Girls are scary

We're all familiar with the shy, nerdy, awkward guy who can't talk to girls.  He stammers and sweats and mumbles before escaping.  It's a bit sad to see, or experience, on either end.  He has a problem with girls.

Then there's the guy who also has a problem with girls, but of a different sort.  He also has no clue what to say, but says it anyway.  Rather than a total lack of confidence, he has an excess, a failure to recognize that given how he acts, he should have a lack of confidence.  Perhaps a lack of reproductive organs as well, but somehow eugenics always focuses on ethnicity rather than fraternity.

These two share a common thread in that they get lumped into a "gaming culture" dominated by men which causes all manner of problems for women who attempt to do weird things such as take part in a hobby which they enjoy.  Perhaps I should do a survey: "Of these undesirable reactions, would you rather be greeted by awkward stammering or by a demand to see your tits?"  Ideally it would be neither, but I write the questions so I get to make the false dichotomy.

Maybe what is needed is "Objectification Separation", which is the ability to objectify and also not.  Porn: objectify.  Not porn: don't objectify.  This would require the highly complex mental task of recognizing that some women at some times wear nothing but those some women most of the time wear clothes and most women even more most of the time wear clothes.  So sometimes there are women whose job at the time is to be stared at, but not always and not all women.  Can you imagine going to a friend who designs websites and demanding, right then, that he break out some code?  Or on an even greater level of absurdity, insisting that all male friends be able to, and have to, hand over a flashdrive of templates, on demand?  That would be ridiculous.

Someone should make a gay MMO and bring it to E3.  Have "Booth Beef", hot, shirtless men who sit and stand around looking hot and having no other purpose.  Have women wandering by and gawking and then laughing at their male friends for not looking as good.  Spread the phrase "dicks or it didn't happen."  At first men might think it's great, being demanded pictures of their penises (by which I mean, one per man, multiple men, not the other way around).  That is, until they start getting mocked.  Laughed at.  Measured by nothing else.  Not even their epeen.  So what if you've gotten every achievement, you're ugly and tiny!

On Twitter I found a link to a developer talking about the new Lara Croft.  She's more realistically proportioned and the developer kept going on about how she'll be in these terrible situations and we'll want to protect her because she'll be so vulnerable and helpless.  This confused me.  How does her being less ridiculous in appearance make me want to protect her more?  I'm just not seeing any link at all unless they made her a child and triggered the "save the children" instinct.  Even stranger, unless I misunderstood, we're still playing her.  We're not heroes leaping in to save the damsel in distress (which is its own problem), but are the damsel in distress, who despite being "helpless" is, I'm guessing, still going to survive and successfully taking things from tombs or other scary places.  Why would I even want to see or play as a helpless female character?  I much prefer female characters who can hold their own, as in Half Life 2 or Fallout: New Vegas.  Not that they're unemotional, but that "being female" doesn't mean "being crippled by emotion and utterly helpless until a male hero or at least male player saves them."

I also don't get the "get back in the kitchen" nonsense.  It might just be the family I grew up in, but cooking wasn't a woman's job (though due to various circumstances they did tend to do the majority).  Why shouldn't a man be able to cook and if a man is able to cook, why wouldn't he?  Of course there's the Barbeque Loophole, but that's not what I'm referring to either.  We'd use actual stoves and ovens.  Except me, I don't use ovens because I can never seem to time anything properly for it.  My brother frequently has my family and his in-laws over for dinner and often, he's the one scurrying back to the kitchen to check on food while my sister-in-law can keep chatting (because she'd done the baking earlier in the day).  It's not gender roles, but family roles: people doing what they are best at and what needs to be done.  Maybe certain chromosomes give some innate tendency toward particular activities (they do), but that's more of a tendency and not a natural order of the universe.  It's too bad more people can't recognize that.