The statement isn't even true, e.g., "move fast, break things", is good advice if you're running an internet start up, but bad advice you you're running a nuclear power plant.
So what traits are useful depend on what you are trying to accomplish, right? Except you're trying to make it be about biology.
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women's fighting ability is lower then men's.
Yay, an unbacked assertion! This is so fair -- you can spend a quarter second regurgitating an unstudied belief while I have to spend an hour hunting down sources. You know, people who actually care about finding the truth will generally help out with this research. People who merely want to maintain their current opinion won't, and will instead just try to identify their opponent's sources to find every possible flaw. I generally hoped to find more of the former here than the latter, but I've now been disabused.
Anyway. We're already talking about exceptional people, so this distribution question isn't relevant unless you're arguing that women with decent fighting abilities are as rare as comets on Earth intercept courses.
You've offered no evidence of women being bad at fighting. We can start from first principles, then. Hand-to-hand combat with little to no training? I'll put odds on a guy; these contests generally come to raw strength, and untrained, men have more strength. Combat with firearms with training? Women mass less on average, so they probably have more trouble with recoil. But the US Marine Corps accepts both men and women who weigh 91 pounds, so low mass must not be an insurmountable issue. Women unused to physical labor might have difficulty hauling standard combat gear, but then, men would too. The risk of pregnancy is real (and since transgender people are also discriminated against in the military, there's no concern about male soldiers becoming pregnant), but birth control is widely available these days. On the other hand, talking about Far Cry 4, nobody seems to carry more than their rifle and a couple pounds of random accoutrement.
Okay, let's look at how these women are actually performing. Turns out there isn't much data -- commanding officers tend to be squeamish about sending soldiers to fight when those soldiers happen to have breasts. But the First Battalion of Death seemed to perform well in the small amount of action they saw. During trench warfare, when soldiers in their region were ordered to push forward, most of the male soldiers refused, while the Battalion of Death went on without them and advanced the line several trenches. The regiment's commander praised the First Battalion's bravery in his reports. (And then the Bolsheviks executed Cpt Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the First Battalion. She chose the victorious side, but she was captured two years before the revolution succeeded.)
The Soviet Union in World War II drafted women. They sent most of them into medical or antiair specializations; all nurses and 40% of doctors were women, and Griesse and Stites report that antiaircraft roles were strongly dominated by women. Officially, women made up about 8% of the Soviet army. (Incidentally, a book I have about this notes that memoirs on this topic are notoriously unreliable -- and then it uses someone's memoirs to try to claim that most women didn't serve in direct combat. The irony.) There were several bomber units that were staffed mostly or fully by women -- the 588th, known as the night witches, operated obsolete biplanes for lack of proper equipment, producing 23 Hero of the Soviet Union awards for its 110 crewmembers. Their physical conditions were gruelling, heavy on missed sleep and missed meals.
On the ground, there were no Soviet infantry or armor units that were primarily or fully staffed by women, but there were many women who served as snipers and became quite decorated for their work. (By the way, our previous complaint about recoil? The Soviet Union during WWII issued a large number of PPSh-41s to their soldiers. These used 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridges, which are designed for pistols. Same power as a pistol in a 3.6kg rifle means far less recoil. If you weren't using that, you were using a bolt-action rifle -- so the recoil just determines whether you get a bruise on your shoulder, rather than throwing off your aim.)
Still, even in desperation, there was typically official pressure to keep women out of combat roles in pretty much every country. Germany in WWII had a blanket ban on them due to their ideology -- specifically, that women exist to produce and rear children and manage homes, nothing else -- and had enough troubles allowing women into industrial roles that they'd taken up during the previous World War and subsequently been mostly pressed out of. The NVA accepted women in non-combat support roles for the most part, allowing them in antiaircraft roles at the start. The Communist uprisings preceding the war had much higher gender representation -- 40% of commanders of the PLAF were women, along with 60,000 regular soldiers and many more irregulars. Men in the PLAF claimed that women were inferior fighters, which is unsurprising -- putting a female name on a resume reduces the perception of the person's competence by a significant margin, and it'd be odd if this only applied to resumes where the only feminine thing present is a first name.
There is a general trend in guerrilla groups (remember we're talking about Far Cry 4? That game where you're helping a guerrilla group?) is to have high female representation. The Sri Lankan military reports that approximately a third of the Tamil Tigers are women. The Tamil Tigers are relatively effective; the Sandinista front won. Apparently it isn't a huge disadvantage to have women in your armed forces.
Women fighting on par is unrealistic? The fact that only one member of the Golden Path is a woman is far more unrealistic.
I agree that there's been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it's generally from people who wouldn't be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
Turnabout is fair play -- no, you're wrong, spend an hour researching this.
The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn't crone, seductress, or fair maiden -- you'll get that in a handful of indie studios.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact.
An indie studio can do it because there are fewer people involved and the owners can be more selective in their hiring practices. A large studio doesn't have those advantages and has had enough turnover that the effects of the initial hiring practices are mitigated.
I'm seeking some feminist consciousness-raising, and I'm hoping some LWers (Alicorn?) can help.
