Springhole.net Blog

Moar TS3 Exchange Fail – Stereotype & Sexism Edition

Let’s take another exciting trip to the TS3 Exchange!

It turns out there is a way to find relevant results – the Advanced Search actually pulls up results based on what you entered, rather than… honestly, I don’t know how the non-advanced search works. All I know is that it really doesn’t work.

So using this Advanced search, I decided to take a look-see and find out how many uploads of particular races and such were comprised of various stereotypes. I searched for various ethnic sims.

Sims depicting Native Americans were among the most stereotyped. As often as not, you would see them with at least two out Loves The Outdoors, Angler, and Green Thumb. One sim’s description even went so far as to say that the Sim was brave and had a green thumb because of her Native American blood. Another one had an entire wardrobe of leather because she was Native America, including her swimsuit.

Latinas (there were remarkably few Latinos) tended to be Athletic, Great Kissers, and/or Hopeless Romantics.

Japanese Sims tended to be workaholic if male, and an inordinate number of Japanese females had personality traits that seemed to be taken from anime characters. A goodly number of them also had the Computer Whiz trait.

The majority of Irish sims had red and occasionally garish orange hair. (In reality, only 10% of the population has red or reddish hair – and there are more redheads in Scotland, with 13% of the population having red or reddish hair.) Lucky, Green Thumb, and Great Kisser were favored traits.

Exchange member Walpurgis creates Sims out of missing people or victims of unsolved murders. Many of Walpurgis’s Native American sims have Loves The Outdoors as a trait, and a large number of her black sims are endowed with Party Animal. An Asian sim (the only one I saw) was given the Computer Whiz trait. When I looked up the person to see if Walpurgis had based her traits on a description somewhere, I could find nothing.

Another member, Xylander, is working on a “Women of the World” series. As you can see for yourself, each woman is horribly stereotyped:

Canada
France
Ireland
Brazil
Japan

Another thing I noticed was that many female sims had descriptions that went something along the lines of:

“This sim isn’t just gorgeous, she also has the brains to match!”
“Who says you can’t have beauty AND brains?”
“Can this sim prove that she can use both her beauty and brains to succeed?”

Wording like this implies that an attractive woman with intelligence is something we should be surprised about. But when it comes to men, a mention of brains is seldom treated as something we should find shocking. When it comes to female sims, statements about their brains often are ended in exclamation marks. Statements about the brains of male sims are ended in blase periods.

Also, sim descriptions that assure us that the sim does indeed have brains are plentiful among female sims, but uncommon among males. The word “brains” brought up 123 results (duplicates omitted) for females. Two of them were pointing out a lack of brains, four were brain eaters, and one refused to eat brains, leaving us a total of 114 female sims advertised for their brains. On the other hand, there were only 26 results for males, seven of them being zombies and one of them being the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz – leaving us fewer than 20 males using brains as an advertising point.

There are, at the time of writing, approximately 47870 male Sims on the Exchange, and 136206 female sims, which means that approximately .039% male sims are being advertised for their brains compared to .083% female sims. While you might think that this would be good because women should be appreciated for their brains, I believe it indicates that people feel they must point out that a woman (especially an attractive woman) has brains because she she is so often expected not to.

I could go on for ages with this post, but I think I’ll end it here. In closing, I hope it’ll make you think a little harder about the sims you’re creating.

Amidst this horrific event, this headline kinda made me giggle. As if the earthquake wasn’t bad enough, the relief efforts have been dubbed “The Disaster of the Century!” (Fortunately, not really.)

Also, please consider using GoodSearch and setting the charity to Doctors Without Borders, or any other charity involved in Haiti’s earthquake relief efforts.

I remember hearing about kids getting beaten up for their Pokemon cards back during the craze.

This puts Pokemon to shame.

You’ve probably heard the term "rabid fan" used to describe girls disturbingly obsessed with whatever hottie caught their fancy.  Twilight fangirls, however, take the cake.  Some unfortunate individuals who stated that they didn’t like the Twilight series, sometimes in a very calm and reasonable manner, have found themselves physically assaulted.

