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 Grot 6 wrote:
You have to much skin in there showing, cover her head with a berka.

Nice strawman, only slightly marred by the lamentable misspelling of "burqa". Better luck next time, friend.

 alanmckenzie wrote:

Deadnight wrote:
Preferring little models with less skin showing isnt going to make the female population like you or me any more than they already do.

Really. Preferring miniatures that don't, or rather disliking miniatures that do, sexualise and objectify woman is not about getting girls to like you.

The accusation is standard MRA fare, at least, the premise being that no man could possibly object to the imagery in question without an ulterior motive. It's rather sexist, and in a rare double-whammy, insults men as well as women, since they, the argument argues, have to relate everything in their lives to the pursuit of sex like some kind of troglodytes.

So, I'm honestly curious. Does anyone think anything of substance has been achieved with this thread? Or are we just circling the drain like the leftovers of a bad salad from three weeks ago, discovered in the back of the fridge growing six kinds of mould and emitting a horrifying smell of rancid olive oil?

I know what my pick is. I don't think we, as a community, have the rhetorical skill or empirical data to actually argue gender politics the way a lot of people here seem hellbent on doing.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Nothing ever changes from these sorts of things, other than occiasional financial losses when a company decides to try to appease the gnashing and wailing of teeth. For as long as I can remember, this topic has come up (used to be in the letters column of Dragon Magazine and occaisional noise at conventions). Those who seek sensible looking femailes though never want to put forth the capital to fix their percieved problems (something that with KS now, they would be able to do much more readily).

Speaking of Kickstarters, a few of the miniatures in this year's Empire of the Dead kickstarter turned out pretty well. I didn't pledge for any specifically, but women were represented in some of the freebies. A few met my requirements. The others... met the hammer. I would argue that some of the otherwise uninteresting Raging Heroes all-women campaign also broadened the horizons of representation in this regard.

I find it curious that the words used to describe people unhappy with the current state of affairs often emphasize the shrillness of their tone, the emotional nature of their argument, and often contain expressions of crying or otherwise "making a scene". There is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
And just to be clear, that second image will have plenty of people who object to the boob plate and nipple nuts.

Those are rather lamentable design elements, especially the, as you so rightly, "nuts". Her torso armor ensemble just looks rather strange, possibly they were going for a "40k-gothic bulletproof vest" kind of thing with the coat thrown on top of that, but they still wanted to maintain her silhouette, which modern protective gear does not do. The bottom of her outfit is likewise a bit odd. Is she wearing green chaps, or a black leather crotch-guard over green pants? These are not gendered observations, just a slight digression. If anyone cares to post a picture of an inquisitorial dudebro, I will gladly nitpick the clothing on one of those as well.

xruslanx wrote:
I am simply saying that it is a man's duty to protect his family and his country.

Maybe in 1914 it was, and we can see where it got them. What passing-bells for those that die as cattle? indeed. I'd much rather follow a rather different heroic example.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
I'd imagine it has something to do with the perception of miniature war gaming that both men and women have. Miniature war gaming is generally considered an activity appropriate only for males. Coupled with the historic elements of warfare which, and I don't have any statistics to base this statement off of so grain of salt and all that, but I imagine is a field of study that most women choose not to undertake, and you will begin to approach an answer to your question.

Something else to consider is the severe lack of relatable protagonists in historic settings for women. Sci-Fi and Fantasy at least allow for women to be central to the story being told because real world cultural mores can be changed or ignored in those fantastical settings. Unless you focus on very rare outliers the same cannot be said for historic games where women's roles were limited and often took the form of supportive activities not devoted to direct combat. I doubt a rousing game of playing American Civil War Nurses would be as much fun as recreating the Battle of Antietam. Although, bonesaws are cool, so maybe I'd play an ACW Nurses game.

The low appeal of historical games (to both sexes) is also a matter of scale. There's no room for individual characters in most of them. Indeed, Flames of War differentiating between lone heroes is something of an outlier in that field already, the general trend tends to be for uniform hordes/platoons/squadrons of troops. Another thing that drives people of both sexes away is the perception, as you point out, a lot of people have of such games, they're seen as a pastime for reenactors and serious history buffs, not for someone with no more than a passing interest in medieval chivalry. Historical games come across as being about recreating and refighting history, whereas fantasy games come across as making up your own stories with your own characters. The two appeal to very different personalities and interest groups, and there is limited overlap there to begin with. People into napoleonics and ACW tend not to also have Necromunda gangs and a Blood Bowl team. Flames of War has tried to cross this divide by being easier to pick up and more aimed for the "beer and pretzels" crowd, of course.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:
Great point! To be honest I have avoided games like Flames of War because I do not perceive myself as enough of a history buff to participate and I do not want to run afoul of players who nit pick every detail of a miniature army.

Historical gamers as a group have a very poor reputation, alas. The stereotype is of basement-dwelling anoraks with replicas of Austerlitz and Waterloo populated with hundreds of tin soldiers, arguing about button color and flag dimensions.

 Grot 6 wrote:
Are we still talking about that blurb picture from the Inquisiton codex?

I don't understand why, either, there's so much more fertile ground for dispute in the miniatures hobby.

Anyone intending to relate this back to miniatures gaming... anytime soon?

 Scott-S6 wrote:

What this image suggests to me that maybe He-Man hasn't been subject to enough scrutiny or criticism. I know I never found male action figure characters at all appealing as a child. They were always these grotesque hunks of muscle with poor problem solving skills and a terrible taste in clothes. He-Man was egregiously bad in this regard, and the idea that some boys might prefer a different kind of hero is still considered a freak outlier today. For my part, it wasn't until I learned to read that I found characters I could actually relate to. As a kid I wanted to be Captain Nemo.

The more you look at He-Man there, the weirder he gets. That outfit is straight out of a pride parade in San Fran. It's hardly a "neutral" generic appearance when you get down to it.

 Seaward wrote:

 Agamemnon2 wrote:
I don't understand why, either, there's so much more fertile ground for dispute in the miniatures hobby.

My personal theory is that there are many unfortunates out there who believe if you white knight hard enough on the internet, girls will track you down a and love you.

Ah yes, "white knighting". A term invented whole cloth by the people who also coined gems such as "redpill", "mangina", "friendzoning", and "negging". Purveyors of misogynist fantasies and cloudcuckooland relationship advice for the benighted masses, bouncing ideas off each other in a permanent echo chamber. The MRA/PUA community has a lot to answer for in the final tally, but belonging to it is in many ways its own punishment.

I find it telling that nowhere in that paradigm is the idea even entertained that maybe some men are feminists because they think of women as actual humans deserving of the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else. No, it has to be a selfish power play. Possibly said fantasists are projecting their own predilections on their enemies, which raises the question "Who is it that you actually have a problem with?" As for my own part, I'm not a white knight, I'm a Rainbow Warrior. Deal with it.

 Jehan-reznor wrote:

Women and man are different deal with it , you should read
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/55001-men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus

Or perhaps this? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130204094518.htm They seem to have some doubts about the veracity of said book.

 MetalOxide wrote:
This thread needs to be locked.

Oh, by the gods of the worlds above and below, yes.

 Seaward wrote:

You think all those terms were originally coined by the MRA? That's hilarious. Ill-informed, but hilarious.

Well I'm glad that in the absence of anything else of value, this thread can at least make people laugh. Enjoy your rhetorical victory over me for as long as you may. I hope it gives you warmth in your existence. It takes a very special kind of knave to mock people for being ill-informed and not make any effort to inform them.

As always, I am open to being corrected, but you instead decided it would be more amusing to kick me in the kneecaps a couple of times, which to me is rather indicative of wanting much more to have the last word in an inane game of tit-for-tat than actually engaging in dialogue. Yes, my statement regarding the coinage of those terms was inaccurate. But do you deny that all of them are now used exclusively or nearly so by the group referred to? Because if so, then you being technically correct really matters not a jot.

My argument stands. Adherents to a certain ideology cannot understand that for some people, feminism is not some long-term cynical ploy for personal satisfaction. How does that even work? If I'm for gay marriage, does that mean I'm secretly yearning for the hirsute embrace of some leather-clad gentleman of the bearish persuasion and am only advocating for the cause in order to further that agenda? Are people against corporate greed and exploitative practices because they want to be the greedy exploiters themselves?

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
The second point doesn't really make sense. The companies don't do it because anyone asks them to. They do it because there is profit in it. If there IS profit in it, then I think you should start a company catering to that market and corner it before someone else finds your secret. Otherwise, if there ISN'T profit to be had, then yes, it is too much to ask.

There's many, many kinds of catering, and you rather assume that all companies are 100% rational capitalist actors, which I don't think is entirely unproblematic. Consider the local game or comics shop whose uncouth, opinionated staff makes people feel unwelcome. In a pure profit perspective, those people should not exist, they're costing stores money. And yet, the last time I tried to buy a Marvel album, I was met with a guy who asked me why I was reading a "loser comic" like Iron Man instead of Batman. He was not maximising profits by doing that, he was being an opinionated fan and a bit of a jerk. I haven't been to that store since, based on their quality of service, instead I bought my next Marvel albums online, which is money that I would gladly have spent at a real store that treated me like an adult.

What you're suggesting is that the marketplace is 100% self-correcting and there's never any need to advocate for any kind of change, since companies will always leap at new things as soon as there's profit to do them, whereas I don't think it's that clear-cut. To my knowledge, the rude comic book buy in [city redacted]* is still employed. Left to their own devices, things have a tendency to stagnate. Maybe you're right and no companies can afford to do things differently, but we should still have the right the raise the issue every now and then.

Maybe someone, somewhere wakes up and sees that hey, THEIR company could make those figures, they just hadn't thought about it before. It costs money up front to try to release figures, and it's bound to be pretty hard to measure their eventual selling power ahead of time, so that's an incentive for companies to be cautious about untested ideas, even if they eventually would be profitable. As such, discussions and advocating for change can perhaps move those projects along a bit, convincing companies that maybe there's people out there for this, or maybe they could do a kickstarter and see how it goes. You're right that companies don't just do X because people ask for X, but people asking for X can get the whole process of doing-X started.

I see no way in which questioning the status quo like this is a negative thing. Maybe nothing will change at the end of the day. Maybe some people complain about things in a way that gets on people's nerves. But that's always going to be the case. Living in the kind of online community as we are, there's always going to be people in it whose opinions we cannot stomach and whose priorities come across as bizarre to us. We're not owed a complaint-free, controversy-free hobby, and by jingo, why would we want one?

--
* Pardon me for doing this, but I live in a small country with a fairly tiny community, and I don't want to come across as calling that one guy out specifically like some anonymous douchebag. If i wanted to complain about him specifically instead of using him as an example, I would have done so in writing to his employers, not online to nobody in particular.

 Seaward wrote:

 Agamemnon2 wrote:
But do you deny that all of them are now used exclusively or nearly so by the group referred to?

Christ, yes. You think "friendzone" and "white knight" are now MRA exclusives?

I believe I might have committed the typical error of paying undue heed to the loudest voices in the room, as it were. I hear them thrown around casually and loud by people who've bought on to the MRA philosophy. If I am in error, I apologize. It happens. And since you invoked the name of Christ, ask yourself what he would rather we do? Continue arguing about those specific minutiae, or try to resolve them and look beyond to a broader picture and bigger issues than matters of terminological inexactitude? I don't know about you, but he always struck me more as a live-and-let-live kind of guy.

"White knighting", regardless of its provenance, seems to me as a term to indicate a certain kind of dubiousness. Being accused of being one is not a nice thing to happen, it implies you're assuming the mantle of virtue not for the sake of virtue itself, but because in so doing you achieve selfish ends. And thus I clothe my naked villany / With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ, / And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

Do you think that a fair assesment of the semantic meaning of the term, or would you like to suggest a nuance I am missing?

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

If the company decides not to do it, who are you to say that they should? Are you an executive? A board member? Even an important investor can change things with enough haranguing! Random joes like us, though? Short of a "VIVE LE PROLETARIAT" style Marxist revolution, we can do very little to influence the corporations directly.

I doubt these corporations are seriously hurt by having to listen to wellmeaning people suggest ideas to them, no matter how unfeasible, so again, I really do not see the harm. Even if I agreed with all the counterarguments why women will never pick this hobby up, i want to have more sensibly-dressed and less barbie-doll-aspected models for their own sake. I buy them when I see them, and I leave positive feedback and give future custom to companies that provide such. THAT is what I can do. It is not much, I readily agree.

I'm not interested in the gender balance of the wargaming hobby, since I will have little to nothing to do with it anymore. I just want to see less Generic Buxom Barbarian Wench #13 in catalogues, and more individualistic, memorable and varied female miniatures with which to build my display pieces and dioramas. I want for sculptors to do what I lack the means to do myself, and to produce things I've not already seen a hundred times.

That being said, I feel there's multiple aspects and issues that are being conflated in this thread, to overall confusion and general disarray. One of them is the "girlfriend in the game shop" thing that a lot of people have anecdotes about, how the FLGS turns into a weird and creepy geek-cave when a young woman enters. Another is the level of sexualization of the figures themselves. Then there's the overall complexity issue of the game, and the question of whether games should be geared even more towards getting non-miniatures gamers (of any gender) involved, a feat which I assure you is not impossible, though from past messages here a lot of people think it so. They're all big issues with some overlap, but should probably still be split up into different threads.

Now, the "why are guys talking about a women's problem?" issue. In some ways, the poster is right to ask it, but in some of the questions I mentioned above, guys have a genuine bone to pick by themselves. As mentioned above, I want to see more varied representations of people as miniatures because my dioramas are all the better for it*. Likewise, I would not mind a reduction of laddish behavior in game stores and clubs should I get back to a more active gaming schedule, since it's not an environment I'm confortable in myself, either** - not because of being outraged on behalf of unspecifed women. Getting women to try Warhammer, though? I have no dog in that race at the present time. If I was in a relationship with someone who wanted to game, or had a daughter interested in the game, then perhaps.

--
* A feat which, incidentally, I feel the modern miniatures industry, buyoued by Kickstarter and its ilk, is making headway towards. Our smorgasbord is ever-expanding. Boutique resin companies are poised to answer to niche customer requests far better than the giants of old ever were. Victoria Miniatures is bringing out female multipart resin sci-fi infantry, and the Raging Heroes campaign was a big vote of confidence from the community in one (albeit perhaps a bit narrow) conception of kickass women warriors. The particular battle to which you allude is, therefore, I feel in good hands and I see only limited cause for further action.
** For reasons which are sufficiently personal for me not to want to share here, begging your indulgence.

And GW is free to listen to or ignore any of those they want to. We little people have no power to make anyone listen after all.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Or to put it another way: There is no victory to be had here Paulson. The Social Justice League will always find a way to paint anything as a male power fantasy and there's not a damned thing any of us can do about. And in the end this all started because someone got uppity over an Inquisitor showing off her cleavage, so how seriously should we take this?

You know what? To hell with all of this this. My problem with this discussion was never with the Inquisitor picture, and I made that abundantly clear, but myopic rabble-rousers here can't entertain more than two extremes of opinion at any one time, utterly unable to recognize that maybe there's a thing called nuance on this planet. All I ask for was not to be summarily and cynically lumped together with every misguided idiot with a knee-jerk reaction, but no, even that is a bar too high for the average Dakkadakka user to vault over. This is the real world, damn it all to Hades, and not everything can be simplistically reduced to two fundamentally different and axiomatically opposed parties. We're not chasing after soundbytes or trying to win an organized debate. Nobody's walking away from the thread with a trophy or a wreath.

If there's one thing I really wanted to get across it was this: There's more to the issue than easy-to-lampoon extremes. Things can be cool and stupid and problematic and awesome at the same time. I see now that I have utterly failed at this, possibly because I didn't dub my opposition Misogynist Douchebag Zombies, or some other cutesy term of dismissal. Or maybe it's just that impossible to talk about this topic online like civilized adults, because none of us are willing to act like civilized adults. About the only thing on the typical feminism arguments bingo sheet nobody went for was rampant homophobia, so thank the gods for small favours, I guess.

Regardless of the actual issues at hand, if this discussion is the best this forum can do, maybe we should pull the plug and start anew. There are no winners here, no memorable putdowns of obnoxious trolls or skillful dismantlings of arguments. No, we're all of us in the gutter, delivering a punch after weary punch at each other, bleeding ourselves dry and getting more and more mired in the filth until it's impossible to tell the sides apart anymore.

Bullockist wrote:
I think a more important issue than women is gaming is fat people in gaming.

I have noticed a distinct lack of realistic obese people represented in gaming. This is every disappointing as there seems to be a large proportion of overweight gamers. I think that to get more fat people into gaming ( is this even possible) we need to have more exposed but crack and more bellies.
I can count the number of obese miniatures who aren't monsters on one hand. I am disappoint.

You jest, but a broader variety of body types is something I for one would like to see. The same with ages. We need more fat geezers, especially civilians.