Specifically, I've never understood why "objectification" is wrong.
I'm a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it's like to be a member of a suppressed group. I still need regular training in avoiding sexist language, etc.
First: my background. When I was 10ish I encountered the word "feminism" for the first time. I asked my mom what the word meant.
She said, "It's the idea that women should have the same rights and privileges as men do."
And I thought, "They have a word for that?" It seemed too obvious to deserve its own word. It felt like having a special word for the idea that left-handers and right-handers should have the same rights and privileges.
So I've always thought of myself as a feminist.
Of course, some activists (the word has positive connotations to me, BTW) pushed too far, as is the case in all large movements. At some times and places (1980s academia, I think), it was common to assert that there are almost no (average) significant differences between men and women that aren't caused by enculturation, except for genitalia. That is of course false. Hormones matter, especially during development.
Such overreaches made it psychologically easier for some non-feminists to dismiss legitimate feminist demands and resist thousands of much-needed feminist advances (which are still ongoing).
Now, on this matter of objectification. I've never understood it. I've tried to get people to explain it to me before, but they were (apparently) not well-trained in rationality. I'm hoping a rationalist can explain it to me.
Here's my confusion about objectification. Depending on what you mean by "objectification," it seems to be either something that (1) is very often perfectly acceptable, or that (2) means something very narrow and is usually not being exemplified when there is an accusation of it being exemplified.
Let me explain.
Earlier, when I tried to figure out what "objectification" was and why it was wrong, the leading article on the topic seemed to be one by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She lays out the goal of her paper like this:
Using examples, she then outlines seven ways to treat a person as a thing. Rae Langton added three more in 2009, bringing the total count to 10 ways to treat a person as a thing:
Consider a classic example of objectification from Playboy magazine: a photo of a female tennis player bending over, revealing her butt, above the caption "Why We Love Tennis."
The Playboy image exhibits at least eight features of objectification: instrumentalization, denial of autonomy, fungibility, denial of subjectivity, reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing!
But, let's consider another example of objectification, what I'll call the Muddy People photo:
To us, these people are nothing but objects of our entertainment and pleasure. We have instrumentalized them. Moreover, they are fungible. It does not matter to us which people are covered in mud and looking silly. And just as with the Playboy example, this photo involves a denial of autonomy. Indeed, it is doubtful the permission to publish their photos was obtained. Moreover, we are not much interested in the feelings of these people but only their role in entertaining us as we gaze upon their mud-caked bodies – a denial of subjectivity. Often, nothing of these mud-covered people can be seen or known except their bodies – in many cases, only body parts, sticking every which way. This is the reduction to body. There is also clearly a reduction to appearance. Their mud-covered appearance is their only interest to us. In many cases, the emotions they might be having are totally obscured by the mud covering their faces. They are also, of course, silent to us.
So all the features of objectification found in the Playboy example, which we might feel is wrong somehow, are also shared by the Muddy People photo, which we probably feel is acceptable. Perhaps this suggests that our feelings are poor guides to moral truth. Or maybe what is wrong with the Playboy photo is something other than objectification.
Of course, there are disanalogies to be found. The Playboy example (especially with the caption) involved sexuality, and the Muddy People photo does not particularly do so. But if this is the line of thought that leads us to condemn Playboy but not the Muddy People photo, then we are bringing in another concept besides objectification.
For example, perhaps we want to say that Playboy‘s objectifications harm women by contributing to a culture of sexual prejudice, but the Muddy People objectifications do not cause any such harm. But then we are not appealing to this Kantian notion of "objectification." Rather, we are appealing to utilitarian principles. (Feminist philosopher Lina Papadaki makes similar objections to the notion of objectification.)
We all use each other as means to an end, or as objects of one kind or another, all the time. And we can do so while respecting their autonomy. I enjoy looking at the shapes and textures in the Muddy People photo while also respecting that the people whose bodies make up those shapes and textures are autonomous individuals of great value. But their value as individuals is not the point of the photo. The point of the photo, in this case, is that it's an interesting picture to look at. And that's okay, I think.
Good romantic partners use each other as a means to their own gratification while also respecting each others' autonomy. We use each other as sex objects, as emotion objects, as conversation objects, as knowledge objects, as carpool objects, and as other objects, all the time - while also respecting each others' autonomy and value. It's not clear to me what's wrong with that.
So if something like Nussbaum's analysis of "objectification" is what is meant by the term, then I don't see what's wrong with it. But if it means something much more narrow (what? I don't know), then I doubt it is exemplified nearly as often as people are accused of exemplifying it.
I reject Kant's epistemology, logic, and metaphysics - as I think any scientifically-informed person should. But even if you do accept all three, I still don't see what's intrinsically wrong with objectification as Nussbaum defines it.
Maybe I'm being dense. That has happened before. I'm not posting this with much confidence that objectification is a mostly useless concept. I'm posting this in pursuit of some consciousness-raising.
Understanding the problem is the first step toward fixing it. And right now I don't understand the problem. So if you have the time, please teach me.
Thanks.
Update: below, I'll keep an updated list of the most useful articles I've found so far.