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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TanithT" data-source="post: 5947175" data-attributes="member: 87695">Thing is, and I'm really not being sarcastic here, I'm glad SOMEBODY gets to have some sex-positive fun with their RPG's if they choose that as a consenting adult.That isn't, by itself, the problem.  The problem is the social consequences when mostly just one privileged group of people (in this case, heterosexual males who enjoy looking at skinny white females with OMGBEWBIES) get to have their particular version of funsexytiems in mass market RPG material.There is nothing wrong with funsexytiems among consenting adults, BUT, and this is a pretty big but (heh heh, no innuendo intended), stuff happens when RPG's get sexualized.  There are effects.  Some of them you might not even notice or think about, because you're one of the privileged group who is getting what you want out of the material.  Consider what happens when gaming material gets sexified in a way that is very specifically *not intended for heterosexual women to use or consume*.  Heterosexual men (and the occasional lesbian or bi woman) get their jollies by being the consumers, while women are depicted as the objects of gaze.  You're nodding and saying, 'Yes, this is good, I like this, I get what I want."  But, and here is that great big but again, other people mostly aren't.  And they're gamers, too.This is what it feels like not to be part of the privileged group.  It's sort of like being in a restaurant that doesn't really serve "your kind".  We mostly get to sit and watch while you are getting served all the entrees. The people outside your privileged group are watching you eat and wondering why there is almost nothing being served on their own plates.  This restaurant is designed to serve most of the food to just this one group.  People on the outside of that group can't help but wonder why they even came here in the first place, even if they can still really enjoy other aspects like the music and the decor and the company.  We start to feel pretty unwelcome at that restaurant even if everyone else in it says more of us should come on in.  After all, it feels just fine to them.Next thing we notice is that members of our non privileged group are the ones being served as the entrees.  And maybe we don't even mind that, because after all it's not actually us on the plate even if it is members of our group.  But if the other people in the restaurant start treating us like entrees and not fellow diners, even if it's subtle and unconscious and mostly in the language they casually use, it's not gonna help that 'feeling welcome' factor.  Maybe most of the diners in the restaurant can actually tell the difference between what is being served up for pleasure and who are the other patrons of the restaurant, but it's fairly likely that some attitude or "entree" type language to refer to us is going to carry over sooner or later. Gotta ask you a question.  How would you feel sitting around the table with women and some gay men, at a strip club where the men were there to be ogled and the women were ogling them and making commentary on their bodies?  Would you feel kinda weird, maybe?  Like this was not a party for you?  Would you want to play D&D at that table?In summary, while I'm of the opinion that sexy stuff for consenting adults is totally cool, there are some really bad social effects to having some people be the privileged consumers and everyone else being the products to be consumed.  I'm aware that there are no easy fixes for the issue, because it's a much more pervasive one than just the gaming industry.  All I can really hope for is that my fellow gamers will just take a minute to think about what it means and how it actually feels to the people you say you want more of in your hobby.</blockquote>

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