I really just want to comment on some of the responses to the whole Jade Raymond kerfuffle that I’ve read. Most of the people I’ve read so far have pretty much been on the same side as I am, including a gentleman I met while ranting about this at my local comic shop, who works in the videogame industry. He commented that if Ms. Raymond is working at Ubisoft, then she’s obviously good at what she does. And sir, if you read this, please feel free to comment and let me know if I may use your name.
The first response I’d like to comment on is: “She should just expect something like this.”
Why? Because she’s a woman? Someone somewhere asked if people would be white knighting a guy like this. The response they got was, “If she was a guy, THIS wouldn’t have happened.” And it’s true.
One of my first articles was the “Bad Gamer Archetypes: The Guy Edition.” Don’t go wadding your knickers over that, because the next column was the Girl Edition. But anyway, in that column two of the types of Bad Gamer Archetypes I talk about are: “Plays His Sexual Fantasies Guy” and “Does Brutal Shit to Plays His Sexual Fantasies Guy’s Character Guy.” In the latter entry, I talk about how the most disturbing thing about the entire situation was not that the second guy spent long periods of time lovingly describing this horrible, brutal, terrible, fucked up sexual violence his character was perpetrating on the first guy’s character, but rather that it didn’t bother the first guy at all. It was almost like, “Well, yeah, that’s what happens to hot chicks.”
Do I have to tell you why this is fucked up on so many levels? Do I?
So, Jade Raymond should just expect this crap because, “Well, that’s just what happens to hot chicks?” By doing her job she should just expect doucheclams to draw pornographic cartoons of her. Because she’s doing her job?
Faith in humanity… sinking…
Another variation on this theme is, “Well, until guys stop wanting sex and women stop knowing that guys want sex…” OMG! How many ways is this fucked up?
1. Hey, maybe women want sex, too.
2. Wanting sex is not the same thing as being a sexist prick.
3. How is a woman who is dressed fairly conservatively and talking solely about her JOB using sex to sell videogames?
4. Did you hear that? My head just exploded all over everything.
Seriously guys, do you not know how self-loathing you sound when you say shit like this? “Urg want pussy, not able control self around pussy… do anything get pussy.”
Do you really think that poorly of yourself and all other men?
And people say Feminists hate men…
The other response I’m seeing a lot of is the “If people wouldn’t talk about it, it would go away.”
Until the next time, and the next time, and the next time… Yeah sure, AssBoy McDouchehound* is getting a bunch of free press out of this. But if we say nothing, that gives a tacit acceptance of what he’s doing.
It’s like this, how many of you were bullied in school? I’m guessing there’s a lot of hands up out there right now, given the audience. I know I was.
Now, how many of you got the “Just ignore them and they’ll go away” advice from your parents? Probably many of those hands still up.
Now, for how many of you did that actually work? Lots fewer hands I’m guessing. I know it didn’t work for me, it just made them escalate until they could get a rise out of me, as in escalating to physical violence, like hitting me with a car.
Ignoring these idiots doesn’t work. Just like ignoring bullies, doesn’t work. It’s like potty training a puppy, if you don’t rub its nose in it, it won’t understand piddling on the carpet is wrong. Granted, after reading his response, I’m guessing the puppy is more capable of learning, but hope springs eternal.
*The really mean part of me wants to find a picture of him so I can draw a cartoon of him sucking off guys for readership, and see how he likes it. But I will not sink to that level… And I don’t draw that well.
Geek Girls Rule!!! 
I share your sadness.
Jade Raymond is lovely, and she makes a great spokesperson for Assassin’s Creed. But to jump from there to that that’s _all_ she can possibly be.. is sad.
But well; the idiots are out there.
It’s odd that these guys claim that it’s girls who aren’t fit for leadership roles, or intellectual roles, b/c they’re clearly just smex objects, when these guys are openly admitting that they (and presumably in their mind ALL guys) are nothing more than animals running on their primal base desires with no free will or rational thought or conscience whatsoever. THAT would definitely preclude them from the very positions they claim women (and specifically Jade) aren’t suited for. xD
I’m just sick of the attitude of blaming women for the lack of self control of men.
They’re attracted to us, so celarly it’s our fault for making them attracted to us and not giving them sweet sweet smex xD
You are entirely right, of course, in your defence of ms Raymond – the oversexed attacks thrown her way have been entirely unwarranted, and somewhat disturbing.
The issue which bothers me the most, however, isn’t that a large portion of male game geeks has decided this is a perfectly reasonable activity to engage in [it’s saddening, but as a large portion of the online male community is adolescent, I’m not sure there’s much to be done about it. For those men over the age of 16 who act that way, however, I despair], but rather the part the specialist media has had in spreading the ‘cult of Jade’, which necessarily led to a situation such as the one we find ourselves in.
As a regular of a major British games forum known for its unusual degree of sophistication, I noticed the build-up of this cult first-hand, finding it slightly distasteful that discussion of early Assassin’s Creed footage quickly turned to discussion of the aesthetic merits of Jade Raymond. Presumably the specialist press (and Ubi Soft’s marketing department) picked up on this, as Jade was thrust into the limelight in a manner normally reserved for the most well-respected or outspoken figureheads. It was clear that she made for ‘good copy’, and not just because of the interest in Assassin’s Creed.