Quotes from TwilightSucks.com, emphasis mine.

At this point Kylie peered away from her book, and says "Do you like the Twilight series?" My high school friend/girl/person(Gail) looked away and answered "Oh it’s okay"

And just like every other story, Kylie freaked, at her ‘okay’ remark. Started making a scene at the back of the bus, saying "Twilight is awesome, how could you hate it… and so on…" At this point I was just watching, I wasn’t in the mood for a rant off. Then, Kylie closed her book and hit Gail across the head. Everyone in the back of the bus was in shock, honestly I was speechless.

Another student was burned with a cigarette for making her opinion known:

Today in english class I was bored so I wrote "Twilight Sucks" on my arm (yeah, mature I know.)

I’m walking to the cafeteria at lunch and I stop in the bathroom to fix my hair and there’s a girl smoking in there. She sees my arm, grabs it, and jabs her lit cigarette into my arm. It hurt like shit (and it still does). And yes, I did report her.

Fans broke this student’s arm:

The books were fucking stupid.

I told this to my friend, who agreed with me. But there was this girl in our class named Louisa who is a total twitard that overheard us talking. She argued with me and when she couldn’t force me to love the book, she stormed off.

When I was walking home from school, Louisa and her friends jumped me. Three of them held me down, while Louisa (whose heavy-set) jammed her knee into my arm and pulled on it until it snapped. They ran off when a woman came out of house yelling at them that she had called the cops.

They shattered my arm in two places. The doctor said it could take over a year before I get back full usage of my left arm.

Are you floored yet?  I was.  The full versions of these horror stories (and more) can be found here.

Fans, I hope you realize that isn’t right.  This madness has got to stop.  If things keep going this way, it’s only a matter of time before someone ends up dead for exercising their constitional right of free speech.

Every year I ponder making up a list of things I DO NOT WANT and mailing it to my relatives.  Then I just know they’d be offended and throw a fit or something and consider me an ingrateful little brat.  Each year I find myself a wee bit closer to not caring, but never not-caring enough to actually make up the list.

This year, I’ll blog it.  They probably won’t read it (most of them don’t even know I have a blog), but at least I’ll get to vent some aggravation.

1. Miniature figurines of cutesy-wootsie/super-deformed (in a non-Japanese way) and el-Cheapo Asian imports.

"Cutesy" has never been my style, ever.  Even when I was a wee Syera watching Care Bears and Smurfs, my natural inclination leaned to something more closely resembling Peter Jackson’s elves’ tastes.  Chances are high that if you find it sooooo cuuuuute, it will put me into hypoglycemic shock.  It’s not that I don’t like cute per se; I like cute when it’s at a level that one would find actually find in nature.  It’s that concentrated, unnatural cuteness that gets me.

Secondly, I don’t really have that much space for more clutter.

On the other hand, a shadow box (or something similar) to put the stuff I already have in would be awesome.  Especially if it had a glass front to keep the dust (there is so much dust) out.

2. Bath/Shower Sets.

First off, I don’t bathe – I shower.  Secondly… I don’t really use lotion that much.  I use so little lotion that the bottles I was given for last Christmas are still sitting unopened in the bathroom.

I also don’t wear perfume, and I don’t really care for makeup.  What I do like is Carmex.  My lips dry out quite badly in the winter.  I can has Carmex, plzkthx? Actually, it turns out Carmex is made with a lot of nasty toxins.  (No, it STILL doen’t have glass in it.)

3. Gift cards/certificates

Many people consider money as a gift to be particularly tacky.  However, retailers have managed to fool the majority of us into giving exactly that by selling the posher-sounding "gift certificate."  In my opinion, gift certificates are the tackier of the two: they make sure the money is tied up at a specific store, rather than allowing the recipient to choose where they want to shop.  Giving someone the freedom to pick their own gift kind of fails when the store you’ve lashed them to doesn’t actually have anything they really want in your card’s price range.

