Penny Arcade Takes On Gender --- But Not How I Wanted

[rax]

So Penny Arcade, which I had talked about not really addressing issues of gender in the past, recently featured a discussion between the two creators about pick-up artistry (PUA) and the "seduction community." You can read the whole exchange here. I'm not going to get into the basic stuff here; you can already go read other bloggers who actually blog on a regular basis talk about those things eloquently. (At least one of those has some genuinely good dating advice in it.) I want to focus on a few specific things I think are interesting about this:

• Gabe's assertion that they were joking and dismissal of people who took him seriously
• Who the assumed reader is (both for their posts and the other posts I'll mention)
• What are the pickup artists saying about this?
• How this ties into the other post I made a while ago

Here's the thing that Gabe said that really bothered me:

I decided to play devil's advocate yesterday with Tycho just because that's something I enjoy doing. I think in reality I fall somewhere in the middle of this argument but that's not as much fun. What I didn't expect was to get flooded with mail from guys thanking me for sticking up for this system because they use it. I also got my share of mail from angry girls but honestly I expected that. I made some pretty ridiculous exaggerations for the sake of a silly argument. Just like any time we exaggerate for the sake of a joke, we end up offending people who don't see the humor in it. We've been doing this for ten years and so the angry mails were no surprise. It was the mails from guys thanking me that really threw me for a loop.

If you go and look at what he'd written up to that point, I don't think you'll find "ridiculous exaggerations" --- I think you'll find things that I see and hear people say all the time. I disagree with them, mind you, but it's not like he said "We should kill all women and replace them with robot orifices" or something that was clearly a ridiculous exaggeration. Maybe I missed some subtlety in there, but if so, I wasn't the only one. I see the humor in exaggerating for the sake of a joke, but I don't think they did a good job here. That in and of itself isn't, you know, a killing offense or anything, it's just failing at being funny to part of your audience. I do this all the time :)

The thing that bothers me is that "Oh I was only joking" is kind of a standard tactic in coming back from saying something offensive. It's hard not to read this as backpedaling, especially with how dismissive of "angry girls" he is. The women (and presumably other people who are not women) who wrote in and said "Hey, that is not cool" are just "angry" and "no surprise," but when men actually agreed with him, they weren't "not seeing the humor in it," they were providing a new and potentially enlightening viewpoint. If he actually exaggerated and said ridiculous things, and people wrote in being on the side of the ridiculous things, shouldn't that be more troubling than people who just didn't get the joke?

Now, he does say some things I actually agree with: "My advice for what it's worth, is that the girls you really want aren't playing a game, and they won't expect you to play one either." "I understand how badly you want to believe that there is a system out there that if you can simply master will resolve your problems. Sadly I don't think that's the case and if there is such a system, it certainly isn't this one." I totally agree with those things. I sort of feel left out of the equation here, though. I mean, their conversation includes the two of them, and one of the people from Love Systems (who blogs about the experience behind this link). Could they perhaps have asked a woman her opinion on the matter, or imagined what she might think or feel? They have wives, it's not like this option was unavailable to them --- and of course women wrote in "angry" as well. Were none of them quotable, summarizable, or otherwise mentionable? If not, why not? I think it could have added a whole lot to the discussion.

The people in the pick-up artist community (which you can find out all about because they have blogs! Wandering into the spaces of people like that is fascinating) at least act like they are actually concerned with what women think about them. Here are a few examples: a Love Systems instructor, who says "some of our most robust critics are usually guys with zero game, whereas all the women that I know who know what we do think its not only awesome, but necessary to make sure guys know how to flirt and hit on them properly!", another instructor going by "tenmagnet," who says "Women, (for example Tyra Banks) tend to understand and appreciate what we do," and the original person who responded to Tycho suggests a few links where women have written about his seminars. One of them seems pretty clearly directed at men; the other less so, though I can see both how it would read to me as "ewwww" and it would read to interesting guys as "Hey, that sounds like maybe I should spend money on this." (I'm also curious if they've ever tried marketing to queer women --- or queer men --- and if so, what happened. Certainly, despite being someone with a theoretical interest in picking women up at bars, I'm pretty certain they are not selling to me.)

