This is the second in a series of three videos exploring the Damsel in Distress trope in video games. In this installment we look at the “dark and edgy” side of the trope in more modern games and how the plot device is often used in conjunction with graphic depictions of violence against women. Over the past decade we’ve seen developers try to spice up the old Damsel in Distress cliche by combining it with other tropes involving victimized women including the disposable woman, the mercy killing and the woman in the refrigerator.
Due to the nature of the topic, this video comes with a trigger warning for violence against women.
For more information and a full transcript visit: http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/05/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/
DEFINITIONS:
The Damsel in Distress: As a trope the damsel in distress is a plot device in which a female character is placed in a perilous situation from which she cannot escape on her own and must then be rescued by a male character, usually providing an incentive or motivation for the protagonist’s quest. This is most often accomplished via kidnapping but it can also take the form of petrification, a curse or demon possession. Traditionally the woman in distress is a love interest or family member of the hero; princesses, wives, girlfriends and sisters are all commonly used to fill the role.
Damsel in the Refrigerator: A combination of the Women in Refrigerators trope and the Damsel in Distress trope. Typically this happens when a female character is killed near the beginning of a story but her soul is then stolen or trapped and must be rescued or freed by the male hero. Occasionally time travel or some other form of resurrection may be involved in the quest to bring the women in question back from the dead.
Disposable Damsel: A variant of the Damsel in Distress trope in which the hero fails to save the woman in peril either because he arrives too late or because (surprise twist!) it turns out she has been dead the whole time.
Euthanized Damsel: A combination of the Damsel in Distress trope and the Mercy Killing trope. This usually happens when the player character must murder the woman in peril “for her own good”. Typically the damsel has been mutilated or deformed in some way by the villain and the “only option left” to the hero is to put her “out of her misery” himself. Occasionally the damsel’ed character will be written so as beg the player to kill her.
(via toffeeee)
Source: femfreq
language as a window into humanity
my linguistics boner is showing oops
“language is a window into social relations”… beautiful line…
important to remember ;-)
On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC), Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, Roman consul, and constitutionalist.
This is an English translation of “Lorem ipsum” the filler text that is commonly used by web designers as sample content for a web page…
The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
(via mgomes)
Source: ibad
Why blogging about how the Internet is ruining our society is massively problematic
I am a college educator, and so I’m used to dealing with problematic assumptions. That I also teach (and do) web design and use web technologies as a means of promoting social justice, only compounds the kinds of assumptions I encounter.
“The Internet is destroying our society,” some students invariably try to convince me every semester. “Everyone’s getting addicted to using computers,” a colleague warns. “Google is making us stupid,” Nicholas Carr, a writer for The Atlantic has most famously quipped. The argument goes something like this (from Carr’s article):
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
So, let me get this straight: because our society is now different, largely due to the increasing use of communication technologies, and because you feel differently about information, and specifically about how your mind is processing said information, bad things are happening everywhere. Does that about cover it? Never mind that there is little to no scientific evidence that “Internet addiction” actually exists. Never mind that a recent study shows that Americans, who spend more time surfing the Internet than any other population in the world, spend, on average, a WHOPPING 28 hours per month. The digital sky is clearly falling and we are helpless to avoid it.
I get it. Believe me; I do: change is scary. Believe it or not (my students certainly don’t), I wasn’t always a “techie.” I was actually raised in a working class family that lived in a rural area, so I didn’t have much access to computer technology growing up. After my parents divorced, I had almost no access to the Internet clear through my formative teenage years. I’m a “digital immigrant,” then, a convert: I adopted the use of digital technologies to solve problems I was encountering, problems as a teacher, as a communicator, and as a citizen.
So, I am a good test subject of this mythology. Has my life gotten worse, because of technology? Am I dumber, more socially inept, and less effective as a person because of technology? Am I addicted to using these technologies, meaning (as is the definition of addiction), that if I don’t use them I go through withdrawal symptoms? The answer to the former questions is: I certainly don’t think so. And no: I have never experienced withdrawal symptoms from not using the Internet (nor do I know anyone who has).
Another, more important, question we should all be asking ourselves is: who is the agent here? If you look at all the statements I started this post with, they all put technology itself in the control seat. People aren’t using Google ineffectively, Google is making us dumber. Our society isn’t using the Internet like it has used every tool since “society” existed, for both good and for ill, technology is using society for its own nefarious ends.
Well, as anyone who knows how the technologies that make up the Internet actually work, I am here to tell you: they are not sentient. Not yet, anyway. And if they ever become so, I will be the first one to decry their use of us, if that use is truly for ill. In the meantime: if something is happening to our society, it is because human beings are doing it. Human being are the designers and users of the Internet. Human beings create computer viruses, which are arguably the closest thing to life on the Internet. Human beings hack the accounts of other human beings, and steal the digital identities of other human beings.
Human beings also generate millions of dollars in charitable donations every year via these same technologies. They use these technologies to connect with each other across the planet. They share stories, design art, make new technologies, and even, yes: educate themselves and others via these same technologies.
The Internet is a tool for being human, not the other way around. And it can be shaped any way we like. And so, as much as I welcome (as anyone committed to democracy must) the nay-sayers who will continue to post about how destructive this virtual space is that we are all co-creating, I must point out: if you really think the Internet is so terrible, why do you continue to use it? Shouldn’t you be bombarding the rest of us with these messages of doom via telegraph, or perhaps carrier pigeon? Just something to think about ;-).
Former Monsanto Employee Exposes Fraud
his week the Food Nation Radio Network interviewed former Monsanto employee Kirk Azevedo about his concerns with the leading biotech company’s practices, a timely interview as the battle over genetically engineered (GE) food regulation continues on a state, national, and international scale.
Azevedo graduated with a biochemistry degree from California Polytechnic State University and started working for the chemical industry doing research on Bt (or Bacillus thuringiensis) pesticides. Around 1996, he became a local market manager for Monsanto, serving as a facilitator for GE crops for the western states. He explained to Food Nation Radio how he had assumed that California cotton that was genetically engineered for herbicide resistance could be marketed as conventional California cotton (to get the California premium) since the only difference between the two, he believed, was the gene Monsanto wanted in the crop. However, one of Monsanto’s Ph.D. researchers informed Azevedo that “there’s actually other proteins that are being produced, not just the one we want, as a byproduct of genetic engineering process.” This concerned Azevedo, who had also been studying protein diseases (including prion diseases such as mad cow disease) and knew proteins could be toxic. When he told his colleague they needed to destroy the seeds from the GE crop so that they aren’t fed to cattle, the other researcher said that Monsanto isn’t going to stop doing what it’s been doing everywhere else.
Azevedo recalls his disillusionment:
I saw what was really the fraud associated with genetic engineering: My impression, and I think most people’s impression with genetically engineered foods and crops and other things is that it’s just like putting one gene in there and that one gene is expressed. If that was the case, well then that’s not so bad. But in reality, the process of genetic engineering changes the cell in such a way that it’s unknown what the effects are going to be.
Azevedo has since left the chemical industry and now calls for the enforcement of GE labeling laws. In California, such a law will appear on voter ballots in the upcoming November election asProposition 37 – the first of its kind, if passed (although no labels would be required for livestock that feed on GE crops). Supporters of GE labeling predict the California rule, which would require labels on most foods containing GE ingredients, could influence food labeling throughout the country.
Not so great news on the national front, however. The U.S. House agriculture committee passed its version of the proposed Farm Bill this week that includes attached provisions severely weakening USDA’s oversight of GE crops. Not only does the bill provide backdoor approval for any new GE crop before meaningful environmental review, but it also protects the biotech industry from lawsuits brought by organic farmers whose crops are contaminated by GE crops through “genetic drift.” According to the Center for Food Safety, “all requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act or Endangered Species Act would be banned, even if a crop approval would harm protected species.”
If that isn’t unsettling enough, news that the European Union is proposing to drop its “zero-tolerance” policy regarding untested GE ingredients in food really takes the cake. This would be a significant change from its usual reputation of far surpassing the United States in holding industry accountable:
The new proposal would allow GM ingredients into the food supply in levels below a certain threshold. This echoes a decision made last year to allow GM crops to be used in animal feed below certain concentration levels. Why this recent “change of heart”? Opponents of GM crops note that the dropping of the zero-tolerance policy is due to pressure from the U.S. government, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the biotech industry (arguably led by Monsanto).
Perhaps it’s not too much of a surprise, given the evidence of Washington’s aggressive promotion of GE crops abroad and even threats of retaliation against dissenting countries. Even so, Azevedo’s words of caution regarding the unknown health effects of Monsanto’s and other biotech companies’ creations make these deregulatory efforts very disconcerting. Our government representatives should be heeding Azevedo and biotech whistleblowers who put public and environmental health before Big Ag interests.
Sarah Damian is New Media Associate for the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.
