like to think of us as nature’s way of providing a society with wildcards.
07/10/2009 at 16:06 Sonic Goo says:
The answer to the whole natural/evolution/energy argument can be put even more succinctly:
Peacocks.
07/10/2009 at 19:20 Ergates says:
Don’t be silly, peas don’t have cocks, they’re plants!
06/10/2009 at 21:14 Donald Duck says:
There is? I never saw it.. How? Must have been too young to see it.
06/10/2009 at 21:16 Donald Duck says:
(And that was a reply to Risingson.)
06/10/2009 at 21:16 Risingson says:
That’s a good one: be tolerant with me being intolerant with you, as you are intolerant with others I’m intolerant too and that’s the same.
06/10/2009 at 21:17 Risingson says:
And Poita, don’t bring “natural” in this discussion: it’s the Godwin of this things.
06/10/2009 at 21:17 Dracko says:
gross dudes kissing
dykes with big tits are cool tho
Time for this video to make the rounds again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6alOnuN-wCY
07/10/2009 at 05:40 Earl_of_Josh says:
Ugh, is that really a usual xbox live session? I’d be amused if there were even a few passing witty slanders.
06/10/2009 at 21:21 Donald Duck says:
Hey Risingson – I can’t handle the reply system here obviou, but mind sharing your thoughts on Another World? It bugs me I missed that.
06/10/2009 at 21:24 Dracko says:
What’s this about Another World? Is there a brilliant blog post I should be reading?
06/10/2009 at 21:22 Donald Duck says:
Or spell.
06/10/2009 at 21:27 TimRandall says:
But being gay IS natural. Ask any bonobo ape (or *insert several other species here*).
As for whether there is any advantage to a species of homosexual behaviour, wouldn’t it be better to ask whether there’s any advantage of homophobic behaviour? Why restrict oneself to sexual activity that has the potential to produce offspring? Is that the only potential benefit of sexuality you can think of?
06/10/2009 at 22:06 Bhazor says:
Actually there are a few ways that homosexuality could benefit a group. The ancient Greeks were rumoured to encourage their soldiers into get some hot man action as a way of cementing very strong bonds within the regiments. Theres also sex as exercise both traditional muscle tuning and in terms of making a guy more potent or a lady more fertile without fear of pregnancy.
Homophobia on the other hand? Not so useful.
06/10/2009 at 23:23 Unlucky Irish says:
Actually this “cementing very strong bonds” you speak of was in reality institutionalised rape (a tradition that actually carries on in many modern militarises), as was much of Ancient Greek homosexuality in general. Of course what the Greeks did has little or no bearing on modern gay “culture”* and it should never be used in defence of homosexuality as it can only back-fire.
*As much as i loathe to use that phrase in this context.
07/10/2009 at 00:44 Bhazor says:
Well you could say the same about marriage for the past 20,000 years. Marital rape wasn’t classed as a crime until the 1970′s. Whether it was emotional bonds or some sort of dominance or power thing it was still serving a use.
06/10/2009 at 21:31 Risingson says:
Hi Donald. Today while I was playing it I realized of more and more signs of the homoerotic winks of that game, and there are many.
The first obvious one is how the main characters look like the gay cliché: Lester, the scientific, is slim and kind of… feminish? look how he moves. Now look at the first encounter with the alien buddy. That big muscled alien buddy, who only could lack the moustache to look like the opposite cliché: the manly gay. That first encounter… have you realized of the sexual tension the game implies? A direct look? In the jail? wink, wink…
And not to mention the very phallic aspects of many enemies, from the slimes, the spikes, the tentacular plants… the always violent aspect of that game makes it have an atmosphere like a Genet tale: it looks like all the hazards are sex-related. There is even a sauna/turkish baths included, if you wanted another wink.
And then there is the ending, which is, simply, the most beautiful love story ending I’ve ever seen in a videogame. And look at the symbols. The freedom. The wings…
Now, there is subtext or there isn’t? :)
06/10/2009 at 21:33 Donald Duck says:
Sorry Dracko, I don’t have anything much better than this to say about the whole ordeal: dumb fucking racists and homophobes should be neutered or shot or at least get a good beating until they understand what a bunch of assholes they are and that it’s their fault the planet is in the condition it is.
But Risington had a point about an old favourite game of mine, that I completely missed, so I was intruiged. Won’t drag the topic away anymore, carry on.
06/10/2009 at 21:55 Dracko says:
If you want to get rid of people ruining the planet, why stop at racists and homophobes?
06/10/2009 at 21:34 Hug_dealer says:
You guys don't even want to know what i did for a few caps in fallout 2.
06/10/2009 at 21:39 Robert Yang says:
Ha, I did that too in the Den. I think the first time I refused, and so he shot me in the face with a shotgun. What an awesome game.
06/10/2009 at 21:48 damien says:
@ hug_dealer:
best reply in the thread. <3
06/10/2009 at 22:08 Bhazor says:
I’m not sure if it’s the same part but I remember being quite insulted when I didn’t have the charisma/chat skills to seduce a same sex character in the game. Bahhh!
06/10/2009 at 21:37 Donald Duck says:
Thanks for the reply Risington, that definitely puts things in perspective. I should go through it. Back when I had an Amiga and played it I was probably too young to see anything sexual anywhere, and my pirated disks stopped working arounf the turkish bath scene, so I never saw the ending.
But yeah, heh the alien could definitely look a bit like Freddy without a moustache. It’s an arty game, I think you’re right.
06/10/2009 at 21:46 Lilliput King says:
I’ve been trying to think of a way to play devil’s advocate here without it being completely ridiculous, and I’m fairly stumped. What can you say?
Perhaps you could comment on how interactivity makes ‘roleplaying’ in games a different kettle o fish to reading about a gay protagonist in a novel, or watching one in a film. You could say it’s perhaps understandable players had difficulty playing as a character so different to them, and doing things they find themselves uncomfortable with. But very few people find difficulty in killing in games, and murder is a far more reprehensible action than being homosexual in, I imagine, the eyes of the vast majority.
That argument would also assume that homophobia isn’t an evil, while acting in a homophobic way is. Which is a difficult one to tackle. Of course, to my crazy super-liberal eyes, being homophobic is just fine, along with being racist, and all those other things people hate so much. Expressing your opinions, either way, on any of those subjects or any others is pretty much fine too. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s a basic and insanely important human right. Of course, that doesn’t extend to treating people of another background to you differently – there are quite rightly laws against discrimination – or treating them in a manner that would be an unacceptable way to treat any human being.
But you should be able to think it. And you should be able to say it. I wouldn’t bring this up if there wasn’t anti-free speech laws at work in the UK currently – it’s a fragile thing.
06/10/2009 at 22:35 invisiblejesus says:
@Lilliput King: Sure, people have a right to believe what they want and to express those beliefs. But there’s a distinction between having the right to do something and it being a good idea to do it. There’s a difference, for that matter, between having a right to do something and having that something be the morally correct thing to do. Most of us have all sorts of rights, and others also have the right to think of us as stupid assholes if we exercise our rights in stupid or irresponsible or morally wrong ways. Sometimes an action can be legally protected and still be the morally wrong thing to do.
06/10/2009 at 22:38 Atalanta says:
You could say it’s perhaps understandable players had difficulty playing as a character so different to them, and doing things they find themselves uncomfortable with.
In addition to the comments you’ve already made, this is a bad argument for another reason — there aren’t a lot of games made where the player character is a mixed-race bisexual woman. So either all of us who aren’t straight white males are either gaming because we’re masochists, or we’re just magically more understanding and accepting of others.
Plus it sets up straight white maleness as the default, proper, normal view, which I kind of resent, but that particular argument only holds if you actually want to create a welcoming gaming environment for everyone, which is not something I’m convinced most people want.
06/10/2009 at 22:40 Atalanta says:
Oh hell, that’s not even sort of as clear as I thought it was. Sorry, I’m hopped up on cold medication right now and can’t English too good no more.
06/10/2009 at 23:15 Lilliput King says:
@invisiblejesus
Valid point. I don’t, of course, defend what they have to say, merely their right to say it. That said, If you’ll allow me the liberty I’ll wheel out the cumbersome tired old concept of moral relativism to point out that your concept of morally right only really applies to you, and is patently unreliable. I’m not sure if you’re speaking from the point of view of your own ethics or of society’s, but either way it holds true. Consider that homosexuality was both legally and largely morally wrong till fairly recently. The people who wished to change that would have been excercising their free speech to campaign for their ‘morally wrong’ point of view.
@Atalanta
I imagine those that complained were white and male, so the justification would only apply to them. I’m not sure why I think this. It’s just a feeling.
Also, seems we are in the same boat :( I can’t afford cold medicine so I’m toughing it out with loud debate.
06/10/2009 at 21:46 NeonBlackJack says:
This kind of thing makes me so sad, but it also makes me quake in my boots at the terrible tidalwave of ignorance you need to charge headfirst into if you make an attempt to address it. Big sigh…
06/10/2009 at 22:13 Arathain says:
On an aside of sorts, my general approach to bigotry of all sorts in multiplayer games (FPSs in particular, since that’s where it’s most obvious) is the good old ragequit. If someone says something bigoted, or puts up some sort of disgusting spray, I’ll say what I think on general chat, and leave the server. I don’t want to be part of the fun of someone who thinks like that. I want them to know there are people out there who aren’t indifferent to their hatred.