They're all pretty on-message about what women think: "Women approve of what we do." But they're not actually asking women to engage them in specific conversation on this, they're positing Tyra Banks and a couple of columnists as an authority for "Women" and moving on. I don't feel engaged in discussion or invited to see what they're all about; I'm just assumed to be on board or of no use to them. They've also figured out that readers of Penny Arcade are going to follow along to their websites and blogs because of this, and in their blog posts, for the most part, try to emphasize the distinction between them and the "bad PUAs": "us and 'PUA's', which I would definately [sic] not class myself or any of the other instructors as," "the seduction community is not the place to go. Most of Love Systems’s competition are second-rate or outright charlatans," "Update: As of this writing, there is now a 30 page thread on the subject of Lovesystems and PUA’s (not the same thing)" (For what it's worth, the forum with that thread has been down for a while, and I've thus not read it. If I'm duplicating work, oops.)

On this issue, they fail miserably at staying on message. "Savoy," who is apparently one of the big names in this cluster, says "Tenmagnet also writes a great blog. I love all PUA blogs, but his is really one of the best." Tenmagnet himself has "pickup" in his tag cloud, and his blog header is "Free Dating and pick up artist advice from Tenmagnet, a Lovesystems/Mystery Method Corp instructor." He also links to "PUA Braddock," another instructor. Future links to "Pickup Artist Tenmagnet," 5.0 uses "PUA" as practically a gendered title like "Mister"... uh, guys, I understand you probably had like four hours to try to take advantage of this huge marketing opportunity (since they charge what, $3000 per attendee to these things?) but.... This is your cake. This is you eating your cake. You can not has.

So other than getting a chance to go and look at how successful these guys are being at marketing themselves, what does this allow us to say about Penny Arcade, and its relationship with issues of gender? Well, sure enough, Automata and Lookouts had no women in them, to the surprise of few. (Automata did have people of color! They play music in a club and get shot at.) I mean, OK, sure, whatever. I get that I'm not part of your audience. And that's just it, I think... I don't feel like they're including me when they address or consider their audience. It's fine that they're guys, I don't have a problem with that. But in situations like this I feel like they are assuming that their readership, or at least the part worth addressing, is male. I think I'm worth addressing, and I think I'm not male, so I feel left out. If their webcomic wasn't funny, I could just go somewhere else, but it's actually pretty funny, and I also don't know where else to go to get the same things. "Gamer girl" things I've seen have mostly seemed to be addressing guys, too.

I'm lucky to have the (incoming shameless plug) Crawl community, which has its share of problems, but there are women on the Dev Team, the playerbase spends its off time discussing gender theory, and calling things "gay" because you don't like them on the IRC channel results in calling out. (In fact, the offtopic discussion group that we joke about calling "##gender-offtopic" started because other people called me out for being sexist. How cool is that?) We're having a tournament at the moment and it's going great. But if I played Halo, I have absolutely no idea what I would do... wait, scratch that. I do know. I'd probably stop playing, and go find something where it felt like the community wanted me there. I think this is also part of why you don't see a lot of women at chess tournaments, &c., but that's another blog post.

I know I wasn't the only person to be bothered by this whole brouhaha --- krinndnz  brought it to my attention and it actually caused me to meet sylvanstargazer . This basically confirms what I already thought: "Penny Arcade isn't great about gender, and it's not likely to change, and I can take it or leave it." Does it change anything for anyone else?

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Of course Penny Arcade isn't great about gender. At its core, it's about the bond of asexual love between its two creators.

(okay, that's snark based on reading, I dunno, maybe 5% of the strips ever? when I follow a link there; I'm just really not part of their audience.)

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

See, I find myself just profoundly not caring about this. I mean, the main problem seems to be that there's some asshole giving speed-dating advice for exorbitant sums, and Gabe and Tycho commented on it, Gabe being a little insensitive and confused because he's a dude who has in his past been incredibly shy and panicky around women. I don't exactly call that a ringing endorsement, just Gabe being awkward because, well, he's a socially awkward nerdy guy who draws comics about games for a living. What frame of reference do you want them to have in their comic, for that matter? They're two guys who sit on a couch and play games. The archetypal example, in fact. So there aren't a lot of women in the comic portrayed positively. Newsflash: nobody in their comic is portrayed positively, least of all themselves.