This had a dual negative impact: first, it legitimised and spread her cult further; second, it gave the more cynical gamers a just excuse to suggest that Jade, and by extension Assassin’s Creed, was only getting hyped up because she was an attractive woman. The problem being, that while the latter was partially correct, the blame somehow ended up getting laid at her door – that she was somehow ‘taking advantage’ of her status.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure that I can in all good conscience blame the media, or the marketers, for their actions. As stated, she /did/ make for good copy, and all the attention she received will have helped rub off on the game, so in both cases they were simply doing their jobs to the best of their ability. It’s just sad that things have ended up this way.
“…as Jade was thrust into the limelight in a manner normally reserved for the most well-respected or outspoken figureheads.”
Wasn’t she the team lead for this product. That’s what all the articles I’ve read have lead me to believe. And that team leads usually do ramp up interviews. After watching video footage of her in the interviews I find her exceptionally well-spoken and if she knows what she’s doing, as I think we both believe she does, then why isn’t she a suitable spokesperson for her product?
“Wasn’t she the team lead for this product. That’s what all the articles I’ve read have lead me to believe. And that team leads usually do ramp up interviews. After watching video footage of her in the interviews I find her exceptionally well-spoken and if she knows what she’s doing, as I think we both believe she does, then why isn’t she a suitable spokesperson for her product?”
My apologies, I appreciate how bad that must have sounded – I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that Jade was not the logical choice for interviews, in the slightest. What I meant to imply was that the amount of interviews that there were, which prominently displayed Jade in photograph and/or her name, were unusually high for a relatively low-profile producer, i.e. one who had not been in successive limelights a la John Romero (for his outspoken nature and the infamous Daikatana), Sid Meier (whose name is attached to a slew of famous games) or Peter Molyneux (famous and good copy).
Certainly, a large proportion of these interviews were conducted for excellent reasons: Jade is one of a very few females to break through the glass ceiling in the games industry; Assassin’s Creed was an exciting looking game, being developed by a veteran team. But nevertheless, her profile was unusually large, which will surely have helped the internet bigots justify their accusations that she had somehow “T&A’d her way to power”.
Well, she is a rare duck, a woman in the videogame industry, and a woman who is damn good at it, as well. Unfortunately the state of the industry makes that news. Would that it were not so. I mean, it is a little annoying to realize that a lot of the spotlight on her amounts to “ZOMG! Competent Woman in Man’s Field! And She’s Not Ugly!!”
Sigh.
Well, at least there does seem to be a constant upward-trend in the number of women working in the industry, I’m just waiting for more to make the leap to the higher echelons: hopefully Jade will turn out to be the tip of the iceberg (of highly valued female game-makers, not of further misogyny-led responses from the gaming community).
Agreed.
I don’t think any thoughtful guy who responds to 2007’s cretinfest need parse words or resort to stoic shoe-heel contemplation. What was done to Jade Raymond was no different than what’s done on the internet to any woman in any field who is conventionally attractive and moderately successful: She becomes the object of a level of male desire so frustrated and so un-self-aware that cretins essentially type out the verbal career-specific equivalent of a gang-rape while only half-realizing it: they pile on verbal abuse simply because the object is beyond their sexual grasp. I’ve seen them do it to any novelist, horror writer, artist or cartoonist who is decent-looking and successful; the less successful are sometimes given more of a break (*sometimes*). The attractiveness factor works for women’s careers as long as they aren’t put on level ground with ordinary males who can type. After that, things degenerate to the Beavis and Butthead version of Straw Dogs. Women aren’t the only people who should be enraged about this. If you’re a guy, you don’t want women believing all men think that way and, therefore, decent guys are either half-hearted assholes or lying. They don’t need the baggage of being blamed for someone else’s desire and we don’t need the baggage of being blamed for countless hydrocephaloids’ aggressive idiocy. It’s in both our interests to hunt down megaphone-enhanced sexist fools and humiliate them until they have to change their user names and cultivate new styles in order to publish.
Personally, I think you should do a whole series of drawings of the perp satisfying queues of convicts with every orifice and post them endlessly. He *should* know how it feels to be bullied, for the simple reason that having some sense of how it feels might stop him from doing it. I’m really sick of this behavior. People can’t make overtly racist statements in public — why is stereotyping women any different?
Years ago, I remember playing in high school bands and hearing white guitarists say Living Color didn’t play “real rock.” I remember thinking, “By that definition, Guns ‘n’ Roses doesn’t play ‘real rock’ either, yet you don’t submit them to the same litmus test. Why? Because on some level, you believe Living Color is trespassing on your territory. GnR doesn’t pose the same threat.”
Mining suits, anyone? It’s a mirror of the very first case of sexual harassment ever prosecuted, sans the miner outfits and physical assault. Oh, and Raymond’s co-workers and underlings clearly have the brains not to think that way.
Lastly, I should mention that women aren’t exempt from mirroring awful male behavior: for every seven male morons who obsess hatefully over Raymond’s perceived imperfections, there’s one equally hostile female who makes similarly hateful statements.
This is the same sort of twit who obsesses endlessly over the perceived “ugliness” of various desired movie stars. Such people should be sent to special Al-Anon meetings for verbal gang-rape enablers.
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