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What Happened to Society's Life Script
In the fifties, the American dream was, for the vast majority of people, pretty obvious. You find a job with the main employer of the town, whether that was a coal mine or a factory or a railyard or whatever the case may be. You marry, if not literally the girl next door, then something close; maybe a high school sweetheart. If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife, and except for a few very highly-female coded jobs, that's just what you did. If you were a man you might have been required to serve in the army beforehand, but few people went to college; only if you were wealthy and/or very, very smart. It mostly wasn't your decision either way, about any of it. 'Should I go into the military, or skilled labor, or go to college?' wasn't a question very many people had to ask; usually what you did next after finishing high school was readily apparent, often literally by having only a single option or a very small set thereof. If you did have the opportunity to go to college- most people didn't- both the university and your parents had much more say in what you did there. And I think we should note- the vast majority of people here could find respect as a worker bee. This is important because the vast majority of people have to be worker bees to have a functioning society.
Today, that is not the case. Everyone who wants to can go to university, or near enough. Many people stay in university long past the point at which it does any good, in point of fact. The military is 100% volunteer, and few people live with access to a single major employer. Young people can't find spouses, and these days don't seem to be able to blunder into relationships either. Every individual can, with certain reasonable limits, do what he wishes, and nobody with institutional power seems keen to say no, that's stupid, do this instead.
And it seems that we have lost something, there. Occasionally conservative pundits will start talking about the success sequence- finish high school, work full time, get married, and then have children. There's some other obvious things that go along with it, like 'don't do drugs'. But the gist of the success sequence is, well, a (somewhat vague)life script. And realistically the success sequence is the sort of thing our culture should be putting more effort into promoting; it isn't the default message despite every idea therein being a good one.
I think the youth agree with me, here. Jordan Peterson's popularity, notoriously, came from offering boomer dad advice. Recently there's been discussion of positive male role models to replace Andrew Tate; Andrew Tate's pitch isn't much different from tons of other redpill influencers. What's different is he's selling 'you, too, can be like me, just do x, y, z'. Obviously he's a lying grifter, but his fanbase are mostly teens. What replacement for his (dumb)life script are these positive male role models offering? The pro-social version of Andrew Tate isn't the male feminist activist. It's Mike Rowe.
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees. In a functioning society there are few girlbosses because there simply are not very many bosses- the average person will always make the median income, live a not particularly impressive lifestyle, and live in flyover. To put it more pithily, average people will always be average. And being average isn't, well, a flashy and appealing thing. In the past, lack of options meant people became average worker bees. Today, people have the option not to do that; they may not be Indian chiefs and fighter pilots and surgeons and other high status jobs instead, but they're being something, and usually that something is below average, gig workers and basement dwellers. It has to be said, therefore- most people can't figure it out on their own. For every unrecognized genius there's a dozen schizos. Boring middle-aged advice serves a useful purpose; to throw out the social pressure to follow it was a mistake. The question becomes, then, 'how do we bring it back?'
There's a lot more to it than this, as there usually is, but here is a pretty serviceable summary of an industrial-revolution-one-two-punch
You didn't have a little family business out of your family home making rope, you were one part of the ropemaking company. Rather than owning a small pile and building on it you had a salary and a mortgage.
Modern appliances, particularly the washing machine, inadvertently erased what little was left for your wife to help out with while you were working
When Betty Crocker first came out with instant cake mix, you didn't even have to add an egg (obvious, now that you know). Women were despondent that they'd been reduced into "just adding water."
So that's apparently where the line was drawn and the scraps over which we've been fighting
Thank you for reducing the contribution of women in the home to "what little your wife does while you do Real Work".
Now that we have vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwaves, what need for men to marry at all? They can just do those five minute tasks in between coming home from their Real Jobs and settling down to have fun with online porn, online gaming, and ordering drugs and booze online.
Even our own lot thinks this is sexist language and want to replace it:
What contribution, indeed? The "little that was left for a wife to help out with" isn't anything important or meaningful, it's just idle women sitting on their hands while you toil and sweat as the breadwinner!
This, but unironically. Especially since men's standards on those tasks tends to be considerably lower than women's.
This is part of the problem about the relations between the sexes, and why both men and women are dissatisfied. Women are finding out they can't have it all, and men are caught between what women's expectations are, and what they think they should be, and everyone is caught between what they are and the ideal. See the foofah about female models in video games; it's not something that is really important, but at the same time it's irksome when the complaint is "They made the women ugly" and no, they just made the women look more realistic. I suppose if we all calmed down and accepted that this is fantasy, and guys want fantasy big-titted sluts they can use as masturbation material (or not even that, just what they expect as a porn model for online female) and that this is not how real women look, but I suppose that's too much to ask for. Maybe customisation options where if you are that rara avis, a female gamer who wants to play Suicide Squad you can tone down Harley's looks, or if you're a guy who wants her to have mega-gigantic jiggly boobsock, you can both get what you want. And we all agree to live and let live.
Specifically, the societal script is that women can have it all, that men should give it to them and that expecting anything in return (most especially including household work or sex) is anathema, justifying a tongue-lashing or worse. And you are playing right into that.
No, they didn't. They deliberately made them less attractive. That they made them "more realistic" is gaslighting from the social justice side.
Well, let's dig in to this. "Less attractive" by what metric? Why should they be attractive in the first place? Are the men ranked on being attractive? I mean yeah, Chris Evans Captain America whoo-hoo baby, but the general run of video game male first person characters?