I just get really frustrated with this whole "debate," because it seems to be constructed entirely in the minds of people who spend their time overthinking it. Yes, I find a lot of aspects of gamer culture annoying and sexist, but I find nearly ALL the aspects of this kind of dust-up annoying as well, because you seem to be acting like this lack of representation is some kind of conscious and intentional slight.

Seriously, I ask you, what would you have them do differently? What would make you feel like you were being addressed in a gender-sensitive manner? What joke should they write, what game should they discuss? Because unless you have a cohesive suggestion for what they could change, this is all navel-gazing.

[doma.livejournal.com]

It was completely unclear to me that Gabe was joking. Now, bricks are often better at understanding subtlety than I am, so that may be my fault, but I had been thinking, "Okay, well, Tycho's not a jerk..."

[seth99rb.livejournal.com]

isnt this just a dumb gamer comic?

[probabilistic.livejournal.com]

My interpretation of the P-A conversation is that Gabe wasn't so familiar with the PUA stuff and was kind of reflexively firing back at Tycho with some stereotypical comments about geek guys, and then realized what he had gotten himself into when he started getting angry mail and looked at the issue more closely. The "devil's advocate" thing seems like an overstatement and his attempt to get out of the fire.

Tangentially, wow, I had no idea this PUA community existed, although I guess it's not terribly surprising. It brings to mind the guy who shot up the women's fitness class earlier this month, and the "How to date young women" self-help book in his home video. Creepy as hell.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

After looking at the other comments, my main response is: no, you're not overthinking this. :) Popular works are exactly the ones that need knowing analysis, even if intellectual engagement narrows the audience of your comments.

About the issue itself, I don't think I have anything to say that hasn't by this point been said often (and better) elsewhere, as is often the case when I come across debates about gender or race.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

And, if it's worthwhile, tangential comments that come to mind: do you know of any (good) woman-written webcomics that are as topical as Penny Arcade? I have a few in my reading list -- Skin Horse (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/skinhorse/series.php) is unusually savvy about gender -- but they all seem to be character- and plot-driven.

Also, Dwarf Fortress may be the only roguelike around with interesting implications when it comes to gender roles. For the most part, its system is egalitarian (though I was annoyed to hear that in the new version only the men have beards), but this very fact leads to some unconsidered consequences. A dwarf mining out a vein of ore will (infrequently, but commonly enough for many people to have told the story) stop for a moment to give birth, then pick up the baby and continue mining. And dwarves who are both warriors and mothers will carry nursing babies into battle. I guess I can think of those things as empowering, if disturbing. :P

And, I never did play Crawl this summer. :( Maybe I will during winter vacation, as I recover from qualifiers.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

If you go and look at what he'd written up to that point, I don't think you'll find "ridiculous exaggerations" --- I think you'll find things that I see and hear people say all the time


I think this is a very telling quote on your part. Neither Gabe, nor yourself, seem to really give credit to the idea that the internet has killed satire.

I've read PA for years, I know the creators and their wit in a way I might describe as intimately, and I could instantly tell that Gabe was only teasing Tycho, and that he regarded the things he said about feminine wiles, and men having nothing women want, but women having vaginas as way off the deep end.

You didn't think it was obviously way off the deep end, because you know people who would say that in some way other than jest, and you do not know that Gabe is not nearly crass enough to be one of those people. Hence his satirical defense of PUAs could look, to the reader who is unfamiliar with this person, like commentary meant to be taken seriously.

Gabe might have known better to not attempt satire, but he is a comedian by trade, and you might have known better than to take a comedian's words at direct face value, but you probably don't keep a psychological evaluation of these two on file. It seems like a no fault error, except for the extremist viewpoints that make it impossible to be obviously comically "over the top" in one's beliefs on the internet.

The lack of diversity, or even women, in their comics I attribute mainly to two factors. Firstly, they are both born and raised in a town called Whitey McCrackerton, Washington state. Ethnic diversity is something they see on TV and not in their real life. In their real life they see Starbucks franchises, apple orchards, and many many many white people. The unconscious result of this is that when they think of a new character their platonic ideal of "a person" is always white because that is the sort of person they are conditioned to expect to run into at any given moment. I think they could do to spend some damn time in SF and LA if only to soak in a little ethnic diversity beyond what the pacific northwest has to offer. Even the whales up there are white, or gray at least.

As for their view of females, that is perhaps less forgivable, but understand that their creative partnership did start out in Jr. Highschool. One is a painfully skinny anxiety ridden wreck with a lisp, the other is a short round person with severe alopecia, both of a nerdy bent. They each spent many years of their lives segregated from any sort of romantic context with other human beings let alone the opposite sex. I strongly suspect that Tyco has had homosexual experiences, though he has never, to my knowledge, explicitly stated such, and that Gabe knows about this and is entirely fine with it.

I think they avoid women as characters out of a conditioned sense that it would be impolite to presume to write from a female perspective when they were not themselves in any way acquainted with the female experience of the world until relatively recently, each having become married within the last decade. A character like Annarchy is, from their point of view, very transgressive of their typical reflexive thoughts on this issue, and is a positive sign that they do endeavor to be less male-centric, but it is a difficult role to break out of, especially when their comics about this peculiarly nerdy peccadillo has made them enormously successful.

That's my take on this situation. I may view them too kindly of course, because I am also a white male anxiety-wracked nerd who has rewarded them for their biased behavior.

[scwizard.livejournal.com]

If you go and look at what he'd written up to that point, I don't think you'll find "ridiculous exaggerations"
Having played devil's advocate extensively, it seems pretty clear to me that Tycho is playing devil's advocate. The main thing is that his comments were too by the book (towards the beginning at the very least).

However this is in retrospect, so I can't necessarily say that it was clearly apparent, but I can say that he was playing devil's advocate and that he wasn't saying "oh I was joking" to back off of an offensive comment.

However, having played devil's advocate extensively, I know that it's very difficult to do if you don't have some sort of belief in the argument. Some of the stuff, like the stuff he said in the "last thing" comment was from the heart, as he reveled in the follow up.

As for the whole penny arcade thing, it's interesting, I might make a post of it sometime.

I was waiting for this one... :)

[rustycoon.livejournal.com]

(Sorry for the multipost, I forget how to do LJ markup sometimes.)

The moment I saw that thread I said to myself (and to faerieboots) "rax is going to have a field day with this one..." I started preparing my responses to what I expected you to write ahead of time, even, because I enjoy debating with you. :) I'm not going to take my previous tack because bossgoji pretty much ungracefully beat it to death and then kept on running with the corpse. :P

I will instead join with scwizard and ff00ff in defending Gabe's legitimacy as someone who was making an off-color joke, and his right to be taken at face value when claiming a particular category of mistake. (A right which everyone has until they abuse it, and I am not aware of Gabe or Tycho ever abusing it, these guys are flawed in their own way, but bullshitting under the flag of seriousness isn't one of them.)

If you go and look at what he'd written up to that point, I don't think you'll find "ridiculous exaggerations"

The problem, here, is that 'ridiculous' is a matter of perspective. I enter two pieces of evidence into the record:

1) Tycho's comment in the root blogpost: "I recently had the misfortune of being exposed to some propaganda from the "seduction community," and I've spent the weekend on a kind of data bender that has left me psychologically gutted."

I will guarantee you that if Tycho wasn't aware of it, neither was Gabe. SC has enough 'holy shit' value to warrant sharing with people with whom you share things that make you go 'wtf.' Tycho's description of this experience correlates very strongly with my own (several years ago) and so I think I have some notion of why Tycho described the experience as 'a fucking rabbit hole.' (more on this later)

2) From Gabe's retraction: "What I didn't expect was to get flooded with mail from guys thanking me for sticking up for this system because they use it."

While you may consider all material within the retraction 'poisoned fruit' because you consider the retraction itself to be insincere, this is the most important sentence in the whole thing.

These guys hadn't run across this before, when they did they reacted very negatively to it. They then launched an ill-conceived attempt at 'ridiculous exaggeration' not realizing that there were people out there who would laud them for taking their position.

If someone isn't aware of PETA's existence (and I know people who haven't been) and decides to make a 'ridiculous straw man argument' that "animals should have the same, and better, rights as human beings," you might think that they were simply a PETA member.

I take Gabe at face value that he had no idea there were actually people who would partake of these services. To him it looks like an obvious call or he wouldn't have been surprised at the supportive emails he received.

The moment Tycho mentioned he'd been on that data bender I knew what ride they were in for and I'd be lying if I didn't enjoy watching them go driving merrily off that cliff. There's some schadenfreude in watching comics devour their own foot up to the ankle. :)

Gabe found out, perhaps painfully, that kids do stupid shit. His retraction reads like an athlete who has learned that kids are doing steroids to be more like him, and he had no idea until now. (Especially the last paragraph.) His ignorance led him to make irresponsible humor. I agree with you that the end product is problematic, but so is your rejection of his admission of error as a cop out.

Everything I read there feels like these guys got hold of the tiger by the tail, but had no idea what they were yanking on until it reared around on them. Of course they're going to backpedal from that. The only alternative is to continue to claim the position, and they're mature enough to know where that road goes.

On Rabbit Holes.

[rustycoon.livejournal.com]

Now then...

Part of the reason I think that they got blindsided by this is because I've been blindsided by the same damn thing. SC is some pretty insidious stuff. The problem is that it doesn't have to be that way, and that creates a profound quantity of moral ambiguity - that grey space is where PUAs operate.

SC was into viral marketing before viral marketing was cool. I remember being shown a game on newgrounds.com called 'The Game' and was a shameless advertisement (in flashgame form) for Strauss' book of the same name. On its face, the SC looks like what Gabe begins defending it as: a way for nervous guys (guys with "zero game") to gain confidence. People with an intellectual bent love to look at things as puzzles and that's what SC turns picking up women into. It converts circumstances into variables that can be manipulated, predicted, and maneuvered to create desired outcomes. Really "The Game" is a fantastic title for this reason.

Actors are reduced to formulae. (e.g. two women together are categorized as objective and obstacle.) The formulae are evaluated and applied. (Would-be PUAs are instructed to approach from the direction of the obstacle, and seek the obstacle's approval before moving on to the intended objective.) Once the pieces have been moved in the proscribed manner, the intended outcome is achieved.

Of course, life isn't so simple, and neither are these systems. There's a lot of responding to developments that is part of these systems but you get the general drift.

These systems are couched as 'informed by an understanding of female psychology.' They justify themselves as being nothing more than 'teaching men how to deliver what women are looking for.' This, in and of itself, is a misguided, but laudable goal. There's a lot to be said for trying to understand sexual and social chemistry and deliver mutually enjoyable outcomes thereon.

Then you come to Patterns which is a combination of hypnosis, Neuro-linguistic Programming, and sales techniques which are intended to subconsciously condition another person without their knowledge (and therefore without their consent).

Regardless of whether or not Patterns work, (and the scientific community has basically laughed NLP off the main stage even while its practice continues)the fact that this school of thought advocates the deliberate, non-consensual re-wiring of someone's experience on such an invasive level is unconsionable.

If you've been reading along with these guys (as I have, and as Tycho seems to have) suddenly you find yourself standing in the middle of the Town Square of Creepyville. What's worse? You have NO idea how you got there, and even less idea when exactly you crossed the town line!

It's a very scary moment of self learning. It's not pleasant to find yourself associated with such behavior, without having ever intended to go there. The road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions, though.

Gabe and Tycho found something on the internet and thought it was amusingly whacked out. What they weren't prepared for was a serious debate on neuro-ethics.

There are things that lurk in the human experience which we remain happily ignorant of until we trip over them. Maybe my position regarding Gabe and Tycho would be different if I hadn't fallen into the same rabbit hole, but everything about that thread reads like two guys who didn't know what they were getting into.

Tune in next week when I tell you about the time I found the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (http://www.vhemt.org/)!