I should do a gender/age breakdown of, say, the reaper human/humanoid catalogue sometime, to see if my gut feeling about fit-bodied manly men being predominant there is actually true or not. Figures in non-aggressive postures is another category that I reckon is underrepresented, partially I think because modern sculptors like doing dynamic action poses to set themselves apart from the flat, two-dimensional stuff of the 80s and 90s.

Angry warlike men we have in abundance, at least from a diorama builder's point of view

 Seaward wrote:

 Agamemnon2 wrote:
Angry warlike men we have in abundance, at least from a diorama builder's point of view

In a wargame? You don't say.

I don't mean from companies who exclusively make wargames minis. I'm sorry you did not understand that from what I wrote. I was referring more to outfits like Reaper, Heresy, Hasslefree, Foundry, et al, who make stuff that's not directly tied to a wargame ruleset, and cater to RPGs and so on. I'm not advocating GW should release a damn thing for me (I won't buy it anyway), they're free to concentrate exclusively on wargames stuff. Though the occasional civilian / display piece from Forge World would be nice (like their Tau Air Caste pilots).

I thought the recent revelation of the female Predator from Prodos' AvP kickstarter is a particularly interesting case of miniature design in the themes of this thread.

So, despite being a humanoid-but-clearly-inhuman alien lifeform, the female predator's main anatomical distinction from her male counterparts is not only a sizeable pair of breasts, but obvious and prominent cleavage. I don't know who designed the concept for this miniature, but it does seem incredibly silly. Yes, movie aliens always look human because they're played by humans in rubber latex suits, but after you've gone through the work of making the Yautja's iconic monstrous face to try to elide that similarity, it seems like a cop-out to have the female of the species sport mammaries fit for Playboy. Doubly so since you're doing it in a format where you could just as easily have sculpted or imagined a design as outlandish as you liked without having to adhere to the realities of film or TV.

 Azazelx wrote:

 Buzzsaw wrote:

Moreover, to say "it seems like a cop-out to have the female of the species sport mammaries fit for Playboy" seems to rather beg the opposite question: what's wrong with breasts?
Remember, the Predator is a guy in a suit, with an emphasis on guy. With the exception of some facial bits, a Predator is entirely similar in physiology to a human male.
It would seem the natural counterpoint to wanting an alien looking female is for the female gamer to ask "what's wrong with having the female actually look like me?"

I think the issue, obviously is that the ginormous tits are enormous to the point where they just look silly. Even with lolheroicminiatureproportions taken into account. The lack of armour in this case is actually consistent with what the males wear, so a non-issue.

Agreed. The male predators in the movies I remember wear no shirts or torso armor aside a kind of thin webbing and the harness that the energy weapon attaches to. As for the rest, they wear gauntlets, greaves, a mask and an armored codpiece with a belt. From what I can make out of the sculpt in the picture I posted, the female is wearing comparative amounts of clothing, so I don't consider that an issue at all. The visual design of the yautja has always been tribal and with hints towards an adherence to tradition, so all good there.

Going off something Buzzsaw said, the comment he made of the potential female customer taking a female predator and saying "The girl is the super ugly one?" struck me, because to me, all yautja are ugly. It's their defining character trait from the first movie onwards. I don't remember if it was Arnie or Danny Glover, but the first thing a film protagonist says when he sees one unmasked is "You are one ugly mother-----". As such, I see the opposite situation. With those breasts, the female predator is the "pretty one".

Brother Vinni's "victim" line is troubling to me in a degree that the FemPredator isn't, It's not just the nudity, but the nudity + the bondage poses. There has to be a market for them, I suppose. I just wouldn't want to see them in my opponent's Dark Eldar army as objective markers or pain tokens (though thematically accurate for the drugged-out-serial-killer angle), and even painting for one display would make me feel a bit skeevy. I paint using real world references a lot, but do I really want to spend my time researching THAT?

 MetalOxide wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
In the lore, which may or may not be canon, they do indeed have breasts and are substantially stronger and larger than the male Predators we have seen so far. They do not normally engage in the hunt, though.

Ah, that's pretty interesting, thanks for the info.

That would have been interesting to see. Maybe even keep the breasts as a visual shorthand for the gender, but have her be bigger and bulkier than the males. I can't tell the scale from the Prodos pictures, but she looks pretty skinny there.

Yeah, a recognizable likeness of a real person in that context makes for a very different thing indeed.