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| Bulimia.com wants you to trade one eating disorder for another by Rafiki 07/24/2015, 8:11pm PDT | ||||
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Of course this is just lazy manipulative clickbait. Of course it is. Part of me didn't want to link to it for exactly that reason. Even people that claim to want to help are now duping people for attention. If video game creators are going to pride themselves on accurate digital representations, then it’s time for them to get real about women. Since when did video game creators pride themselves on accur......oh right, lazy manipulative clickbait. *HUGE SIGH*. If you're confused about what "realism" refers to, yeah, they don't bother to establish that at the start. All the way down at the bottom, though, they link to the average body measurements of US adults from the CDC. I'll save you the trouble of typing those numbers (either set) into a BMI calculator: fat. Fat, pushing the lower boundary of obese. Hey, bulimics with an unhealthy body and at high risk for assorted medical complications, start gorging yourself into another unhealthy body that's at high risk for assorted medical complications! It's realistic! I'd call fat acceptance a cancer, but fat is its own kind of unhealthy. Fat acceptance is a fat. Look, I would never argue that female video game models are generally realistic, or that women and young girls don't face huge pressure or have huge anxiety over body image. But for fuck's sake, you'd think a site that was trying to act as a resource to help people become healthy would promote good health. Nope, let's go with politics instead. Apparently the lumpen beefgolems running bulimia.com would rather push an agenda than good science. Video game designers and their companies have complete control over the female bodies in their games. So why is it they so often opt to make these characters into unrealistically idealized versions of their human counterparts? Because it gives me a big boner. Too honest? What are the consequences of such interpretations? The perpetuation of unrealistic body imagery in the media can have decidedly negative repercussions. One could argue that the social pressures to obtain perfection are reinforced even through the depiction of video game characters. Girl gamers – especially young ones – could develop a skewed image of how the female body should look. This might mark the beginning of obsessive thoughts about their own bodies, and self-questioning as to why they don’t align with their perceived ideal. I want to highlight the "could" and "might." One could argue, this might mark. Heavens, let's not look into this. Let's all put on our thinking caps and imagine. Clearly this isn't meant to be a technical paper and directed at a younger audience, so obviously they're not going to provide pages of dry research and statistics, but you'd think they'd try to speak with a little more authority than to ask people to join them in speculating. It's not like this hasn't been a topic that's been researched for decades. They mention the high mortality rates, so.....lives are literally at stake! The last paragraph illustrates exactly what I'm talking about. No speculation, just statements of fact. "But even if depictions in entertainment didn't have any affect on peoples' self-perception, what's the harm in this page?" Ok, you've got a bunch of people to show up, you've got their attention, they agree there's a problem, and maybe they're wondering how to help. Maybe their collective effort could make a real difference if they have a concrete understanding of the problem and how to combat it. But you send them off on a snipe hunt. Hooray. Also, I like how none of the women got a tit reduction (secret subtext). Also, I picked that Rikku picture specifically because she looked the fattest. I've never played Final Fantasy X and I didn't google her until after I typed all of this out, so I had no idea she was supposed to be 15. Kind of an embarrassing image to pair with that boner comment. Kind of an embarrassing image. I haven't posted this yet and I'm just typing stream of consciousness now so I could always edit one or the other, but I- wait, why did they make her tits bigger? |
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Bulimia.com wants you to trade one eating disorder for another by 07/24/2015, 8:11pm PDT  Hey look, a character editor by 07/24/2015, 8:18pm PDT Re: Bulimia.com wants you to trade one eating disorder for another by 07/24/2015, 9:25pm PDT They're almost onto something here. by 07/25/2015, 2:32pm PDT |
