Archive for Culture

| February 18, 2013
12 comments

Rape Culture Part 1 – Infantalizing Women

Trigger Warning for discussion of rape, rape fantasies, consensual non-consent, and BDSM. This is a 6 part series that will be updated weekly, focusing on rape culture, rape fantasies, and consent.

I joined a group on FetLife that was dedicated to rape fantasies. My goal was to explore how to reconcile having rape fantasies, and writing rape erotica with my belief that upholding a rape culture is negative to society.

I’m going to be looking at the types of responses, and what I think on them, in parts.

Part 1 – Infantalizing Women

Underneath a lot of the replies was skepticism of feminism, and of the term ‘Rape Culture’. They brought up many things that I agree with — that the idea of continual consent puts the onus on the man to ‘take care’ of his female partner in case she changes her mind and doesn’t inform him. That relying on body language for consent, even if she says yes, is tricky at best, and impossible at worst.

Read more

Category: Culture | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| February 16, 2013
16 comments

Games Imitating Life: Rape Culture in MMORPGs?

Contrary to the Kotaku article, no one was accused of rape in game at any point, and that is not the point of this blog post. Any comment that suggests that someone was accused of rape, or attempted rape, will not be approved.

 

A curious event happened to me recently while roleplaying, and I’ll use direct quotes whenever appropriate. For those of you not familiar, I’ll explain things. Roleplaying, being the act of taking on the role of a character that’s not yourself, is traditionally done through tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons. With the rise in popularity of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) it’s taken on a different turn in the online space with people playing out scenes as their avatars (their usually three-dimensional computer generated character) in an online world.

These days I play Guild Wars 2 (GW2), a recent and fairly popular MMORPG set in the fantasy world of Tyria. Read more

Category: Culture, Media, Personal | Tags: , , , , , , ,
| February 11, 2013
No comments

Valentine’s / Amy’s Innocence

I blogged on One Handed Writers about Valentine’s Day, romance, and how I just can’t really write it ‘properly’.

I’ve never been one to celebrate Valentine’s. I never really saw the point, and from a feminist perspective, I always found it offensive in how it upheld so many stereotypes about women, and men, and how they interact in relationships.

I just don’t buy this idea that women are only interested in having sex with their partner in exchange for material goods, or that men have to take their partner to an expensive, crowded restaurant on one of the busiest days of the year. It’s a societal expectation, however, and people do like that.

Read the rest here.

As well, Amy’s Innocence is only .99 cents for this week if you want to explore a less traditional and more erotic coming of age romance. Who doesn’t love a pale little redhead losing her virginity to a strong military man, I ask you!

Category: Culture | Tags: , , , ,
| February 10, 2013
6 comments

Fetlife Brings Back Issue of Paypal Erotica Censorship

Fetlife is no longer allowed* hosting incest, zoophilia or scat.** It doesn’t matter if it’s consensual, and between two adults. It doesn’t matter if it’s fantasy. It doesn’t matter if they’re just idle desires that no one would act out on. On their announcement notice, they say:

From all the research we’ve done over the past two weeks, the Big 4 no-no’s are:

1. Anything Under 18.

2. Incest. (Even between consenting adults.)

3. Zoophilia.

4. Scat.

We won’t even be able to allow people to fantasize about incest (between consensual adults), zoophilia, or scat… if we want to continue to be there for the community.

In a story that will sound familiar to erotica authors from last year around the same time, Fetlife’s payment processor cut off their service and threatened to fine them after finding pictures of cartoon jokes of the Simpson’s characters having sex, among other things.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Paypal Censorship issue of last winter, PayPal told Smashwords, All Romance eBooks, and other sites that PayPal would no longer serve them as a client if they continued to host erotica with rape, incest, bestiality or scat.**

Read more

Category: Culture, Media | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| February 8, 2013
No comments

Video Games and Violence: The Connection

Video games contribute to violence.

That’s my contention, though I can almost guarantee not in the way you think I mean it. Read more

Category: Culture, Media | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| February 5, 2013
10 comments

Introduction: Class, Poverty, Gender and Violence

A particularly insightful article by a blogger here got me to thinking quite a lot lately. More importantly it got me to writing and the subsequent post has ended up serving as my introduction in returning to blogging with my partner here.

I’ve had the good fortune of being a cis gendered male born into a wealthy western country. Even though I began life in one of the poorest corners of that nation, I count myself fortunate in many ways. Read more

Category: Culture, Personal | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| January 23, 2013
No comments

Rape and Sex Trafficking

Every time I hear a story about rape and sex trafficking, it breaks my heart. I’ve watched movies, read books, and seen news story after news story that tells of such terrible treatment. Behaviour so horrible that it seems almost unstoppable.

There is an imbalance between men and women to varying degrees all over the world. There are fundamental differences between the genders, and sex is one of the biggest routes of so much pleasure and pain and controversy in our world.

Read more

Category: Culture |
| January 21, 2013
One comment

Workplace Bullying

Bullying at work is a problem that I’m ashamed to have been the target of on several occasions.

It took me a long time to realize what was happening, much longer than it should have.

It wasn’t wholly my fault I didn’t realize what was happening however. I’ve been bullied at multiple workplaces and I’ve been to doctors and psychiatrists and therapists in order to cope, and not one of them mentioned the word ‘bully’. Not one of them told me that it was normal to respond to bullying in the fashion that I did. Not one of them told me that it wasn’t my fault.

Read more

Category: Culture |
| January 14, 2013
No comments

Girls are Sluts

Male privilege is something that men can get by virtue of being male, such as a higher starting salary offer out of college. Other times, however, it can be something negative that they avoid getting by virtue of not being female. One of those instances is being judged for sexual proclivities from a young age.

It’s an old trope now that a woman will be called a slut for sleeping with a guy she loves where as a guy is a stud for sleeping with a dozen women he hated, and it affects girls from a very young age.

Read more

Category: Culture |
| January 11, 2013
2 comments

Not Being a Bigot

Not being a bigot should not win you any prizes in 2013. You should not feel entitled to a pat on the back to say that you don’t hate gay people. You don’t deserve an inflated ego because you think trans gendered individuals deserve the same rights and protections awarded to cis individuals [individuals who were born in the correctly gendered body]. Saying you don’t blame all Muslims for 9/11 doesn’t mean you’re open minded.

They are people who happen to be different than you in some manner. Saying that you don’t think they deserve to be treated as less than a person doesn’t make you a good person – it just means that you might not be a bad person.

Read more

Category: Culture |
« Older Entries  
%d bloggers like this: