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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.
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.
If there are fifty changes all of which makes the game worse to varying degrees, there may be only a few of them which are blatantly, inarguably, provably bad, but a whole lot of them which make the game a little worse but where a crafty debater can say "are you sure? You just aren't looking at it from the right angle." But the game becomes worse anyway, because all of these little changes with plausible deniability add up..
Don't women usually pick attractive characters in games? I believe there was a reference to that in one of the earlier discussions.
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