[sethg]

I don't know much about "the seduction community" (and from what little I've seen from your links I really don't want to know much, and I'm glad that my undergraduate attempts at dating were poisoned by nothing stronger than The Sensuous Dirty Old Man), but it seems intuitively obvious (ha!) that if a man with some minimal level of self-confidence and hygeine asks one or two hundred women "will you have sex with me?", one of them will probably say "yes", and if he doesn't invest a great deal of effort into getting to know each of those women, then he will get to that "yes" sooner. (One might call this r-strategy dating.) The downside is that before that one woman says "yes", some higher number will back away from the encounter thinking "eeeww". So I guess the function of these training programs, aside from separating socially inept misogynists from their money, is to train them to not care about the "eeeww" reaction.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Slightly off-topic, as this is more about PUAs than Penny Arcade's response to them in specific, but I was struck by this comment in one of the articles you linked to:

In this society, women hold the power in most romantic interactions. We're the ones who decide if and when sex is going to occur and that gives us the upper hand ... until we actually do the deed. And then all the power shifts to you males. So keep that in mind next time you think a girl is being standoffish for no reason. We're just protecting ourselves.

I know I've heard that this is how it works, and that there's a whole elaborate social system structured around it, but maybe I just don't have enough heteronormative experience-- I always thought of it the situation as either a) mutual agreement or b) rape. The model described above seems to ignore the possibility that the woman might want to have sex with a man who doesn't want to have sex with her. How does that model deal with that situation? Assuming that either the woman is a slut or the guy is queer or otherwise unmanly? < / sexist and heterosexist phrasing > Or what?

It's odd because it's not precisely a lack of female agency-- just a lack of agency-aimed-at-sexual-satisfaction, rather than agency-aimed-at-power-through-manipulation.

Feh.

(Edited to correct my not-really-html-tags)

[jadia.livejournal.com]

* I started by thinking Gabe was totally joking and then he kept talking and I ended up being a little bit unsure. I actually did think he was hitting "ridiculous exaggeration" in the first few posts.

* I think he's pretty honest here & isn't just going "O I was only joking chill" at all.

* Tycho represents my point of view in this debate pretty well.

* When Gabe started talking about his anxiety problems I thought he was going to suggest that the men with anxiety problems talking to women should go see a psychiatrist. I still think he should have.

* I would think that a woman would be 100x better at giving advice about what she wants than anyone else. Not entirely sure why people think that some random guy on the internet is going to know more about how to talk to someone than the person in question, or maybe her friends, but the world is full of stupid people.

* So I don't think Penny-Arcade is great about gender either, but I think compared with most of what I see out there, they're not too shabby. (see, pvponline. or not, really. I don't really know why I still read it, except that it occasionally doesn't suck.) My standards may be pretty damn low, and perhaps they kind of have to be given my choice of occupation/hobbies, but as far as gamer comics go, I think they're in the top ranks for dealing with gender. I was also annoyed about the Lookouts, which you wrote about previously, but this one didn't ping me as much, probably because Tycho was so staunchly in my camp, from the very beginning. (The difference between your interpretation and mine is probably simply because I did think Gabe *was* joking and you didn't.)

I also recently played the first episode of their game, On the Precipice of Darkness, where Annarchy is the brains behind the operation and wears a pretty princess dress. She also blows things up with a flamethrower every so often, builds destructo robots, and is otherwise awesome like Tycho & Gabe are. If that's not an example of good role model for girls then I don't know what is. (Note, I do not endorse anyone actually blowing shit up, in a dress or otherwise.)

(Also, I want to be clear that I think it's fine for you to criticize them on this, and I'm not trying to defend them or anything. I'm just responding to the more general question as to whether this changes my opinion of them by giving you my opinion of them. And, I don't think gender things are graded on a curve, but the environment you're used to does affect how "good" or "bad" you consider it.)

[rathdei.livejournal.com]

Penny arcade is about two dudes playing videogames, at its core. So yea, not so great on gender, yes.

mostly I just hate dating in general

Odzywki

[(Anonymous)]

Hi

I'm lookingo for people who like strength sports eg. bodybuilding. You can take part in a huge project of testing sport supplements.
We will be test supplements like this
[url=http://www.odzywki-warszawa.waw.pl/najlepsze-odzywki-na-mase]odzywki na mase[/url] If you are interested in this project please send me information on e-mail: bodybuildingprojectone@gmail.com
We will contact only with chosen people

purses italian designer handbags

[(Anonymous)]

buy a inexpensive bags (http://inexpensivebags.weebly.com/) high-fashion handbags (http://high-fashionbags.weebly.com/) and check coupon code available for gift