Sex on Sunday: Games, porn, sexism, gender and more games

Pre-Internet sex game in the form of objectification of heads, not bodies. Perhaps this  should be called commercial sexism rather than commercial sex, but I feel the creator was making as much sexist fun of males as females. It is not clear whether one could send in a photo for a custom head that would not talk back. Caveman need to dominate.


Playing With Sex: How Video Games Are Changing Porn

Michael Thomsen, 28 February 2011, IGN

Sex is finding its way into games with or without help from big publishers or studios. Bonetown was made by a small group of college grads who decided that the open world gameplay of Grand Theft Auto could be used for a satiric rip, substituting sex missions for shootouts. We wanted people to play it and laugh at it and not just sit there alone and jerk off.

Other video games involving sex and fantasy without other human beings having to be there. Have sex with a pickup from a gay bar, create a self with ideal sexual attributes, promote safer sex with condoms or watch your own stripper strip.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

6 thoughts on “Sex on Sunday: Games, porn, sexism, gender and more games

  1. Asehpe

    The possibilities are endless… and the future will come anyway (no pun intended).

    Maybe this is what the rescue industry see when they look at prostitution: people willing to become games, robots, objects. People loosing their soul for the pleasure of others.

    Which I suppose would be like suggesting that singers like Pavarotti demean themselves by doing for money what machines can also do: produce music. Worse yet, machines can even record and play Pavarotti’s voice at any moment. With the necessary programs and add-ons, I could probably build my own virtual tenor and watch him sing.

    Now doesn’t that make Pavarotti look like someone who is “selling himself” and “becoming an object to the sensual musical lust of his listeners”, all of them already used to listening to music from “cold, non-human machines and simulated music devices”?

    Reply
  2. Laura Agustín

    absolutely but in fact opera stars and actresses were for most of history considered quasi-prostitutes, and in some cultures this association still holds, along with ‘dancer’ (practically a synonym for sex worker in some places).

    Reply
  3. asehpe

    My reference point for this was the Commedia dell’Arte and the beginnings of theatre, back in the days when women were not allowed to be actors because it would be demeaning to them.

    I wonder if improvements in the social status of prostitutes will follow the same pattern followed by improvements in the social status of other types of artists and performers. After all, in today’s Western world, being a singer or an actor is no longer thought of as being a quasi-prostitute; au contraire, these professions are now quite glamorized. Who knows? Maybe sex work will follow in their footsteps.

    One may therefore wonder how exactly the performance arts managed to escape their stigma. In what stages did this happen? And what forces caused the change and lifted the stigma?

    Reply
  4. Laura Agustín

    i know what you mean, but the stigma’s not all gone everywhere, and glamour doesn’t absolve women celebrities from possible whore stigma at any moment. see my next post.

    Reply
  5. asehpe

    It seems women celebrity have to act the whore part to get the whore stigma, though — Madonna, Lady Gaga, etc. Nathalie Wood or Elizabeth Taylor had much fewer problems with that, as do Ema Thompson or Sigourney Weaver in today’s world. My impression is thus that the stigma is no longer associated with acting, as it used to be, but with (looking like) a whore (whatever that means at a given point in time), and would extend similarly to non-actors and non-performers (or non-celebrities).

    Reply
  6. laura agustin Post author

    in a way you are right, it is not about the acting per se. on the other hand whore stigma is so easily activated, by so little, a single word or glance, that i can’t believe that no scrap of acting’s taint still adheres. you don’t have to act slutty in the gaga way for the stigma to come your way, nor do you have to be young or pretty or anything else.

    Reply

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