In an industry where female protagonists were rare, women gamers who rarely saw their gender portrayed as anything other than a hostage or background decoration had a real character they could relate to, even if the rebooted Lara Croft wasn’t perfect.

The new Tomb Raider sold a million copies in less than two days after it was released on March 5, 2013. It sold 3.4 million copies in total that month, coming in second only to BioShock Infinite, which was a monster of a release. According to a story published on Gamesindustry.biz on May 28, 2013, however, publisher Square Enix was not happy with the number of net sales of TR to customers.

If Rise of the Tomb Raider fails to perform to Square Enix’s sales expectations, will this be taken as an argument to bolster the “conventional wisdom” that games with female protagonists don’t sell? It is not hyperbole to suggest that the situation with female protagonists in video games is tenuous enough that this result could hold back efforts to increase representation of women in video games for years to come.

Dennis tackles the problem of Tomb Raider’s Xbox-only release for women (via dailydot)

florrickandassociates:

“what a wonderful time for women on television,” said julianna margulies, just minutes before the academy rewarded modern family over orange is the new black

spikejonzze:

“You know, you really don’t need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” – The Social Network (2010)

imsirius:

Your character falls into the “friend zone” – Is this primarily a man’s problem, or are women put in the friend zone as well? x

pushtosmart:

Push to Smart plays Burial At Sea Episode 2

slayboybunny:

rawr0609:

robotgirlomatic:

A Woman Wore A Hidden Camera To Show How Many Times In A Day She Gets Harassed.

At 3:17, a woman describes an assault on a subway. You really should hear what she says so you can learn how horrific this is for many women on a daily basis.

Wow I’ve been thinking of doing that hidden camera thing for forever but never got around to it. These ladies are so brave.

“And I think that most women who’ve been assaulted know this look, which is the "I’m getting off on you being uncomfortable”“ hits me like a semitruck!! this is important

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

corpusfisty:

When women can’t go out because they’re asking for rape, and black men can’t go out because they’re asking to be shot, it’s time for a fuckin’ change.

blackourstory:

everythingrhymeswithalcohol:

Always remember female victims of police violence & brutality. Adding:
#AiyanaJones
#KathrynJohnston

…and Marlene Pinnock, Miriam Carey, Kendra James, Alesia Thomas…

pervocracy:

postwhitesociety:

hm

I think the “women are mysterious” thing can also come from:

1) Women actually being quite clear, but not telling men what they want to hear. ”She said she doesn’t want to talk to me? So many mixed messages and confusing signals!”

2) Women not having cheat codes. ”I tried being nice, and she didn’t have sex with me. I tried being an asshole, and she didn’t have sex with me. Come on, there’s got to be some kind of solution to this puzzle!”

3) Women not being a hive mind. ”First a woman told me that she likes guys with big muscles. Then the very next day a woman told me she thinks muscles aren’t attractive at all. Make up your mind, women!”

4) An individual woman doing something confusing, and instead of asking “why is she doing this now?” men ask “why do women always do this?”

OITNB star visits Kara Walker’s exhibit, misses point: some notes for our fellow white queers

transqueermediaexchange:

by Emma Shakarshy and Cordelia Nailong

Click the title for the full article.

Queer communities have a long way to go to be the welcoming places that we would like them to be, especially when it comes to racism.

Orange is The New Black’s “Big Boo”, Lea Delaria, recently viewed Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety”, an exhibit in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory that highlights the legacies of white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, anti-blackness, slavery, and patriarchy that have shaped the past 500 years. The Domino Sugar Factory was chosen as a venue for this piece for a number of reasons including the fact that enslaved folks were the foundation of the sugar economy that Domino rose from and were the enslaved labor of the sugar plantations. This is not to mention that factories like this one literally processed sugar from brown to white. Walker’s exhibit features sculptures of enslaved children made of molasses to highlight the sugar factories, as well as many other industries’, reliance on black labor to benefit white capitalistic goals.

The center of Walker’s exhibit is a 40 foot-tall sphinx created out of sugar, with the head of the black “mammy” stereotype, representing the racist iconography of the black female domestic servant at the hands of white families. The sphinx’s body is that of the oversexualized black woman, often seen as props in music videos (think Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”) and TV and film.

Many white viewers of Walker’s piece have made the news by taking racist,misogynistic selfies with the piece, cupping, licking, and generally abusing the work. In his piece, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” Nicholas Powers writes that the pornographic jokes are recreations of the very racism that the art is meant to critique.

Lea Delaria, queer comedienne and celeb with an Instagram following of 167,000 users, unfortunately offered no exception. DeLaria posed with the piece, positioned between the sphinx’s breasts, with the head of the work cut off, and the caption “Sugar Tits.” Her next photo is of her looking smugly from beneath the buttocks and vulva of the sphinx, with the caption, “That’s what I call looking into the face of god. #karawalkerdomino #theeffectsofgammaraysonmaninthemooncunt.” This is incredibly disrespectful. In viewing a sculpture critiquing the oversexualization and white exploitation of black bodies, DeLaria is perpetuating that same sexualization and encouraging her followers to do so as well.