Sometimes for a lesser offence I’ll just say something, and only leave if they continue to be jerks, because there’s no point in arguing with them.
I just think it’s important to say something. Don’t make a scene, but don’t give assent by silence.
06/10/2009 at 22:25 EyeMessiah says:
@Poita
There is nothing wrong with being disgusted. Being disgusted is perfectly normal, it happens to normal people all the time.
The key is realising that its mostly a wholly meaningless response (unless you were considering eating some rotting carrion or somesuch) and just gritting your teeth and getting over it.
Taking your worthless disgust and publishing it as a worthless rant on the internet is, well, worthless.
If only.
06/10/2009 at 22:42 Poita says:
@eye. yeah, i’m sure nature spent almost two billion years refining and programing disgust into all species and specifically humans for no reason at all.
The capacity for disgust is hardwired into our DNA and it serves as a kind of ‘stored wisdom’. there are certain things that are too dangerous for us to have to learn by trial and error so we are given an inate sense of it right off. Without noticing it you feel disgust thousands of times a day. Just like pain, or the potential for pain, we steer our way through our day on a path of avoidance of things that we shouldn’t experience. We only feel the pain or disgust when we happen to get to near to the experience.
The system can be interfered and confused by a life time of propaganda but generally the disgust for gays that the average gamer feels and expresses is natural. They might go about expressing it in a cruel way but the basic feeling is not un natural at all.
06/10/2009 at 23:09 Dante says:
@ Poita
Ah, the old genetic response. I find it odd that proponents of this theory always reduce genetic disposition to it’s most base instincts. Apparently ignoring the fact that increasing complex societal interaction is what has made us the dominant species.
Overriding ones natural responses is what makes us human. Give into them and we are little more than animals.
06/10/2009 at 23:11 pedant says:
@poita “. yeah, i’m sure nature spent almost two billion years refining ”
And yet we still have backs designed for walking on all fours, appendixes that spontaneously kill us and spontaneous cancer. That refinement seems somewhat less than refined.
As for disgust for gays being natural, remember that the founders of modern civilization and the finest philosophers of all time very much enjoyed sex with men and older boys. Or that pretty much every truly disgusting behaviour we can think of is very natural. For starters just check out dolphins. Dolphins are such assholes…
And if digust is a good indicator of something that is wrong in mother nature then hey, you fail. Along with spiders and ravioli. Nothing more disgusting than that.
06/10/2009 at 23:28 Bhazor says:
Then theres the Etoro tribe which thinks man on man oral sex is an essential part of becoming a man and the very liberal approach of the Ancient Greeks.
06/10/2009 at 22:28 damian says:
“modern civility is rather recent in the social evolution of western man. take us back only a hundred or so years and hating the people across the imaginary border into another tribe / country / kingdom was a way of life and pretty much required for the survival of your own. ”
Even though we share a moniker, I cannot dissagree more with this flimsy, unresearched piece of nonsense.
Seriously, did you stop thinking when you got out of school?
I don’t really know much about the subject at hand to make any kind of point. At least I can admit when I’M down on my homework.
07/10/2009 at 01:57 Bhazor says:
You might want to look into the attitudes of The British Empire before you dismiss the argument so rudely or read the slave trade or the East India Company to see how different peoples were completely dehumanised by England alone. Churchill for example advocated the use of gas on what is now Iraq as a way of inspiring “Some lively terror among the uncivilised mud Arabs”. Oh yes, he was also pro mandatory sterilisation for the mentally handicapped and was voted The Greatest Britain of all time.
06/10/2009 at 22:29 EyeMessiah says:
@Halo 3
I love that his alias is GayBoy and that his detractors, in a moment of sheer unprecedented genius spin-that-around and mock him by calling him “GayBoy”.
07/10/2009 at 02:08 Ergates says:
I went to school with a guy called Dickon Head. Yes, really.
The funny thing was, that not once did I ever hear anyone making a joke about it. It would have been just too easy.
06/10/2009 at 22:49 The Pink Ninja says:
The fact is the majority of Gamers are knuckle-draggers with hairy palms.
For undeniable proof I point you in the way of any online FPS shooter.
The PCG TF2 server included.
06/10/2009 at 23:10 army of none says:
What the bloody hell. Handle with Care was a brilliant mod, and the issue of the relationship being between two guys shouldn’t matter at all! Homophobia for the loss.
06/10/2009 at 23:12 invisiblejesus says:
@Poita: Maybe you’re right about disgust being natural. Let’s just say for the sake of discussion that it’s true. So what? It’s natural for me to want to sleep with my best friend’s girlfriend, she’s a great looking woman. It’s natural for me to want to hurt my upstairs neighbors when they keep me awake late at night making noise. Neither of those things are morally acceptable things to do, despite being perfectly natural. On the flip side, we’re communicating via the internet on a site about video games. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t born with an internet-capable gaming computer in my hands, so I’m going to go ahead and call that entirely unnatural. But I doubt any reasonable person would say there’s anything morally wrong with it. Natural or unnatural is fine and all, but it doesn’t carry moral significance in and of itself.
06/10/2009 at 23:15 Player2 says:
I wanna see this taken a step further. Let’s have Bungee announce that Master Chief is gay.
Oh lord what I would give for this to happen.
06/10/2009 at 23:35 Dante says:
I’m still holding out hope for Gears of War 3 to end it a great big manly make out session between Dom and Marcus.
06/10/2009 at 23:16 Dracko says:
Poita, I find you disgusting. What’s your evolutionary rationalisation as to how misguided that is?
06/10/2009 at 23:48 Taillefer says:
You’ll have to try and forgive his confusion caused by a life time of propaganda.
06/10/2009 at 23:30 Helm says:
re: Another World and gay subtext
I don’t begrudge you the analysis, I’m open to any point of view on anything. Yes, the game has objects that are round and occasionally long in them, yes there is a bath-house (with naked women in them, but let’s disregard, after all, when you crash in there they are all shocked and then you’re running away from them!) yes you meet an alien that is physically much larger than you (and who touches you), yes the main character seems to be a weak, nerdy recluse (besides driving in a Ferrari, but then again, Carmack has ferraris and that doesn’t make him any less of a nerd) so alright, you can see in that some sexual metaphor.
What’s this telling me though is that you’re a human being and you’re perusing a piece of art made by a human being. I don’t know if I can make this clearer, but that entry-level Freudianisms that one can apply to anything don’t really illuminate what they’re analyzing in any deeper level than the fundamental ‘the people that made this art have sexual impulses of some type’. Is that so interesting in itself?
Perhaps it’s a point of intellectual progress to look at Another World and get from it alternate sexual readings. I kinda worry if it’s something we should stop at so much, though. Anyone can read anything into anything, it’s not so encouraging when the readings are epidermic.
On the other thread of this conversation where this user is explaining biological imperative and evolution to support that being gay is unnatural, he perhaps should ponder more on how biological determinism undermines any metaphysical concept of free-will. So if people are turning out gay, they’re turning out gay through the normal (read: deterministic) channels, they’re not choosing at any point of the way to sin against nature. Either everyone’s got nature on their side, on nobody does, as far as these systems of approach go. Also there’s something to be said about the difference between descriptive/prescriptive moral statements in relation to biological determinism.
06/10/2009 at 23:33 pillxthrills says:
Now, that’s just a nice piece of writing.
06/10/2009 at 23:39 Lilliput King says:
Hehe, enjoyed reading this.
As regards determinism, it’s unfair to criticise him on a point he didn’t actually make. He could be suggesting that homosexuality is a choice, however potentially misguided that would be.
06/10/2009 at 23:53 Helm says:
I have some trouble with proponents of hard evolutionary views that also shoehorn some metaphysical free will in there somewhere, somehow, but yes, perhaps he did mean something like that and it’s not wise to just assume otherwise because it’d make more sense.
07/10/2009 at 07:03 Risingson says:
Helm, yes, it is interesting. Because there is an obvious subtext, intentional or not, as there is a subtext, and yes, it is important. And there is nothing bad about it, it does not corrupt the game, and so on. Homoeroticism and gay subtext is everywhere, and it hasn’t caused the demise of occidental culture for now.
“I kinda worry if it’s something we should stop at so much, though. Anyone can read anything into anything, it’s not so encouraging when the readings are epidermic.”
Helm, no, simply no. We have suffered this in movies for a long time, deniying the homoeroticism in cases like Ben Hur “because it is overinterpretation”, and also i can go a step backward and say that it is a fear of just simple interpretation of symbols. Like “I don’t know why you think that much about it, you are rare, just enjoy it as it is as everyone”. And that is something that is related to being “natural”, to alienism, something I do not like. Interpretation is fine, as long as it is reasoned. “Intellectual”? Maybe. But don’t use that term in such a negative way.
06/10/2009 at 23:33 Sagan says:
This might be as good as any place to ask this question which has been bugging me for a while. Is there a word other than “gay” I can use to speak derogatory about something that is too feminine for my tastes? As in “No, I’m not wearing a pink shirt. That’s just gay.” I want to express my disgust at wearing a pink shirt, so that the other person immediately stops any attempt at convincing me to wear one. But I don’t want to use the word “gay” for that, as that is just mean to gay people. So which other word or words could I use in that context?