It's a stupid fight and I don't want to get in to it. If guys want doll characters in high heels, fishnets and plunging cleavage bashing people's brains in with baseball bats, well... you do you. But it's not any realistic level of 'attractiveness'.
Here's the less attractive version of Harley Quinn, right? Oh my gosh, the new version doesn't have her arse swinging like a pendulum, this is an affront!
It's a silly thing to get worked up over. Guys want the exaggerated boobs'n'butt, sure, let them have it. But it's not "less attractive versus more attractive", it's porn attractive.
Can you name many conventionally unattractive male game protagonists from major franchises?
I went down a mental list, and all I could come up with was Mario, who barely has human proportions anyway. The other one was Link in the classic Zelda games, but that was fixed by Ocarina of Time (one of the developers’ wives famously asked for them to ditch the bulbous nose and the rest is history.
You have a wide variety of looks for male protagonists, but they usually fall into the pretty boy camp (Link, Cloud, 9S in Nier Automata) or they’re more classically masculine (Simon Belmont, Snake, Chris Redfield), or they’re somewhere in between, bishounen who project some masculine energy (see Alucard and basically all of Iga-era Castlevania, or brother Nier in Replicant). This is the way it always was and I haven’t seen much deviation.
Women have frequently fallen into the supermodel camp. You have Lara Croft, Bayonetta, Samus, 2B and the old Harley Quinn as classic examples. I prefer petite and/or cute, personally, so women like Lara Croft and 2B don’t do much for me, but, say, Zelda from Skyward Sword does and a lot of female characters from RPGs fall into that camp (a recent example would be Xenoblade 3, with Mio, and there’s a steady selection of Fire Emblem and Atelier characters over the decades that work fine for me). So my tastes have always been a bit underrepresented. Suffice to say masculine or chunky characters aren’t that popular with guys, and there’s room for guys with my taste but they’ll rarely be the only protagonist in a game outside select RPGs, which is fine. Heck, even Saber from Fate, who would realistically be muscular, doesn’t look like it.
I don’t play many AAA games, so I’m mostly unaffected by the trends I’ve seen. But the trend seems to be that every attractive female character is made less attractive by conventional standards, and every new female character is either ordinary or unattractive, which has never been the case with guys and seems to continue not to be the case. By what rubric in film, television, or popular art could you make the case that Aloy from the second Horizon game, or that protagonist from the latest Fable trailer, or the Forspoken protagonist, or that super-masculine woman from The Last of Us 2 is attractive to men in the general population? Maybe there’s some art from certain periods with large women, but that’s always seemed to be a result of the artist’s proclivities, not overall trends. I don’t recall seeing masculine women being all that popular with men in any period in history. Why have new characters who look like Samus seemingly become so rare? And why have things seemingly tilted away from those female signifiers of beauty, as in the case of Harley Quinn?
How many modern male characters have seen the equivalent treatment? I don’t even recall many recent male protagonists, but does, say, the guy from the latest Assassin’s Creed adhere less to conventional male standards? What about the guy on the art of Baulder’s Gate 3, who at least looks like he fits into the bishounen trope? What about the new Prince of Persia protagonist, who, haircut aside, just looks very fit, the Simon Belmont type?
Regardless, it looks like the principles of female character design have changed, where the principles of male character design have changed more incrementally if at all. I think that’s what people are latching on to.
Screw that, I'd just be happy if anyone could name a merely average-looking male game protagonist from a major franchise.
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I don't think Harley is beautiful, but then "vacuum sealed into her costume" isn't appealing to me. I think the character is unappealing in general because of the whole back story, and then Margot Robbie in the movie version of Suicide Squad just sealed the deal about "this is ugliness" for me. But I'm old enough that I think tattoos and dyed hair are signifiers of trashy, not hawtness.
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By most metrics both the audience and the people doing it would recognize.
Are we doing merited impossibility now?
That's Harley Quinn's character in a nutshell; psychotic pixie nightmare girl.
Which is not reality, and if you want the blow-up doll version of that in a video game, okay go for it. But it's not beautiful, it's not what real women look like, and from the outside for women, it's a tedious trope.
Like I said, male and female sexuality is different. I'm not unsympathetic to guys going "my fantasy wank material is not appealing in this new version" about their traditional games, Lord knows I've whined about changes to my favourite materials in media. But games companies have to expand the market to make money, which means trying to sell to women as well.
Personally, I don't think games like Suicide Squad are appealing to women, but there may well be some women out there who like those kind of shoot-em-ups. So the game studios want to reel them in by giving them characters to identify with, like Harley, and that makes turning Harley from the blow-up doll to something more appealing to women a necessity. Again, I wouldn't take Suicide Squad for free because the concept insults me: oh yeah, go ahead and piss on Flash's corpse, that's so mature. But I'm carrying over my preferences from comics where I like the Justice League and don't like the idea of "so let's kill the League", even more "let's kill the League in demeaning ways because old-fashioned notions of honour and dignity are to be ridiculed".
I'm way more on board with the criticisms of having Lex Luthor be the voice of SJW by admiring the Amazons for being free of toxic masculinity. Those kinds of changes are truly worth fighting over, not cosmetic changes to Harley's butt so it's less jiggly.
Also, what the hell did they do to Amanda Waller? She's supposed to be a hefty lass, not this pop-eyed skinny bint.
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