4. Art Stuff

Pretty much everyone in the family knows I’m inclined to pick up a pencil and start doodling something.  What they don’t realize, however, is that I don’t really care for oil pastels, water colors, or markers.  Most of my artistic time is spent drawing concept art for something that will be finalized on the computer.

Give me a set of decent mechanical pencils and/or a sketchbook and I’ll be happy.  Really.

5. Puzzles/Board Games

Puzzles and board games may do it for some people, but generally speaking I have more interesting (and/or constructive) ways to fritter away my time.

Puzzles have two great flaws: the first is that they aren’t really practical in a world where five people compete for table space.  The second is that I hate putting that much effort into something I’m just going to take apart again.

Board games have one great flaw: they get boring in a real hurry.  They’re dreadfully repetative – after playing them a few times they tend to sink into the banality of preparing dinner, except preparing dinner is slightly more interesting.  Another problem is that the potential players are usually too busy doing something more interesting and/or more constructive.  Like reading Instructables or doing something with their rotary tools.

Welp, that should pretty much cover it.  Maybe sometime I’ll get gutsy enough to tell the family.  Or maybe I’ll have them read this blog.  Maybe…

I haven’t really had anything awesome to post lately. Alas. So I shall post some of my thoughts…

People gorge themselves into carb overload on Thanksgiving – candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, bread rolls, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie… then they blame their lethargy on the turkey. Silly, eh?

Why do people insist on cooking all that stuff on Thanksgiving, anyway? Nobody needs to eat that much, and you’d save yourself so much stress if you simplified the meal.

Birthdays exist for two reasons:
1. Giving your “friends” and relatives something to forget. Thank you, everyone, for not remembering.
2. Making whiny brats feel entitled to get free crap.

For Christmas, I want nothing that was shipped in from China. Not that I’ll get that lucky.

It’s definite: PeTA couldn’t care less about the environment. Despite howling that ‘meat isn’t green’ on the one hand, they’re telling people to buy products containing rainforest-destroying palm oil. Since PeTA doesn’t care what gets destroyed or hurt as long as there are no animals in the end product, why don’t they just nuke the planet already? A pain-and-cruelty-free Earth! Wouldn’t that be nice?

It astonishes me how someone can grasp that sunlight traveling through a pane of window glass will create more heat, but cannot fathom how releasing gasses that do the exact same thing into the atmosphere could be warming up the planet.

If you believe that fat and cholesterol is responsible for our nation’s health problems, please Google “Inuit paradox.” Thank you.

GaiaOnline (formerly known as GoGaia) started out as an online community for anime fans.  I wasn’t there in the early days, so I can’t vouch for what it was back then, but I can most assuredly state that whatever it is now isn’t that.

Gaia claims that their site is “PG-13.”  I don’t think these guys have a frog’s clue what “PG-13″ actually means.  The forums (some are worse than others) are rife with swearing and graphic language that would get the rating pushed up to R.  Obscene and sexual usernames are common – and fully allowed.  Administrators and moderators have been known to leave topics alone that should have been dealt with according to the site’s written rules because said topics were “funny.”

The site does utilize an optional word filter system – which is utterly useless.  Instead of censoring out the entire word, it blocks everything except the first and last letters.  It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to fill in the rest yourself.

For some reason Gaia recently decided to completely block the word “pedophile.”  How that is supposed to help anything, no-one knows.

The site administrators themselves seem to be trying to see how far they can push the envelope: fetish items such as soiled underwear have appeared on the site.  Some items have names that just evade actual swear words by a hair, such as the “FAQ Hat,” which is a hat in the shape of a hand giving the finger.

Now for the ironic part: the art style and avatar dressup concept are extremely appealing to younger children.  Furthermore, Gaia’s ads have been appearing on sites definitely aimed at children, such as Neopets.