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Liberation MUSH
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@Aria The Matsu are kind of a liminal case for me. In first edition, the game and setting were explicitly sexist; there’s a sidebar somewhere in the core book saying something like, “Female samurai are still samurai, but they’re also still female, so they’re being dishonorable if they don’t speak more quietly than men and make smaller movements than men.” So, from that standpoint, the Matsu getting to say “Fuck you, and you’re insulting the memory of my world-saving ancestor if you don’t go fuck yourself” makes sense…
…But, like, Rokugan is fictional. They could have just written a world that doesn’t hate women where one group of women is allowed to be loud and aggressive without writing it so it’s a response to institutional sexism. The Matsu making sense in the context of that setting reminds me of the really old arguments about that one Metal Gear game where the only female soldier has to fight in a bikini because something something plant DNA breathes through her skin so wearing more than a bikini would suffocate her.
I dunno. Getting off-topic here anyway, I suppose.
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@Aria said in Liberation MUSH:
Y’know, like it’s almost impossible for male writers to consider that there may be a group of women whose interests and desires don’t revolve around dudes
I imagine it’s possible for individual writers, but when you get more than one dude in a room it’s instantly dick-centric. And then you’ve got male publishers and editors…
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@Pavel
And to be fair, most of the comic book consumer base is switches not buttons.
The studios are probably just targeting the people they think will give them the most money.
Horny teenage toggles just waiting for someone to turn them on.
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@De-Villefort said in Liberation MUSH:
And to be fair, most of the comic book consumer base is switches
I assume they’re more bottoms who pretend to be switches to seem more interesting.
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@Pavel
Hahaha!
Switches and buttons (Penis and vagina), not switches and bottoms.
But also, I agree.I was trying not to be crude while saying that the comic book fan base is a total sausage fest.
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Let’s not be reductive genitalia-essentialists about gender no matter where we are in the forum.
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@De-Villefort said in Liberation MUSH:
And to be fair, most of the comic book consumer base is switches not buttons.
This is a broad assumption that is probably not accurate. Every stat I see seems to be parroting claims made in 2014 or 2017, where men were deemed to be between 64% and 54% of readership of ‘comic books’.
This is market research, and clearly - CLEARLY - people who don’t identify as switches are making up enough of the target audience to result in ch-ch-ch-changes
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Here. Have some statistics from 2019.
Note that this doesn’t break down “What percentage of comic book readers in the United States are men versus what percentage are women?”, but rather “What percentage of adults say they are fans of comic books?”
There is a statistically significant discrepancy between genders.
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@Aria said in Liberation MUSH:
Here. Have some statistics from 2019.
I was curious about the numbers and they seem to be behind a pretty hefty paywall.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring The stats themselves are, but the abstract is readable:
“The graph shows the share of adults who are fans of comic books in the United States as of April 2019, sorted by gender. The data reveals that 43 percent of men said that they were fans of comics books, compared to 24 percent of women.”
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@MisterBoring said in Liberation MUSH:
@Aria said in Liberation MUSH:
Here. Have some statistics from 2019.
I was curious about the numbers and they seem to be behind a pretty hefty paywall.
Ahhh, sorry about that. It was 43% of adult men and 24% of adult women. So not wildly different than what you’d see from older statistics.
If you do want to see older statistics, there’s an interesting spreadsheet here that breaks comics related search terms down by publishing house, with some pretty massive disparities between publishers - 12.5% women readership for Antarctic Press (Robotech), versus 64.71% for JC Comics (who I’ve literally never heard of) and 62.26% for Slave Labor Graphics (publishers of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Lenore, etc.).
Interestingly, the manga related terms skewed much more heavily female than other categories. But bear in mind that data is from 2013, so it’s a decade out of date.
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Shitty MUSH idea, 7/31/2023: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: the MUSH using a combination of FATE Accelerated for character sheets and FS3 for combat.
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I suspect part of the change in demographics is that nerdy things aren’t being gatekept quite as hard for women and femmes, and are more easily accessed online.
No more do you have to walk into a comic shop or a TT gaming store to buy stuff, only for all conversation, and laughter, die as a group of nerdy guys glare at you and whisper angrily because you dared to enter their domain, like you just walked into their damn living room instead of a place of business, all for the crime of being a woman or feminine presenting person.
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@Adora said in Liberation MUSH:
No more do you have to walk into a comic shop or a TT gaming store to buy stuff, only for all conversation, and laughter, die as a group of nerdy guys glare at you and whisper angrily because you dared to enter their domain, like you just walked into their damn living room instead of a place of business, all for the crime of being a woman or feminine presenting person.
JFC, if only that was the weirdest and worst thing that ever happened to me in the local comic/gaming shop…
The one where I went to high school was mostly just silent shock and awkward staring. The one where I went to college I maintain was actively dangerous to women.
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@Aria
The world would be a better place if more comic book stores hired women to station their front counters.
It might ease the nerds into being normal around women by giving them regular exposure to girl-cooties. -
I feel very fortunate that the comic-book and gaming store of my teens did almost always have a woman at the counter.
And very fortunate that now most of the gaming stores in town are places where hot trans girls want YOU to play Magic: The Gathering with them.
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Probably depends. Relying on women to give men attention as a means of making them less inappropriate if they are steeped in a culture where men tell each other they are owed sex, dominion, and it’s women’s fault if they don’t feel like a strong man and no matter their behavior they are entitled to female attention of their choosing-- it just doesn’t work.
Just ask any woman who was raised in and especially spent a portion of their adult life in a fundamentalist religious group.
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@De-Villefort said in Liberation MUSH:
@Aria
It might ease the nerds into being normal around women by giving them regular exposure to girl-cooties.Or it would give said nerds a constant target to creep on and abuse and behave inappropriately with due to an inherent power imbalance of the paying customer and someone just trying to earn enough money to pay their bills.
What needs to happen is for their fellow nerdy guys to chime in and say “this behavior isn’t okay, stop acting like a goddamn incel just because Mia turned you down for a date in 7th grade.”
It’s not on women, or any other marginalized group, to help heal people actively bigoted toward them.
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Also I have to say that most “nerds” that I was around were actually very normal guys. Maybe more quiet until the game started? Far less creepy than the religious nuts I was used to. Sensitive towards how others might feel. Or on the spectrum. I felt safer with them than I did with my former youth group. I did notice though at conventions and more comics oriented stores that I tended to feel less safe, but there was a lot different cultures there than at the small game (rpgs/cards) store in college. In fact it was some of my tabletop buddies that noticed the gross convention behavior stuff the first time I attended one before I did and really the first time in my entire life to that point I’d seen any men take other men to task for their predatory behavior rather than assume the woman was inviting the attention somehow. It was shocking to me.
I did meet other women at conventions and via mushing and that frankly was the best part esp in the days of assumptions about how real girls wouldn’t be interested. My older kids embraced gamer geekism and over the years I’ve been thrilled to see how different their gaming conventions have looked from when I first started going. But that is more about people showing up and seizing enjoyment and directing programming for themselves not trying to train misogynistic men. I wonder if there might be less of them in some gatherings not so much because they are finally getting the attention owed them but because they’re not comfortable joining in where they don’t feel like they are catered to/bad behavior is accepted.
But there’s still plenty of it. And still plenty of people who blame women not giving them enough attention for it.
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@Aria I don’t really trust a paywalled article where I can’t see any type of breakdown about how they came to this conclusion or what the polling size was, etc.