06/10/2009 at 23:35 Dante says:
Girly?
06/10/2009 at 23:37 Lilliput King says:
“Too effeminate for me, I’m a red blooded male and like man things such as boobs. Woo, boobs.”
07/10/2009 at 02:05 Arathain says:
You say “Pink’s not my colour.” You don’t make any negative connections between that and anything to do with other people. Thus girly is also right out.
Remember, when we’re using a reference to a group of people as a synonym for ‘bad’, that’s a form of bigotry. In most cases, a somewhat minor one, but there nonetheless.
07/10/2009 at 15:44 TimRandall says:
You could say, “dude, that’s gay… and not in the good way either.”
07/10/2009 at 18:13 Dante says:
Joking aside ‘camp’ is a perfectly acceptable word to use on such occasions.
06/10/2009 at 23:34 Lilliput King says:
In terms of the ‘disgust’ angle, Polita has a point in that it’s obviously enough a survival instinct. I’m disgusted by the smell and appearance of vomit, and of rotting meat. This tells me not to get too close to/play with/eat vomit or rotting meat. I’m not sure in the case of homosexuality that it holds true, though, especially as a method for declaring it ethically wrong.
For a start, your disgust isn’t universal. Gay people most likely don’t find themselves or others disgusting. Which puts it firmly into the “wrong for me, not wrong for you, but I’m right” category of confused arguments.
Secondly, culture moves faster than evolution. There are too many examples of disgust not helping us one bit, and people just having to get over it. I imagine at some point all doctors and surgeons feel pretty icky about the fact that they have to talk to people about their wang dysfunction/slicing people open, but they get over it, and provide a service that helps millions of people.
Perhaps if you think of disgust as a base instinct like fear it might help to rationalise it. Fear helps us, lets us know when to run, often protects us from harm. But sometimes its a hindrance, despite apparently making sense. Planes are pretty scary things, flying up there, weighing loads, woo it’s crazy. Plenty of people are scared of planes, and of flight, despite it being perfectly safe. Plenty of people get over it. Essentially, your disgust is irrational.
At least, thats how I see it.
07/10/2009 at 02:15 Ergates says:
I found sprouts disgusting, the thought of eating one makes me feel physically sick. Yet they are very good for you and full of vitamins and nutrients. Which means that in this (admitedly very specific) case, disgust is actually positively harmful. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. (not you, obviously, I’m on your side)
06/10/2009 at 23:36 Pijama says:
Homophobia – one of the most ridiculous social behaviours, EVER.
It’s not like being actively anti-homosexual will do anything. They (homosexuals) will get around and love each other as they should. Period.
The AIM won’t make a difference.
07/10/2009 at 04:57 Grey Cap says:
Not true. People (in most cases?) are hurt when other people ridicule them or attack them -or spit at them- or whatever. I can sort of understand what you mean (it’s a free country and so there’s no problem) but mindless hate DOES hurt people. Might as well say that racism can’t hurt immigrants. . .
06/10/2009 at 23:47 Hoernchen says:
Great. The gaming equivalent of picking up a hooker just to find out that it’s actually a transvestite. If I buy pussy, I don’t expect ass, so I feel betrayed, how is this surprising ?
07/10/2009 at 01:57 coupsan says:
Except you weren’t supposed to play the game with the expectation of anything. If you thought it was the same protagonist, that’s your incorrect presumption.
There was no trickery involved. Nothing was guaranteed.
07/10/2009 at 02:08 Arathain says:
Because you assumed something about your character without being told. Why did you do that? Would you assume your character’s hair was dark and get terribly offended when you looked in a mirror in the game and saw it was blond?
06/10/2009 at 23:49 Helm says:
I think perhaps there is some misinterpretation of other social fears as ‘disgust’ when one sees a couple of dudes making out or ponders the concept of an incestuous coupling of some sort. It is the mark of a lucid mind to, when faced with such emotions, instead of hastily thinking of how they can or cannot support their moral predisposition and sticking to easy solutions that do, instead explore them more and bravely and see where they lead. It’s often surprising where that is. For example I’ve had this ‘gay disgust’ at some point in my younger life (I’m 25 now) and what clued me in that it wasn’t some sort of primoridial hardwired response was that before having seen people making out I wasn’t disgusted by the concept in the abstract. I realized that what I was feeling wasn’t so much disgust as it was anger at these people that were defying social norms that were solidified in me from a very early age, it was a knee-jerk reaction towards people that ‘do not play by the rules’ coupled with my own teenage olmisexual frustration (meaning I wasn’t getting any so how dare they). It’s the very same impulse that also drives a lot of people towards ‘socially aberrant’ behavior in the first place, sometimes.
It is a very valid point against previously mentioned ‘hardwired evolutionary disgust’ concepts expressed before that after I worked my shit out, these emotions went away and now I can look at homosexual people having sex without feeling any negative emotion, and also, although I don’t feel any strong sexual impulse from such things, I can see how if I unraveled the social programming further, I might at some point do. I can certainly spot tenderness and passion just like I can in heterosexual couples. Did I get WILLPOWER FROM THE UNIVERSE and defeat my nature or something? Of course not. I just came to terms with some cognitive dissonance between my instinctual tendencies and the overlying conditioning that a largely bigoted society hammers into us from a very early age.
07/10/2009 at 05:38 12kill4 says:
Helm’s response was brilliant. Why do I now feel like there are a bunch sociologists lurking around the virtual corridors of Rps waiting to form a flashmob on any topic which can allow them to put their seemingly useless degree into action.
06/10/2009 at 23:55 Legionary says:
Gaming is a hotbed for homophobia because games developers have produced bugger all games in which homosexuality even occurs, or they create games where homosexuality is either exploitative (lesbians with large breasts) or an object of ridicule (“haha, look he’s camp/gay!”)
Honestly, think about black or asian people people in games. Wouldn’t it be weird if there were hardly any of ‘em in games? And wouldn’t it eventually promote amongst gamers a sort of racism?
Education defeats prejudice, and it’s time we admit that games are a large part of education, particularly cultural education. But there’s none of that prejudice-busting education in games. Games overwhelmingly ignore homosexuality as though it doesn’t exist. And when it does feature some homosexuality, it mocks or derides it. Think of the GTA series.
Developers need to introduce homosexuality as an option in any game where the player character is not defined (ie where the player creates their own or makes the decisions). And they need to add in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered supporting characters. We do exist in real life, but thanks to developers we don’t exist in the myriad universes shown to us in games.
07/10/2009 at 00:15 Howl says:
Gaming follows Hollywood so I’m not holding my breath here. I can’t think of any blockbusters where the characters are incidentally gay. Their sexuality is generally an integral part of the plot (i.e. it’s some kind of ‘gay’ film, whatever that means) or they are straight.
When we have Hollywood blockbusters with people charging around, saving the world and they just happen to also be gay, then attitudes might start changing, with gaming dragging along a decade behind.
07/10/2009 at 00:16 invisiblejesus says:
While I agree that games as a whole would benefit from more and better representation of gay characters, I think calling games a hotbed for homophobia is pushing it more than a bit too far. Don’t forget, this is the internet. There are a lot of web sites you can go to where you can sometimes find expressions of outrage against homosexuality (and any number of other things) that would be considered inappropriate in most social circumstances. They’re typically whose topics attract excessive outrage of all types. Games, comic books, politics, whatever. What you see there isn’t a special hatred of homosexuals that is somehow related to the topic, it’s people who enjoy expressing excessive outrage (say that three times fast) taking advantage of an environment where their behavior is accepted or encouraged. That doesn’t mean their behavior is typical of anyone who enjoys the topics those sites cover, it just means that if you allow unreasonable people to shout a lot they’ll wind up dominating the conversation. Go to sites that don’t allow that sort of crazy behavior, even if those sites relate to the same topics, and you get a much different sort of discourse.
07/10/2009 at 03:58 Gutter says:
The demographic isn’t large enough to bother with that. Yes, there is a lot of avid gamers who are gay, but it’s still a pretty small percentage of the market. It’s pretty clear that woman avatars in games are made to be played by male. They do not offer a Male and Female option to accommodate female players, they do it for the male players, hence the large bossoms.
Why would give special attention to your demo when they are not even trying with a much larger one?
Beside, having gay theme expose them to the biggest video game censor of all : Wal-Mart.
07/10/2009 at 06:11 pnic says:
I don’t think Hollywood is as far behind as you’d think on gay films. I think it’s often the audience’s (and critic’s) perception that makes us think that the only films with gay characters are “gay films”. Consider Brokeback Mountain. Along with Milk, it’s probably your archetypal “gay film”. This certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Ang Lee making it only about gay issues. The plot could easily be duplicated with a heterosexual couple. Forbidden love wrecking lives has been a common theme for a long time. Often I think the press can be blamed for making a huge deal of the homosexuality in a film that we begin to think of the film only in that context.
07/10/2009 at 07:15 Risingson says:
Stop talking about normal or natural, people. Those words are, I insist, the godwin of these kind of discussions. Natural? What does mother nature have to do with this in the 21st century? Normal? Why is normality a positive concept per se?
And here it is, Gutter said:
“The demographic isn’t large enough to bother with that. Yes, there is a lot of avid gamers who are gay, but it’s still a pretty small percentage of the market. It’s pretty clear that woman avatars in games are made to be played by male. They do not offer a Male and Female option to accommodate female players, they do it for the male players, hence the large bossoms.
