Report: Star Wars toymakers were directed to exclude female characters
hypable.com
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Same goes for startups. Given the barriers to entry in the software business, which are low but still very much nonzero (hence the need for VC), and given that VC can't fund all the possible ideas that want to enter, what's in the market is what non-consumer participants have decided in their wisdom that consumers will probably like. Which may well be very profitable, but is unlikely to maximize profit.
Which leads to a simple reply to PG's claim, "When you accuse Silicon Valley of x, you're implicitly saying x works well, which doesn't seem smart if you're against x." No, I'm implicitly saying that x works rather poorly, because Silicon Valley works rather poorly and is still profitable. It could be much more profitable.
> "maintain the sharp boy/girl product division"
You're assuming what they're doing is unprofitable and irrational. But a majority of families with two or more children have children of opposite sexes and a cultural taboo against different sexes sharing the same toys means parents need to buy more toys. It isn't hard to believe that this strategy is profitable on net.
So it's really showing the other thing -- not that the market isn't efficient, but that it can be efficient/profitable for the market to be sexist.
But that makes the analogous thing in tech that boys are encouraged to be programmers and girls are encouraged to be nurses. Which is a thing that happens predominantly in schools and at home and it isn't clear how the software industry would be a beneficiary of that -- which is perhaps why we hear many calls to do something about it. The profit-seeking behavior is to change it.
“The market” is not some natural occurring phenomenon, but rather a complex mix of political and ethical choices.
It is our responsibility to be acutely aware of this and make “the market” accountable to our cultural aspirations.
That is, we must use whatever tools available to make “the market” not profitable when it encultures sexism or is overtly sexist. Find the people responsible behind these decisions and make it clear to them, and the companies that enable and protect them, that it is absolutely unacceptable.
We could apply the same hollow catch phrase to the election of government and reveal how ultimately toxic the trope is.
Quote from article, that brings up the trope:
“For far too long, fans searching for merchandise of their favorite female characters have been told that the onus is on their wallets. “Buy the toys that are out there,” the message has echoed, even as fans scour the unyielding shelves for a green-skinned assassin, a black-clad Avenger — and now a fearless young woman who hums with the power of the Force.
It is time to reverse the conversation. Toy and merchandise companies must stop taking a character’s gender into consideration when including them in products. Put Gamora with the rest of the Guardians. Leave Black Widow on her motorcycle. And when Star Wars: Episode VIII finally arrives, don’t make us ask “Where’s Rey?””
But these people only listen to money, and even when they listen to people, there will always be someone who only listens to money.
The theoretical beauty of capitalism is that it uses greed against itself; in theory, the best way to become rich is to make something truly valuable. In practice, we're pretty easy to manipulate and we've unwittingly ensured the destruction of the very parts of capitalism that make greed work for its pay.
So yes, we do need to vote with our wallets, and we need to do it ASAP, because it'll only get worse if we keep buying it.
My recommendation would be to buy every goddamn Rey toy you can find. That'll make it clear that Rey is what sells. A broad boycott won't tell them anything, other than "we're angry".
Putting this on the front page of HN so that other media outlets pay attention is one such technique.
Conversely, by voting with wallets, we show support for the very minds that enabled and legitimized this toxic decision.
Two, short of a march held in front of Mattel's doorstep (or the doorstep of whoever refuses to make Rey toys), voting with "cultural ethics" is not going to be noticed by the kind of person who says "no boy will want a toy with a girl on the front".
Three, "cultural ethics" is a vague term in and of itself. Are you referring to the culture of expecting boys to like boys' toys? Or are you talking about taking that culture and replacing it with another? What's the difference between cultural and personal ethics, and if personal ethics exist, then how do cultural ethics have an effect?
Fourth, voting with our wallets beats the corps at their own game. By consciously deciding to only pay for products that fit our ethics, we force companies to follow our ethics (or, at least, the ethics of the masses). If we do not buy, they don't make money, so what we buy directly affects their decisions.
Finally, I don't understand the "toxic" label you keep using. What is toxic about it? An idea can't be poison; ideas do not inherently do anything. Only actions can be harmful--or helpful. Voting with our wallets is only as toxic as the thing we decide to vote for.
As mentioned in another comment on this thread, "vote with your dollars" doesn't work when there aren't any other candidates on the ballot, making it a relatively ineffective approach in this case.
What you're actually saying is that you want some outcome other than what the market, which absolutely is a naturally occurring phenomenon despite your beliefs, has produced. And, like everyone else who wants to force their own outcomes, you propose to do so based on a view of morality that you want imposed on everyone else.
The market is the result of a multitude of people making their own independent judgements and decisions about the value and desirability of goods and services. That's it. Anything that interferes with it to produce specific outcomes isn't "shaping", "influencing", or even "interfering" in the market. It's an attempt to replace the market, and thus the right of other people to act on their own judgement, with something else.
Whatever that something else is, it's not a civilized society.
Giving female characters the same exposure as male character, and equally, giving women equal voice as men, is exactly like a faith based decision making process. Perfect analogy.
