What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: I was a table games dealer and everything you described in your article was what I experienced, then like an old worn out shoe I was thrown out on my ear with no direction of where to go or what to do and no help from those I thought would help and possibly change what had happened to me. I lost everything. Women are treated exactly as you said here, but the way the industry deals with this is to get rid of the women and replace them with younger naive ones.

I’m really sorry you had that experience. It never ceases to infuriate me how every aspect of our culture serves to erase the value, wisdom and visibility of older women while simultaneously praising older men. The dissonance is pretty much exclusively attributable to the premiums we place on female beauty: nobody cares if a male newscaster is 85 with a face like the back end of a truck, but once even a conventionally attractive woman in the same job stops looking like she’s 35, she gets fired. Unless the premise of a TV show is specifically about older women being awesome despite the UNBEARABLE HANDICAP of, you know, being older women, it’s extremely rare to see women older than about 47 on screen, unless they look like Kim Cattrall and are playing a character scripted to appear youthful, impulsive and vacuous rather than someone with wisdom, humour and strength.

And given how male-centric gaming is, the problem only gets worse. I remember hearing about how one console fighting game had a period of twenty-odd years pass between one instalment and the next: all the male characters lived out that time and got older and more awesome, whereas the women all miraculously were frozen in time capsules or somesuch bullshit and showed up the same age with their now-full-grown and equally hot daughters in tow. WHAT. The extent of the double-standard is just breathtaking in its sexism. 

  1. fozmeadows posted this