“Why would give special attention to your demo when they are not even trying with a much larger one?”
That’s another funny one. Gay people have been playing heterosexual characters or feeling like them during a lot of years, and that is considered something, let’s say, normal. But heterosexual men (women?) cannot empathise with a gay character. It’s a minority! It is not interesting! I don’t want to see their vision! Homosexual obsession!
“Why would give special attention to your demo when they are not even trying with a much larger one?”
Diversity? Credibility? Niche market?
And then there is the other related matter: I don’t want gay people to show me that they are gay. I can talk about boobs, about my wife, about my girlfriend, about how HOT is that girl that has just passed by, but gay people? Please, don’t talk about your preferences. I don’t want to know them, they are disgusting, and you must understand and tolerate how I feel.
And then again is the matter of “i like gay people that look like the rest of the people”. Let’s kill the difference already.
07/10/2009 at 00:01 Helm says:
Persona 4, though quirky and Japanese, tackles the concept of a superficially ‘tough guy’ that has homosexual feelings he’d rather not admit. Of course, in true jprg fashion the onset of working it out is to fight a Shadow Self boss battle where his shadow’s naked torso is fitted on the neck of a gigantic muscular figure that holds oversized 0-> male symbols with both arms and is flanked by two bodybuilders named ‘Nice Guy’ and ‘Tough Guy’. You should go after ‘Nice Guy’ first cuz he buffs the boss up the whole time.
After the battle the character admits to his shadow self that he is too a part of him and that he has some soulsearching to do. And he actually does, for the rest of the game.
But yes, not a lot of games like that.
07/10/2009 at 00:36 Bhazor says:
This! This is pretty much what I say whenever some bast tells me JRPGs are generic.
08/10/2009 at 15:18 Okami says:
I will now buy Persona 4. Eventhough I have sworn to never ever play another one of those damn JRPGs again.
07/10/2009 at 00:32 Narrator 1 says:
As the great Kusanagi Kyo would say:
“Heh, heh! Burned!”
07/10/2009 at 00:33 sinister agent says:
I would encourage anyone who has a problem with playing as a gay person to lick a socket and taunt a bear. I can quite understand people who merely don’t care either way and/or don’t want someone who’s gay to be in their face about it, or even to hear about it – they do no harm and want to be left alone, so fine. But people who act all outraged and disgusted about it need to just fuck a rent boy already. There’s no reason but sublimated self-loathing to go that over the top about it.
07/10/2009 at 02:17 Ergates says:
I would encourage anyone who has a problem with playing as a gay person to lick a socket and taunt a bear
Presumably not at the same time though as they’re very rarely found in the same locations.
07/10/2009 at 03:02 Noc says:
Unless someone has snuck a bear into your living room as a prank, or you’re out at one of those campgrounds with electricity hookups for campers.
07/10/2009 at 00:39 Hyudra says:
Legionary uses black/asian as an example, “What if black/asian people were absent from games.” — I’d like to point out that hispanics are very much a nonentity in games. At best, you can find a skin color option in a character creator, but even then they’re very much a minority.
Aboriginals as well. I think Prey had a native american protagonist, but that’s the only example that springs to mind.
07/10/2009 at 00:52 Stijn says:
But if they do make an appearance, they do it well!
(Grim Fandango)
07/10/2009 at 04:23 Fumarole says:
Don’t forget Ding Chavez. And of course Carmen Sandiego.
07/10/2009 at 18:31 TeeJay says:
…and Tropico 3 is on it’s way…
07/10/2009 at 01:10 MD says:
My first reaction is just to snicker at the blatant idiocy of some people. But that’s an easy response when I’m not on the receiving end of what can depressingly often spill over into serious hatred with serious consequences.
07/10/2009 at 01:31 Serenegoose says:
wow! The escapist doing a ‘wtf is with the homophobia in gamers and games!’
Oh. The escapist still hasn’t got a handle on basic trans friendly language.
oh videogame articles. With one hand ye giveth…
07/10/2009 at 01:59 Sulkdodds says:
The silliest part of all this is of course:
that Handle With Care is not a ‘gay game’. That any homosexuality in it is almost irrelevant to the precedings. That the characters are normal people, and their marriage is a normal marriage; that its themes are ordinary and speak to ordinary people. That they JUST HAPPEN to be gay. And that this apparently STILL a problem for some people. You know there’s a big problem in culture when something becomes a gay rights issue merely because gays are present. It’s absurd that this threatens to eclipse all the other interesting things that the game does (or that it fails to do).
Yang brings this up plenty and he’s right to focus on it: portraying homosexuality as so perfectly normal that its presence is utterly unworthy of comment is probably the most effective approach.
07/10/2009 at 02:08 Andy says:
I wouldn’t mind gays so much if they’d just stop bloody rubbing it in our faces.
“Woo woo I’m gay, look at me I’m spectacular”
No one gives a shit.
Really, I couldn’t care less if you choose to stick your prick up another man’s arsehole, just keep your damn private life private.
Stop dressing up flamboyantly, wearing more make up than a whore, having your hair styled in a way so tacky even a runway model wouldn’t have it like that, stop using that silly little high pitched gay voice, stop doing the gay walk….
Just stop attention seeking, stop insulting people that don’t agree with your word view, and the majority of animosity between hetros and homos will fade away.
—-
Oh yeah, and if i remember rightly the majority of studies on homosexuality between animals showed that most species either used it as a form of male dominance (think prison bitch, pushing a male down to the status of female), or simply because they’re horny little bastards who need a hole (because they can’t wank) to relieve themselves and there’s no willing (or weak…) female nearby. Dolphins have actually been known to rape people.
And before one of you lefty dictators decide to insult my intelligence (I know you will because I’ve taken the anti-pro-gay stance) based off my fragmented, grammatical cluster fuck of a post, I’m dysgraphic.
07/10/2009 at 02:13 Arathain says:
“I wouldn’t mind gays so much if they’d just stop bloody rubbing it in our faces.”
Just as soon as everyone else stops rubbing their heterosexuality in theirs. Fair’s fair.
07/10/2009 at 02:17 jalf says:
Gosh yes, and those *girls*! Wearing makeup and stuff too, dressing to attract attention, eww, what are they thinking? What about you? You never let anyone know you’re into girls? You never comment to people around you that that girl over there is hot? You never compliment a girl on her looks?
But yes, I can totally see how that’s different, and the same standards shouldn’t be applied to GAYS.
We can’t have *gays* going around here trying to make themselves attractive just because everyone else does it. Where’d we be then?
The irony is staggering…
I just don’t understand the animosity. No one cares if a guy tries to show off to impress a girl. No one minds if a girl shows a bit too much cleavage or exaggerates the swaying of her hips when walking.
But if someone *dares* to dress outside your norms, *dares* to be attracted to someone you’re not attracted to, they should be BANNED.
No. You just need to get out more. Get off the internet, let people live their lives the way they want to and stop cramming your bigotry and prejudices down their throats.
07/10/2009 at 02:42 Legionary says:
It may well be true that you think you’re being entirely fair when you say you only resent having your “face rubbed in it”, but the reality is that you’re being entirely unfair.
“Know your place,” is your message, “know your place.”
07/10/2009 at 03:12 Andy says:
“We can’t have *gays* going around here trying to make themselves attractive just because everyone else does it. Where’d we be then?”
There’s a bit of a difference between wearing trendy pants and a smart shirt, and dressing up like a woman.
“You never comment to people around you that that girl over there is hot?”
Random strangers no, straight mates yes.
Do I open The Sun to page 3, shove it under my gay work mate’s nose and go ‘Look at these puppies, see what you’re missing?”, No.
Speaking of him, he’s the type of gay person I like. For all intents and purposes he looks, acts, and talks normal. I wouldn’t have even guessed that he was a homosexual if I hadn’t been told by a friend of his who also works with me.
“But if someone *dares* to dress outside your norms, *dares* to be attracted to someone you’re not attracted to, they should be BANNED.”
What happens between two consenting adults in their own private space is of no concern to me, but when they take it out in public it becomes a whole nother matter, and I extend this to straight people as well. The amount of times I’ve walked through the city centre and seen people engaging in foreplay…
“No one cares if a guy tries to show off to impress a girl. ”
Showing off how, like showing off how many press ups they can do?
Yeah, I and most people I know would think that person is a cunt.
And if it’s a mate much piss taking would ensue
07/10/2009 at 03:27 Psychopomp says:
“There’s a bit of a difference between wearing trendy pants and a smart shirt, and dressing up like a woman.”
Not all queens are gay, dude.
07/10/2009 at 03:31 Vinraith says:
“Not all queens are gay, dude.”
Most of them aren’t, in fact.
07/10/2009 at 03:33 Psychopomp says:
Also
“I wouldn’t mind gays so much if they’d just stop bloody rubbing it in our faces.”
I enjoy penis
NEENER
NEENER
NEENER
07/10/2009 at 03:46 invisiblejesus says:
Andy, consider this. There are no men, gay or otherwise, dressed up as women in this thread. There are no people, gay or otherwise, making out. There’s a discussion of an art mod that happens to have two gay character in it and the response that’s gotten from players. That’s all. And your response to that has been an angry tirade in which you’ve slapped a pretty broad stereotype on gays and then pre-emptively declared the rest of us “lefty dictators” who’re going to make fun of your grammar, despite no one having said one word to you about it at that time.
I’m not asking for a response. Just take some time to think over the actual contents of the article, the actual responses people have posted, and your response. That’s all. No flaming, no lefty dictatorship, just think about it.
07/10/2009 at 07:00 user@example.com says:
One of my co-workers has a picture of her child as her desktop wallpaper, and her boyfriend visited her at work once.
I wish she’d stop rubbing it in my face. Nobody gives a shit – she can be straight if she likes, but where does she get off forcing it into public view like that?
07/10/2009 at 07:58 Lars Westergren says:
“I wouldn’t mind gays so much if they’d just stop bloody rubbing it in our faces.”
Well, I get heterosexuality rubbed in my face literally hundreds of times daily, 365 days a year – couples walking hand in hand and even kissing openly, sexy ads, romance subplots on TV, movies, books and in games… Love and sex are one of the main parts of human existence, why do you demand that I have to go around and constantly censor an important part of myself in order not to offend you?
“Stop dressing up flamboyantly, wearing more make up than a whore, having your hair styled in a way so tacky even a runway model wouldn’t have it like that, stop using that silly little high pitched gay voice, stop doing the gay walk….”
Few gay guys do that – and even if some do, what does it matter? You are not going to catch the gay if you accidentally look at someone acting like this, why makes you so angry about human diversity?
“if i remember rightly the majority of studies on homosexuality between animals showed that most species either used it as a form of male dominance”
I have two objections to that argument-
a) Historically, “dominance” has always been the explanation in biology texts for homosexual acts, but this has changed. It has been known for along time that among the human like apes that sex is used as a social “lubricant” rather than aggression. There are also cases where biologists have changed their minds about the dominance explanation among other animals. If, for instance, among mountain rams, individual A fucks B who fucks C who fucks A, and in each act both individuals are nonaggressive to each other, and indeed seek each other out, there is either a strange dominance hierarchy going on, or they are likely doing it for fun and pleasure. But since we can’t interview them and ask them about their “true” motives it is difficult to know for sure.
b) Since when is animal behaviour a suitable measure of human behaviour or morality? Many male animals when mating with a new female kills her previous children with other males so she will go into heat quicker and then devote all her energy to raising his offspring. Is this something we should learn from? If not, why do you think should we learn from how common homosexuality is in the animal kingdom?
07/10/2009 at 11:04 Psychopomp says:
“Andy, consider this. There are no men, gay or otherwise, dressed up as women in this thread. There are no people, gay or otherwise, making out.”
I don’t know, Kieron *does* drink a lot.
07/10/2009 at 13:30 Kieron W says:
“Stop dressing up flamboyantly, wearing more make up than a whore, having your hair styled in a way so tacky even a runway model wouldn’t have it like that”
“There’s a bit of a difference between wearing trendy pants and a smart shirt, and dressing up like a woman”
Look, women get all the best clothes, shoes and makeup. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to share :-) And you’re conflating your hate-figures, most cross-dressers/transvestites are heterosexual. For instance, my latex minidress was a birthday present from my girlfriend.
07/10/2009 at 19:21 Sonic Goo says:
Not all gay people dress like women or even flamboyantly. Most look just like anyone else. In fact, there could be a gay person RIGHT BEHIND YOU RIGHT NOW!
08/10/2009 at 15:58 Okami says:
That’s not likely to happen. You can, after all, only insult what’s there.
08/10/2009 at 21:33 Psychopomp says:
“And before one of you lefty dictators decide to insult my intelligence (I know you will because I’ve taken the anti-pro-gay stance) based off my fragmented, grammatical cluster fuck of a post, I’m dysgraphic.”
Just noticed this
I am dysgraphic, and I’m pretty sure you’ve mixed up dyslexic and dysgraphic.
07/10/2009 at 02:35 Psychopomp says:
Frankly, I think they just need some nice yaoi.
07/10/2009 at 02:51 Lewis says:
I think I’m almost as disturbed by the image Escapist chose to go alongside the piece. I mean, reinforcing stereotypes, much?
Amusingly, I pitched a very single piece to Escapist for this issue. As in, a piece about Radiator and people’s responses to the homosexual relationship. They didn’t go for it, and I was mildly annoyed, as I thought it was a great idea. Seems they agreed, but rather sensibly, let the game’s creator talk about it instead. Very good.
07/10/2009 at 11:04 Kieron Gillen says:
Lewis: Let’s be fair – he’s written to them before, so I suspect he’d already pitched it them.
KG
07/10/2009 at 03:37 Sulkdodds says:
Would my comment be deleted if I posted a big picture of a cock
I feel like rubbing gay in someone’s face
I’m not even gay
07/10/2009 at 03:45 Vinraith says:
In games with no relationships/ sexuality obviously the gender preference of the main character is pretty irrelevant. In games that involve romance in one way or another, I almost always play a straight male (or rarely a lesbian female) because that’s the more appealing gender to me in real life. Playing a straight female or a gay male is fundamentally unappealing to me in that context. If that was the only option, and the game was primarily centered around a romantic relationship, it would certainly reduce my interest in playing said game. I suspect many gay males would be less interested in playing a game centered around romancing a female for similar reasons.
All that said, I can’t imagine complaining about it. The guy made a game with a gay protagonist. That’s serving a seriously underserved niche in gaming, and while it may not be appealing to me personally I fail to see how it can be construed as anything other than a good thing. Variety and freedom are always positives, and I can only agree with other people here that there should be more diversity both in supporting characters and protagonist choices wherever possible.
07/10/2009 at 05:22 HYPERPOWER! says:
I wouldn’t mind gays so much if they’d just stop bloody rubbing it in our faces.
“Woo woo I’m gay, look at me I’m spectacular”
And you’ve had this happen to you how often?
I could count the number of times I’ve encountered someone who was very vocal and expressive about their homosexuality on my fingers. And I used to work in retail! S:
On the other hand, the amount of macho dickheads – the other extreme of the scale – I have to deal with almost daily is stupefying.
07/10/2009 at 05:26 Earl_of_Josh says:
Oh my god, he’s right. I’ll never enter the ocean again, Dolphin “rape caves” have now replaced “the mail-man” as my most horrific phobia.
07/10/2009 at 16:35 phil says:
I take it you’ve never seen the documentary about the murder chimps and the spider monkies?
07/10/2009 at 05:49 DJ Phantoon says:
Well I’d be offended if my character turned out to be Hitler!
07/10/2009 at 11:11 Psychopomp says:
Actually, that make make an interesting game
07/10/2009 at 13:45 EyeMessiah says:
Preordered.
07/10/2009 at 07:06 Schwerpunk says:
I’m just surprised no one has mentioned Metroid, or Samus Aran, yet. Here, we have a protagonist that all along we assumed was male (not that it’s ever stated), and when it is revealed at the end that you were playing as a female all along – whoa! /That’s/ awesome. To adapt Hoernchen’s analogy, it’s like paying for cock and getting pussy; and that somehow is better?
I’m severely disappointed to see how some gamers responded to an even subtler change – sexuality, with revulsion, and even admission of feelings of betrayal. Get over yourselves, guys, would you feel betrayed if it turned out that Gordon Freeman went to Stanford instead of M.I.T.?
I’m also reminded of the surprised people showed when it was revealed that Todd McFarlane’s Spawn was black. It was a pleasant surprise for most, as it challenged out preconceived notions of what a ‘hero’ usually is, and we were able to move along with the story from there.
Why are some of us incapable of doing that here?
Also, DJ Phantoon, was that an covert attempt at invoking Godwin’s Law? ;)
07/10/2009 at 09:29 Babs says:
Valve should totally reveal Gordon Freeman to be gay. Then you could have scenes with Alex looking all sad and pouty and when walking around town all the random people could be like:
‘That’s Gordon Freeman, the fag!’
‘Wow, Gordon Freeman! You look soooo fabulous!’
And he could get it on with the G-man (G stand for Gay obviously).
07/10/2009 at 09:33 Babs says:
Actually, maybe not.
07/10/2009 at 16:19 DXN says:
Gordon Freeman is gay. Recall how often, and how insistently Barney offered to “buy him a beer” in HL1. How easily can we imagine slurred confessions in the back of the facility campus bar, the two men drawn back there again and again over the weeks and months, the only place they feel safe exploring their feelings for each other, their days spent gazing longingly but silently at each other over the chasm of rank and workplace decorum?
Think about Alyx’s awkward expression after she hugs Gordon at the start of Ep. 1 – she knows what he meant by the way he drew back slightly, that stiff pat on the shoulder. And what meets Eli when he sits him down for a heart-to-heart, trying to nudge him into a relationship with his daughter? An incredibly long, awkward silence from Gordon. Even his name is quite clearly a reference to Wilberforce Humphries.
08/10/2009 at 23:43 Terazeal says:
Wait, why the heck would someone assume that Samus is male? Sure, the manual for the original game used male pronouns, but those can also act as gender-neutral pronouns(silly English language). Aside from that, there was reference to gender at all in that game.