“What you're actually saying is that you want some outcome other than what the market, which absolutely is a naturally occurring phenomenon despite your beliefs, has produced”
The market, again, is not some natural occurring phenomenon. It is steered by culture and the existing power dynamics within it. That includes pervading issues of sexism, classism, racism, and countless other facets that shape it.
If you do not believe this, you are ignoring at least fifty years of sociology.
Further, if this concept were so alien, so outrightly crazy, so radical, the chances that it would be getting any attention at all is unlikely.
Monopolies completely undermine capitalist economies. We see the same thing with utilities, where one company has a regional monopoly on the electric grid, internet service, or water, consumers suffer from the lack of competition. So the government steps in to regulate.
I'm not saying the government should regulate the Star Wars universe to ensure female consumer demands are met, people should instead flock to science fiction/fantasy universes that meet their needs, but--as you note--those other universes don't have the corporate backing to get films into theaters. I enjoy Star Wars and Star Trek, but after 40 and 50 years of playing around in these mythoses, I would really like to see new worlds explored more deeply by the mass public.
Secondly, the main problem of making scifi flicks is their cost. The Expanse is getting a TV series because George R.R. Martin is backing it and the books sold amazingly well.
You'll need a pretty big Kickstarter to match that.
...they thought everyone would identify with the whiny, emo bad guy?
Their conception of the Star Wars fanbase will be based on the worst cliches you can imagine — a homogenous mass of awkward, nerdy, unsophisticated adolescent white boys and young adults — and be informed by a crude and cynical view of marketing psychology. Basically, they have no intuition whatsoever for what Star Wars fans want or think, so will fill in the gap in their knowledge by assuming the very worst.
All the above leads the executives to believe that the nerdy white boys who are dumb enough love this Star Wars crap cannot and will not identify with any character except the one who most resembles themselves. A moody, caucasian man-child with a cool mask and superpowers? How could they not love him? Any objections about him being a rather unsympathetic villain will be waved away as so much noise. “After all, Vader was a villain or something, and we sell a shit-ton of merch with his face on it, right?”
To these same execs, the characters of Finn and Rey won't be viewed as anything other than a bone thrown to potential black and female fans. A way of expanding the franchise's appeal beyond its typical demographic. But they will still look at that homogenous mass of white nerds and say “These losers are the target of our marketing and merchandising efforts, and they will never identify with a female character, or buy merchandise containing one. We don't need to prove this, because we're top execs and our success demonstrates that our intuition is correct.”
But what appeals to them isn't necessarily what appeals to kids, and while the parents pay for the toys, the kids pick the toys. Their market research might have indicated that this is what the typical Star Wars fan wants (or maybe wanted a few years ago, due to changing perspectives in the past decade that weren't apparent during the last rush), but they aren't selling toys to the people that are already Star Wars fans.
(Toys as in kids' toys, not "Collectibles")
I understand the argument behind "vote with your dollars", but when an entire industry is on the wrong side of the issue how can you possibly "vote"?
(BTW, as unlikely as it might seem, we've found the best gender neutral toys are at Ikea.)
Why would that seem unlikely? We up here the North are the cutting edge of equality, after all...
And people like us are voting with our wallets. Its just that noone (except Ikea and some small "alternative" toy stores) seems to want our money.
Disney is also in a tough spot re depictions of female characters. Any 3d/toy depiction will subject them to complaints re body type. A gold-bikini leia is not acceptable today, but any distinctively female profile will be judged harshly. The real character/actress may be a traditional rail-thin model, several inches shorter and 1/2 the weight of her male counterparts. That's what sells tickets. But that same profile in an action figure will be judged harshly. I understand why they might want to avoided the debate.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars-the-force-awakens/...
Furthermore, in the actual film (which was released after this article was published), BB-8 is only referred to as "he"/"him". The anonymous informant claims, "JJ was determined to make BB-8 cute and strong – and female." But Daisy Ridley is quoted by Time as saying, "I remember J.J. saying, 'He's not a child.'" Abrams is quoted as telling Entertainment Weekly, "I named him BB-8 because it was almost onomatopoeia. It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the two B's." There's a video of Abrams answering the question just before the film's release at http://collider.com/bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-forc... with, "I always referred to him as 'he', but that's just sort of a, you know, I haven't checked. I haven't looked under the hood."
So I doubt the leaker's claim that Abrams was "determined to make BB-8 female".
2. A female robot is just a tiny bit different from a female human. But it's not even that: it's a gender-ambiguous robot, whose femininity consists of solely a pronoun used by one executive and an anonymous source, and could have easily been male. That seems to be a serious cop-out. You might as well say that the Millennium Falcon satisfies the request for female toys (the ship is regularly referred to as "she" in the original trilogy).
