alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 79 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men, and that building an adult game audience means sexually appealing to straight men. Female characters in adult games are often expected to have sexualised designs, with entitled male gamers complaining about characters like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy or The Last of Us II’s Ellie not being sexy enough; meanwhile, the BBC has reported about female games workers also being affected by a blasé culture around women’s sexualisation, such as graphic, distressing sexual content being thrust upon female games actors without warning. The few semi-famous titillating console games, like the Leisure Suit Larry series or Playboy: The Mansion, don’t exactly seem like they’re interested in feminism.

    But understanding sex in video games means understanding it as more than just cheap eye candy for straight guys. Sex is central to how many video games work, including games that don’t technically have any explicit content. Nintendo games present themselves as bastions of childlike, lightly heterosexual wholesomeness – Mario gets his kiss on the cheek from Princess Peach! – but I’ve written about the gay and trans innuendos common throughout the Zelda games, for instance, and how they’re used to both build Link’s androgynous character and to make use of covertly gay and covertly homophobic comedy. Levels of awareness of sex, from basic focuses on satisfying touch to creating sexual tension, are intrinsic to games in various ways, and the games that play with this awareness often find new and interesting ways to tell their stories, and to reflect on why we play games in the first place.










  • stepping in here to say: you are not making a very good impression in this thread. people are trying in good faith to explain why you are mistaken here—and how even biological sex is better understood as bimodal rather than binary—and you keep going to somewhat eyebrow-raising, contrarian places and not really engaging with their arguments. we are permissive to a degree of ignorance/lack of knowledge/genuine curiosity that might be prickly for some people, but your current conduct in this thread is pushing the line and likely to get you removed from at least this section if you continue.



  • So a pride flag that is clearly textbook racist is good and arguing against it and the people that say its better because of the racism is not allowed here

    when you call them racist and imply they’re segregationist for having their preference, yes, that is not allowed. that’s needlessly aggressive and needlessly sectarian—and speaking personally, “having a preference for more stripes on a flag that represent marginalized communities is racist and like segregation” is just such an overstatement of the point (that i otherwise agree with, for the record—i am not a fan of the progress flag) being made that it verges into being unserious.


  • Otherwise you could claim a crossdresser were trans or people who claimed they were “attack helicopters” would have to be accepted as trans because there would literally be no argument you could make against it.

    this just sounds like a skill issue on your part, i’m sorry–this is not an issue if you have a postmodernist understanding of gender, which most trans people (myself included) subscribe to.

    at the end of the day when you drill down? there really is not a material difference between the “real” and “fake” genders–gender is entirely socially constructed, and the designations of “male” and “female” that most people fall into are as arbitrary as any xenogender (real or frivolously created by right-wingers). you only “lose” by entertaining frivolous designations if your understanding of gender is already so narrow that you can’t conceptually accommodate anything beyond a handful of stock gender identities to begin with.







  • this is the definitive image on all LGBTQ+ gatekeeping discourse, in my humble opinion (but especially during pride month.) i am constantly obligated to say: i don’t care if you think asexuals aren’t valid, or bi/pan lesbians don’t exist, or yadda yadda we need to keep pride safe for work. shut the fuck up! these don’t matter!

    and while i’m sure some people do hold them very sincerely: it’s definitely conspicuous how i have almost never heard these positions expressed in any real-life queer space. these issues are so distorted by online spaces in terms of how prominent they are, and it’s worth remembering that