08/10/2009 at 23:56 invisiblejesus says:
You would assume Samus is male because the armor has a masculine look to it, and because at that time you didn’t really see action games with female protagonists. Since then female action heroes have become more of a usual thing in games, and the armor seems to be styled to be a little bit more feminine in shape. But back then, Samus being a woman was a pretty big surprise.
07/10/2009 at 07:21 Risingson says:
Now I feel useless. Two long answers for questions that have been beautifully nested up there :(
07/10/2009 at 08:01 Mal says:
I disagree on the reinforcing stereotypes bit. The only thing that could be considered “gay” about the article’s presentation was the dudes’ purple clothing, and that’s a bit of a stretch.
07/10/2009 at 09:55 Bobsy says:
Trying to think about gay characters in games, and the list is (obviously) pretty short. There was the Will & Grace analogue character in Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy, but his handling was iffy at best (from the same game that had chikka-chikka-bow-wow music accompanying the black character everywhere he goes).
“Hi! I’m your non-threatening best friend from waaaay back who appears incongruously and only exists for this single, pointless scene. Oh, and by the way, I’m GAY and it’s REALLY TOUGH BEING GAY because I’m GAY. Bye now!”
On the other hand I’m playing Assassin’s Creed for the second time at the moment. I’d completely forgotten that one of your targets was a fat gay leper. He’s the self-styled Merchant King of Damascus, and holds a party where he poisons all the great and good of the city for a lifetime of being ostracised by them. I remembered he was all bitter about having to hide away for having leperousy but not that he was gay. It actually makes him a remarkably sympathetic antagonist, more so than if he was just fat and ugly.
07/10/2009 at 10:17 Risingson says:
I still see a really negative context there, though :/
Negative in the same sense of that gay dramas where the gay character is condemned to be dead at the end of the movie.
07/10/2009 at 10:38 Dreamhacker says:
I’m going to throw the elephant in the room out into the open:
There is this tiny, itty-bitty chance that quite a few of the negative opinions about said mod were colored by RELIGION.
07/10/2009 at 10:43 Risingson says:
Well, it’s the same: irrational thinking.
Risingson and the oxymorons
07/10/2009 at 11:25 Mman says:
I can’t say I’m shocked; from experience I know things like casual sexism are rampant enough in gaming discussion (“casual” referring to the fact that people don’t even know they are doing it in many cases). So I’m not surprised outrage flares up the moment something pops up that involves the slightest controversy.
07/10/2009 at 12:34 mister k says:
I love rants about people shoving homosexuality in peoples faces. I’m not certain, but I do wonder if they mean certain extremely camp comedians they have watched on tv. Such people usually have an ignorance of history, and certainly an ignorance of the concept of privelege. But, having said that, I spouted nonsense ravings about homosexual people being ok if they were just more subtle and feminists going too far… then I grew up.
07/10/2009 at 14:14 kulak says:
I’m loving how metropolitan and liberal the RPS audience seems to be (excluding the homophobes).
07/10/2009 at 14:19 Sparvy says:
Yeah, but that is always the problem isn’t it. There always have to be a few that destroys all the love.
It just makes me depressed.
07/10/2009 at 15:59 TimRandall says:
I’m just grateful that teh stupid seems to all be concentrated in just a few posters.
Where is biological selection when you need it?
07/10/2009 at 16:07 Nezz says:
They are young. Time cures many delusions.
07/10/2009 at 16:09 Psychopomp says:
And the sore bum, after said curing.
07/10/2009 at 18:05 Dreamhacker says:
Goes with the region. (Yes Virginia, RPS is a European site)
07/10/2009 at 16:45 Cooper says:
I can’t find any other response to this in me other than to groan. I mean, it hadn’t even occured to me that the sexual content of the game would be an issue. Until it gets pointed out that it is for some. And – of course – I get reminded (as if I’d ever forget for one moment) that the world is still full of idiots.
07/10/2009 at 16:54 Starky says:
I’ve not played this game/mod so I can’t comment specifically about it but there’s a difference between homophobia and preference.
If I was playing a game as a male character that turned out to be gay but otherwise had no impact on the game, that wouldn’t bother me at all. That said, I have to admit it would begin to bother me if I had to play out a romantic scenario with another male character – depending on the level of depth involved.
It would make me uncomfortable, and I’d not want to play that – games, especially things like roleplaying games you often invest yourself into the character, and no one likes to be tricked into something that makes them uncomfortable.
That would be the only part that I’d object too, playing a game that half way through forced you to play out a homosexual romance to continue in the game.
It depends on the situation, if I’m playing a game that invites you to become the character, make the choices and invest personality yourself and then suddenly forces/reveals that your character is gay… Using mass effect as an example, if you got half way though as a male character and the game suddenly made your character gay, and this had significant impact on the game (flirty lines with male characters, so on), I’d be bothered by that, would it be enough to make me stop playing? Honestly I’m not sure, maybe.
On the flip side, it would not bother me one little bit if upon the creation of a male character in Masseffect (or at any time in a options screen) you could select the sexuality of the character and then that would influence the conversation options in game.
I’m all for giving people the option of playing a gay male Shepard, so long as I don’t have too if I don’t want too.
It’s the gaming equivalent of seeing 2 men kissing in public – utterly fine. Compared to having another man hitting on you.
All that said, I’m wondering if I was playing a game like Grand Theft Auto 4, where the character you play is clearly a character, not someone you invest yourself into at all, just someone you control.
Would it bother me if Nico Bellic was gay?
I’m forced to answer, maybe. Probably not if it as just an aspect of his character that had no effect on gameplay. Still, I think it might if I had to start doing dating missions, going to gay strip clubs and so on.
It’s hard to say for sure, it depends on the context and depth, how the game handles it, for that matter how any media handles it.
I can happily watch a movie or TV shows with gay characters, I can happily watch Will and Grace (hell I actually really like W&G), but shows like Queer as folk (even though I still watched it, for it was otherwise excellent) the softcore gay sex did make me uncomfortable.
If that makes me a homophobe in some peoples eyes, so be it.
07/10/2009 at 16:58 Psychopomp says:
Isn’t art supposed to challenge you in some way, though?
07/10/2009 at 17:19 phil says:
I believe the sex scenes in the UK version of Queer as Folk were deliberately designed to challenge and provoke distate – hence the whole 15 year old boy/older man strongly implied rimming in the first episode (an act most would consider distateful, not to mention illegal, if a hetro couple performed it.) The scene itself was funny and playful but it nicely encapsulated show’s intention to provoke, this game seems considerable more circumspect.
07/10/2009 at 17:27 Starky says:
Perhaps, but I seriously doubt any amount of challenge is going to change my hard wired preference. I can hug my gay friends and that’s fine, but I find roleplaying a gay man uncomfortable, same way as I find watching gay sex uncomfortable.
Just to be clear there are lots of things I find uncomfortable, watching any kind of sex on TV/Film with my parents ranks up there (even though I’m almost 28 years old) with watching homosexual sex.
It’s not that I find it disgusting, it doesn’t make me angry, I’m not one to start ranting on internet forums about it, demanding it not be shown. I’ll simply avoid it if I can – sometimes, as I mentioned with Queer as folk, the quality of the program is enough that I’ll suffer that discomfort.
Do gay men not get that same discomfort watching heterosexual sex, or maybe lesbian sex?
Again, if the game is subtle with the sexuality or gives you a choice, I’ve no issue with it.
If it doesn’t give you a choice, and is overt to a degree that effects my enjoyment of the game – I’ll simply not play it. Just as with gay romance novels, or gay romance films, I’ll simply choose not to watch them. I don’t begrudge those who enjoy them doing so, or their existence.
07/10/2009 at 18:10 Dante says:
“Would it bother me if Nico Bellic was gay?”
It would probably bother a lot of people, first and foremost being gays themselves, given Rockstar’s immature treatment of them.
Lest we forget, GTA4 contains a gay character, who is portrayed as a screaming queen despite the fact that he used to be in the Serbian bloody army.
07/10/2009 at 17:54 Nalano says:
You people suck at roleplaying.
Buff, juicing man-mountain stuffed into power armor with improbable skills at stoving people’s heads in? Easy as pie.
Svelte, lithe ballerina that can do everything the Space Marine can? No problemo!
Incidentally gay man? WHOA, DUDE, I DUNNO IF I CAN GET IN CHARACTER, HERE.
Reminds me of all those guys playing MMOs where they’ll play a female character only if they can RP them as lesbian nymphomaniacs.
07/10/2009 at 18:13 mpk says:
Angry Internets Man: trying to take the “gay” out of “gamers” since 1745.
07/10/2009 at 18:19 Bagalot says:
I don’t think it was pijama’s point that we shouldn’t worry about homophobia because it doesn’t actually hurt anything, but rather that being anti-homosexual is a ridiculous reaction, as it doesn’t make you any straighter and it isn’t going to make anyone else decide to be straight who isn’t, which is largely the subconscious reason why homophobic dudes act so anti-gay things.
07/10/2009 at 18:28 Spliter says:
Making the player think he was straight all the time and then revealing he’s gay:
Total ownage by the mod author :)
really a butt-rape with no lube XD
Seeing a strong reaction like that isn’t that incomprehensible, people don’t like being someone they don’t feel comfortable being (and most men feel that being attracted by another men is a reason to be ashamed of oneself [you might say to your gay friend it's ok but you still feel somehow uncomfortable about it]), so I can’t really accuse that commenter of anything.
Funny thing is that most men aren’t that taken aback by playing as a female that likes men, or a female that likes women!
On a side note:I don’t really believe in homophobia, people aren’t afraid of the gay community, they’re just taken aback by them (it’s like accusing someone to have a gut-phobia because the person is disgusted by the look of spilled out guts).
07/10/2009 at 19:18 Ergates says:
Homophobia doesn’t actually mean fear of homosexuals, in the same way the haemophilia isn’t love of blood.
07/10/2009 at 22:39 Phydaux says:
Indeed, a phobia can also be hatred or dislike.
07/10/2009 at 22:33 Phydaux says:
Call of Juarez had a Mexican protagonist.
07/10/2009 at 22:35 Phydaux says:
This was supposed to be a reply to another post, don’t really understand why it’s here, and I can’t edit it. Ho hum.
08/10/2009 at 00:41 Raphael says:
Really, what’s so wrong about dressing flamboyantly?
08/10/2009 at 01:31 Alikchi says:
Speaking as a gay gamer – you try playing a few rounds of Left 4 Dead without someone calling someone else a f*ggot. It’s pretty disgusting, there’s no excuse for it, and it shames the gaming community. You start throwing homophobia around, you’ve instantly lost all respect from decent people.
08/10/2009 at 16:23 Spliter says:
Would you get over yourself??
Damn, calling someone gay or faggot is the oldest insult on the internet, it isn’t against gay people, it has nothing to do with sexuality, it’s only another way of saying “you’re a d**khead” but it’s faster because normally you use only 3 letters, and playing l4d you don’t have much time to write or to think what you need to say.
It got taken in as a general insult. I would hate if someone told me what I can or can’t call other people.
08/10/2009 at 16:28 Dominic White says:
You – yes, YOU, and only you, personally, are the reason why the internet is a pain to wade through sometimes.
Not just people like you, but YOU, and the clones that you have asexually spawned.
08/10/2009 at 16:28 AndrewC says:
And what term of insult, Spliter, would you give to someone completely incapable of recognising how their behaviour affects other people while being incredibly quick to get offended when they feel somone else’s behaviour is affecting them?
08/10/2009 at 16:28 Dominic White says:
Note that my comment was aimed at Spliter, obviously.
08/10/2009 at 16:33 William says:
I was sort of with Splitter as far as ‘gay’, but ‘faggot’ is a different story. For a start its not all that concise, its much nastier and when I say something is ‘gay’ I’m just regressing to chidlishness. But then he came across as a bit of a twat (There you go AndyC :P).
I’ll confess I do call a lot of things gay and probably will do until I die; “Omg the sniper rifle is so gay’ or after being smashed off a roof by a tank ‘well, that was pretty gay’.
08/10/2009 at 17:07 Nalano says:
Yeah, spliter, and nig is just an easy three-letter way of saying lazy. Casual bigotry is still bigotry.
08/10/2009 at 17:48 Ergates says:
Splitter: So using “Gay” or “Faggot” as an insult isn’t “against” gays? What exactly would lead you to draw that conclusion?
Insults work by associating someone with something bad: “You’re shit”, “You smell” etc. Therefore when you use “Gay” as an insult you are implying that being gay is a bad thing. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an insult. Do you see?
08/10/2009 at 20:57 Spliter says:
(thanks for feeding the troll I’m full now)
to anyone that responded to me: Being gay is okay as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have anything against that people apart from the fact that near them I can’t call other people gay or they’ll get terribly upset.
That’s the thing! Everyone’s a bit racist! It’s not bad it’s a good thing, it helps us mantain our cultures! I don’t scold people when someone else calls someone a jew, even though I don’t like it I already accepted that as <>. If someone insults you just ignore him because that person is probably not worth your attention, and that’s all I’m asking of the gay community.
08/10/2009 at 23:34 Terazeal says:
It’s funny cause he’s ageist.
09/10/2009 at 20:46 Sky Jack says:
The vast majority of males are heterosexual, and it is damaging to their pride to be called “faggot” or “gay.” Most people understand this.
I do not for one moment believe that males over, say, 25 suddenly develop tolerance for homosexuals and therefore stop using “gay” as an insult. They simply move on to more sophisticated taunts. I mean, anybody can shout “faggot” at anyone. It’s better to call someone “grandma” or imply that he wears panties.
08/10/2009 at 15:33 oceanclub says:
At first I honestly thought “Andy” was being ironic and I was waiting for the humorous payoff. It’s amazing to think that in the year 2009, there are still people who are angry homophobes – who literally get as angry as a L4D2 boycotter if they even think suspect someone near them is gay or “dressing flamboyantly” (honestly, I really thought he was taking the piss when he said that).
Attitudes have changed spectacularly over the last decade or so (in Ireland, a country which only legalised homosexuality in 1994, a conservative government is bringing in civil partnerships); you might still hear fundamentalist Christians railing against gays, but even they tend to be of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger-love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin variety. So its both unsettling and funny in a weird way to stumble across someone who appears to walk through the streets at the weekend seething to themselves “look at all dem bummers TAUNTING me with their nice clothes”.
P.
08/10/2009 at 19:34 The Colonel says:
Wow. I don’t understand why anyone would want to justify using immature, insulting and deeply damaging language. If you use it and don’t mean anything by it, fine, maybe. But to act as if you are holding the high moral ground over people who object to its use makes me angry. If you’ve thought about the effect that such language could have and still continue to use it then you are an insensitive prick in my eyes. The only real advantage that I can see of such language being used is that it makes it easier to see when someone has failed to mature beyond 14 years old. It wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t a 2000 year history of persecution exacerbated by this attitude. Just say “scouse” whenever someone’s annoyed you and no-one will want to kill themselves.
08/10/2009 at 21:26 The Colonel says:
Unintentional racism is, indeed, widespread and common, but it is in no way a "good thing". Racism is not the same thing as thinking your country is better than another country. Calling someone a Jew is, I hope, a joke playing on the obvious outrageousness of explicit racism. The use of gay as an insult is rarely ironic, and often not intended as a joke in the same sense as calling someone a Jew. It isn't necessarily a big issue, but every now and again there's a kid who is so stimatised by other kids implying their natural state and identity is an abomination, or a joke, or something worthy of no more than an insult that it does real damage. Is it really that much to sacrifice to use a different word?
09/10/2009 at 01:05 Spliter says:
My point was that we often don’t think about what we say, we say it quickly, we say it when we’re angry. But it lets us release our emotions once in a while (which is often what we do when we play fast paced action games). I don’t mind people calling me names or insulting me if it’s because of a moment of anger or some other strong emotion. What I can’t tolerate is when someone holds a lifetime hatred for a person because of an insult!
In my uni everyone calls everyone what they want and no one gets angry, on the contrary it helps us dissolve the unneeded walls of etiquette.
I’m not against homosexuals, people of different races, cultures,religions, different number of toes or operating system preference, I’m against those that get angry over simple WORDS, and not even words of hatred but of a rush of adrenaline, you know, sticks and stones.
One thing is persecution, which I’m against; it’s bad, it hurts people, and it should be forbidden in most cases (few of them are actually purposeful and even those few could be solved by other means), what I’m defending is “fogive and forget”.
09/10/2009 at 00:11 Klaus says:
I’m not sure how much this pertains to me anyhow, the only place where I usually leave my civility at the door is 4chan. But in regards to offensive language, my approach has always been a dose of ‘do unto to others.’ If I want people people to cease calling me slurs, I’d have to curb my own colorful language. I am unwilling to do that, so I place no ‘restraint’ on others language.
Re: The article. I can’t say I’ve played, or at least remembered playing any gay protagonists. I remember playing a romance mod for Baldur’s Gate 2(?) called Nathaniel or some such. I quit part way through. But that was because I grew to strongly dislike him.
09/10/2009 at 01:14 The Colonel says:
It's not a matter of forgiving and forgetting. In my experience when people are angry and not thinking about what they're saying, they say "worse" insults than "gay". "Gay" is used as a casual insult as much as it is a hot-blooded instinct response.
Words are important because they contain within them the attitudes towards other things. It's an obvious and over-used example, but the word "nigger" means nothing other than "black" in literal terms. In the context of it being used to mean black people are inferior to white people for over a hundred years, it takes on a connotation and meaning beyond the literal one. That is what has happened to the word "gay". If you use it in a derogatory way, you are sending out a message, WHATEVER you intend by the word. Most people in a University context appreciate your usage of the word, but in general society it is safer to use a different one.
09/10/2009 at 14:12 everypiece says:
Going by the usual timeline of these things, I would expect the trans-friendly language in 2029…
09/10/2009 at 14:19 everypiece says:
Bah! My comment was supposed to be nested to something much futher up the page. Now it doesn’t make any sense!
09/10/2009 at 20:38 Sky Jack says:
This is nothing more than a case of a troll shouting, “Gotcha!” A self-righteous, politically leftwing, pseudo-intellectual troll at that. A total douche.
09/10/2009 at 20:42 Dominic White says:
What is wrong with you? Seriously. The guy is gay, so when he writes about relationships, he goes with what he knows.
09/10/2009 at 21:06 Hug_dealer says:
which is worse? Calling someone Gay(the socially accepted term for a male homosexual), or a sally(a term used when you call them a woman).