Problem:
Western corporations treat the consumer as some sheep to whom you show some advertising and then they are supposed to react accordingly and purchase their stuff. You show the advertisement for the movie and then consumers are supposed to pay you to watch the movie. You show them the movie and then they are supposed to go buy the toys you make available on store shelves. They treat the consumers as a simple black box with an input for advertising and an output where money comes out. And time and again people prove they are not this simple revenue generating mechanism. And whenever they prove this, western companies are baffled, unprepared, and ultimately blame it on the consumers by starting anti-piracy crusades and trademark protection crusades. Many pages could be linked here to prove the utter stupidity of these companies, but maybe in a grandchild post. The market and these companies are not efficient. They just barely manage to make a humongous profit. This is typical of any monopoly. The market is inefficient, the market actors are inefficient and the monopolizing actor makes a profit (most often not as much as an actor could possibly make if the market was healthy) to the detriment of all other actors.
Solution:
They are even more pitiable when compared to the state of affairs in places like Japan. The media industry for anime, manga and all related things understands there needs to be a symbiosis between the source (usually or eventually a company) of original content and the fans. Once a company releases something it becomes part of an ecosystem around that content. They are no longer the sole provider in that ecosystem. And this serves to keep the ecosystem healthy. Fan content keeps the community active and buzzing during the periods between releases by the original source.
Let's take one company acting in such ecosystems for example. More precisely one range of products(Nendoroids) for one year(2015) from one company (Good Smile Company). For those unfamiliar, Nendoroids are high quality posable figurines (with a few articulations and interchangeable parts) of super-deformed(chibi) versions of characters. For the particular issue of gender representation of characters a rough count leads to around ~125 female figurines and ~50 male figurines released in 2015 which results in a ratio of about 5/2. Note that the target audience also isn't segregated into male or female. The target customer is simply Japanese.
To showcase their agility in the ecosystem let's take a much more narrow example. The Mikudayo figurine. This is a figurine with a lot of fan history behind it. It starts with Hatsune Miku who started as the box art mascot for a voicebank for the vocal music synthesis software Vocaloid. Fans in turn created an entire character around this one picture sparking an entire phenomenon that spread through the entire world (I may write a tangent explaining a bit the Miku phenomenon). Good Smile Company crated a Nendoroid figurine for Miku in the specific style of the line. Eventually, a fan based an entire costume on the Nendoroid version of the character and wore the costume at a convention. The result was rather grotesque, but the sheer discrepancy between the cuteness of the Nendoroid figurine and the eeriness of the life size costume version sparked a phenomenon around this new version of the character that turned into a new character of its own called Mikudayo. Subsequently Good Smile Company released a figurine of exactly this new character.
Such a chain of events is mostly unthinkable in the west.
- The Mikudayo figurine would never have been launched because of the murkiness of the trademark issues.
- The Mikudayo phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks and misrepresenting the character.
- The Hatsune Miku phenomenon would have been squashed and people sued for infringing the original trademarks by creating fan content that mislead people into thinking Miku was anything else than a piece of software (People new to the phenomenon usually mistakenly associate Miku and Vocaloid in general with the hologram not the voicebank and the software. Trademarks were designed to prevent exactly this.).
- The Vocaloid software would never have been made or would never have succeed, because the very idea of making your voice available for everyone on the planet to create songs with is baffling and outrageous to artists in the west.
And yet the ecosystem around this phenomenon (Miku) is healthily spreading and growing and all actors are making a profit even if there is rampant copyright and trademark infringement.
The only western company that seems to get it a bit is Hasbro. They aren't really actively targeting their fanbase but at least unlike others they aren't cracking down on fan content too hard. (And it's a good thing they are not targeting their fanbase because their biases around what the demographic of the fanbase would want would make them change the content and abandon the very strengths that made people fans in the first place) Hasbro has on their hands a completely unexpected phenomenon of an unprecedented growth and scale. This phenomenon is called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the volume and demographics of the fanbase is something Hasbro could never have anticipated.
Looking at the length of the comment maybe I should turn this into a blog post of it's own. But it's not like I said anything new. Maybe I should end this by saying that we should make these companies that treat consumers as a money spewing black box fail. Alas, it may actually have no effect since there actually are a lot of sheep that will just buy what is given to them, and any of our efforts ignored with the decrease in sales blamed on piracy.
Let me ask you a simple question - who gets to decide what stuff should or should not be shoved down people's throats?
Because it may so transpire that you might find yourself quite soon in a position where you are going to say: "To save this village and its villagers we have to slay everybody and burn it to the ground."
The people whose throats they are being shoved down, i.e., the consumers. Right now you have a situation where Rey action figures are unavailable to consumers who want to buy them, because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted better than the people themselves.
Did you even read the headline? (I'm not even going to ask about the article.)
What are you talking about? How did you arrive to the conclusion that they are unavailable? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D...
> because some marketing executives thought they knew what people wanted better than the people themselves.
Isn't that pretty much what marketing is in the first place?
Most of Rey figures were announced after the backlash. Anecdotally, I went around shopping and was able to find everything SW, except for a Rey figure. They even had action figures for minor characters in the Rebels series, but no Rey.
You must feel awfully afflicted every time you enter a store. So many things being shoved down your throat. How do you even function?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10958155 and marked it off-topic.
This has everything to do with the fantasy demographic biases in the minds of the executives of toy making companies.