There are days when I am lucky to find a site with articles for geek women like myself. There is some solidarity. However, as with all collective groups there is going to be only some overlap with values. I might rant a bit today.
A value System
First, a value system is a collective of your held personal beliefs influenced by experience, religion, morals etc. What one might think is good and bad.
So for myself, I have a Catholic value system meaning I accept the Churches teachings on pretty much all moral matters.
What becomes difficult is reading or talking with someone with perhaps a more secular value system about moral matters.
It is particularly mind-numbing and eye-gouging to deal with relativism. Give me anything but a relativist. (Although I probably shouldn't ask for something worse. I just can't think of it at this moment.)
The Offender
I've written about feminists before and I will again today because my feathers are a bit ruffled. The particular article I started to read was about the virtue of modesty. (Modesty is generally the handle I use online.) Effectively, the article was about turning this virtue into a vice.
RAZZAFRAGGA!!!
This gets under my skin SO MUCH. This article isn't the only offender no. The general attitude is seen in many places and often amplified in online geek communities. It's opposite land out there! Vices are virtues! Virtues are Vices! They question the idealism of being courageous and noble and virtuous? They praise the ability to act out violent childish fantasies. And by "they" I mean game journalists and other online journalists.
It can be applied to the media culture at large though.
Hypocrites All!
One of the big reasons that such a mirror universe is so aggravating is that the writer still expects decency. For example, the writer who wrote about the "vice" of modesty claimed that the burden of resisting temptation was on men. Basically, if men get turned on by a flash of ankle it's not the woman's fault. Granted it was more about being allowed to show as much skin as she wanted without being objectified or sexualized. One, God made woman beautiful. She is created to allure, it wasn't a mistake. Two, God created man to desire beauty and therefore woman. These are good natural things.
We live in a world where anything good is twisted by the Enemy. The deformity is what we often experience. Sexiness is a distortion of true feminine beauty. So unfortunately, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
On the other side of the coin, yes, it is true that there are those so Puritan that they cover the body because they believe it evil and gross. The mindset should be that my body is so precious and sacred that it should be covered lest the world go mad upon gazing upon it. (I may be dramatizing this a bit, but hey drama is the spice of life.)
But there's a bright side too...
Today I happened across this Kickstarter Project:
TUG.
Most geek girls lament the scantily clad super heroine or game characters. This project took social science to help design this game. Seriously going through their philosophy and design plans and studies fills me with hope.
It is only in a fantasy world where a woman can wear a bikini and somehow not be ogled by the men around her 90% of the time. Fantasy is not reality and often we forget that.
I may have a Thomas Merton type post about that sometime soon. I'll first have to re-read some of Merton's complaints about journalism.