To me, there is no difference, niether is actual hate speech.
09/10/2009 at 21:29 Serenegoose says:
@everypiece: Yeah, tell me about it. It's with real pain that I read the other articles on the issue and hear 'tranny' flung around like it's an acceptable term now.
@Hug Dealer: Are you gay or female? Because there's this weird thing where people -outside- don't get a say on what's offensive/hateful to said communities (because the stupidity of that is self-evident. See white people declaring that black people shouldn't get worked up about being called 'nigger' because it's not that bad). Calling someone gay might not be on the same level as calling them a frilly-knickered flaming poofter, but you're still establishing that to be gay -is insulting-. Similarly, insults based on someones genital status indicate that you think it is insulting to insinuate that someone has a vagina. It might be an insult that is considered mild on the scale of insults, but it is an insult that -only exists- because of meaningless bigotry. Just because it's mild doesn't change that. That's why you don't get the same wealth of insults about being white, male, and middle class.
09/10/2009 at 21:41 Sky Jack says:
You know what? Let’s just ban ALL insults, because they’re insulting to some people. Then we can all be happen, you disgusting little girl.
09/10/2009 at 22:00 Klaus says:
Nice straw-man. He wasn’t talking about banning ALL insults. I do think people need to grow thicker skin, but there isn’t a need to be hyperbolic.
09/10/2009 at 21:51 Vandelay says:
"This is nothing more than a case of a troll shouting, “Gotcha!” A self-righteous, politically leftwing, pseudo-intellectual troll at that. A total douche."
What? Have you played the mod? There was no "Gotcha!" moment at all. It was pretty clear that it was a gay relationship for the most part of the mod. He is responding to people who came away from the mod and said that they would prefer it if the characters hadn't of been gay. Because apparently putting themselves in the shoes of big muscle bound gun totting mad men (homoerotic much) is fine, but playing a gay guy is a big no no. Makes you wonder if some of them might be a tad insecure.
09/10/2009 at 22:22 The Colonel says:
NB: Jokes and insults are not synonymous
10/10/2009 at 00:03 Hug_dealer says:
You can turn anything into an insult. i have gay friends, i have girl friends, i have all kinds of friends. I call the jocks meatheads, and make fun of thier jockish ways, the same way i call out my gay friends for thier flaming ways, and they would be the first to admit its all true. I get called out on my nerdish tendancies cause i play video games. so be it. Nothing wrong with razzing people.
Call me a bigot if you like, i dont care. Tell that to the 2 gay guys who will be standing up with me at my wedding soon.
An insult is only harmful when you give the words power.
10/10/2009 at 00:42 Klaus says:
Heh. I wonder when the ‘I can’t be racist! I have black friends’ excuse will go outta style.
An insult is only harmful when you give the words power.
That’s about as useful as telling a child ‘sticks and stones.’ It’s easy to defend against hypothetical or imagined attacks, but when it’s in your face and you are understanding the earnest fervor it is being uttered with, I imagine it’s a different thing. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t react or care if I were called a nigger, I can’t be totally sure because- to my knowledge -I have never been the target of actual bigotry.
And watching many troll raids, I think I can safely disagree with such a claim. I’ve seen many a fellow make such a claim only to quickly relent and swear eternal vengeance of swift and brutal litigation.
10/10/2009 at 00:51 Railick says:
I’m a white dude, however I work on the phone for telephone companies. Once I was talking to a customer and for whatever reason I upset him and he started slinging racist slang at me calling me the N word and a lot of other stuff I’d never heard before. I’m not a black guy , I can’t imagine what it feels like to be a black person and have the same things said to you. However I can tell you that it made me feel horrible, like I was sub human like for some reason this guy on the phone was better than me (Or thought he was) It made my stomach burn and made me feel very angry, was shaking afterwards. (it only made it worse that I was actaully correct in what I’d said and he was ignorant and wrong)
THe guy sitting next to me noticed I was shaking and I told him what had happened. He happened to be a older black guy who I’d made friends with very quickly at my new job and he’d been doing that kind of work for a long time. He laughed at me and said “HAH! Now you know how it feels!” For whatever reason that actaully made me feel better. Since then I’ve had that same thing slung at me several times over the phone and I always feel the same way. I dunno if it is the tone of my voice or if it is just the people on the other end imaging that I must be black because I don’t agree with them I have no idea but It feels horrible to be on the other end of a racial slur even if you aren’t the race in question! It is far from true that words can never hurt you. They may injury you directly but they can cause emotional damage (I also know this from years of being verbally abused by my father) that can inturn indeed cause physical problems as well.
10/10/2009 at 00:20 The Colonel says:
The issue isn't using insults as a joke, especially when it's with/to your friends.
10/10/2009 at 00:35 Railick says:
One of my very best friends is an over weight black gay man who is balding. I was sitting there one day at work with him and I said "You do realize that you're like, every minority rolled into one?" and he said "What?" and I said "No offense, but you're gay, black , over weight, and bald. I can't imagine what I could throw in there to make you any more decimated against" and he said "Yah, you're right!" And we both had a good laugh about it.
Even having said that I would /never/ call him ANY of the words above even in a joking manner (although I have called him flaming before but he openly admits to that. I wouldn't do it if he weren't constantly hitting on me) Maybe if I knew him a lot better I would feel more comfortable using some more aggresive speech against him if I knew he thought that kind of thing was funny but I'd never do it just randomly.
You can say people should grow thicker skin but that is up to the person not you. What you think is a mild joke or some harmless words could be the straw that broke the camels back for the other person and really hurt their feelings,lower their feeling of self worth. Who knows you may be the one that convinces some dude to go off and kill himself. You never know, you can't know. It is best NOT to insult people and keep your feelings to yourself even if you don't agree with their life style. I don't agree with my friends life style choice but I don't hold it against him, it just isn't something I would choose for myself. I more than happy that he lives in a country where he is free to choose his own way and I am happy to have him as a friend. ( I just wish he'd stop hitting on me!)
10/10/2009 at 02:26 solipsistnation says:
On some level, though, it is.
In fact, it's more than that– if "gay" (which is a simple description of a person; "you are white. you are a man. you are gay.") is used as an insult EVER it diminishes the validity of being gay everywhere. "Dude, that's so gay" is just as bad if it's between friends as it is between enemies or acquaintances or whatever. It emphasizes that there is a difference and that the difference is question is BAD– it's something that should be pointed out and labelled!
I had friends in high school who used "Jew" as an insult– like, "Man, you are SUCH a Jew!" and "That's so Jewish!" to refer to, well, I'm not really sure. It wasn't even the sort of stereotypical things people insult Jews over like, I dunno– being stingy, having big noses (Yeah, I've seen Nazi propaganda pamphlets. ick.). It was just a thing they called people. Imagine if that was what all the CounterStrike losers called each other– "LOL JEW LOL." "PWNED JEW." etc. Is that acceptable?
If it isn't, then why is "LOL FAG LOL" okay?
10/10/2009 at 05:23 MD says:
Well said, solipsistnation. Unfortunately there are a frightening number of people who would answer ‘yes’ to your rhetorical question on the acceptibility of using ‘Jew’ as an insult. And the CS kids *are* doing it, or at least they were the last time I played. I think it might have begun as a supposedly ironic thing, and then spread like a virus to the armies of mindless youngsters and not-so-youngsters who aren’t happy unless their insult of choice is edgy and shocking, and hey if it spits on the memory of the worst atrocity in the history of humanity, that can only be a bonus right?
10/10/2009 at 03:21 Hug_dealer says:
Guess im a racist bigot then. better let my friends know.
I can understand where you guys are coming from, and i know what you are saying.
the insults only hurt when you give them power is a comment for those talking about every the kids on the net just randomly talking smack. Getting offended is a little silly.
10/10/2009 at 04:18 Klaus says:
I don’t believe anyone called you a bigot or a racist. I am not against you saying whatever you like, I was just challenging your ‘words are just words’ claim. I frequently make use of all sorts of offensive slurs and terms (in ‘proper places’) but I do not pretend it’s ok or tell people to man up.
So yes, I recognize certain words hurt feelings. I recognize that people have a right to those feelings. I just place my ‘right’ to say those aforementioned words above their feelings without diminishing others of that same ‘right.’ And I recognize I may in fact just be an uncouth jerk.
10/10/2009 at 15:37 solipsistnation says:
Ah. Classy. I didn't know that because, honestly, I can't stand playing online with people I don't know, for basically that sort of reason.
11/10/2009 at 14:19 The Colonel says:
Yeah ok I concede that point. I meant to say that if it's a joke made in the context of friends, then (presumably) it would be playing on the absurdness of using "gay" as an insult and sending out a very different message to the term used abusively about someone.
Regarding your point about Jew as an insult/joke, I'm not sure I really know where I stand. The real difference about "gay" is that it sits in the context of a society which was until recently actively and legislatively anti-gay. I would expect that there are unlikely to be many people in England suffering particularly for being Jewish.
I think the big problem with "gay" is that rather than being a joke playing on the outrageousness of the statement, as most of the time "Jews" is, it's just become a widely used synonym for "shit" et al.
Change my mind?
20/10/2010 at 04:39 replica watches says:
Wow… tag replicas|
Thanks for compiling this and posting it.
Raspekt from Chi-town.