Talk:The Heart/Quotes/@comment-49.144.212.154-20130617093109/@comment-64.53.163.31-20140811052548

Ok, several things. The Overseers are a male branch of a religious organisiation; segregation of the sexes in religious organisations is literally the most common thing ever. The female Oracles aren't passive; their role is in determining policy through intense debate and study. The suggestions they come up with are held as absolute truth. In the argument of determining policy vs street patrol/burning heretics, I'm gonna take the immensely controversial opinion that policy>>>>>>patrol.

(ETA: Also they're apparently trained in combat anyway, so policy AND patrol for the Oracles, just patrol for the Overseers. There.)

And for that matter, even if the Church of the Everyman is sexist doesn't mean that the society in general is. They're a religious institution; they're gonna be a couple hundred years behind in terms of morality/progression. Look at the goddamn Catholic Church. Ancient institution; still won't let women be priests. That doesn't mean every country that has Catholicism as a religion is sexist like the Catholic Church. That just means the Catholic Church is sexist. This is incredibly inconclusive evidence.

We get a total of 3 parliamentarians named: Morgan, Custis, and that guy Morgan's prostitute used to work for. That's 3 guys. That's circumstantial evidence about the general makeup of parliament at best. We get no indication as to the sex of any other parliamentarians. For all we know, the rest of Parliament is made up of bigender river crusts with hydraulic attachments. For all we know, the Ladies Boyle each hold a seat in Parliament. There's no evidence for or against any of these assertions. Again, completely inconclusive.

The City Watch is shown to be exclusively men. Ok, I'll give you that, but we have no evidence that this is because of some systemic limitation on who can join the City Watch or if it's because of some self-selection process (similar to IRL) where women just don't join the police force in the numbers that men do. Or maybe women don't tend to pass the physical requirements set up (similar to IRL) Again, inconclusive evidence.

Women are shown as subservient in roles of servants, courtesans, and governesses. Ok first of all, teachers aren't a subservient occupation (seriously, what?) so I'm gonna have to dock you on that. But as for servants and courtesans, is it possible that -- and bear with me on this one -- that the reason we see so many servants and courtesans is because the game takes place exclusively in rich people's houses and a fuckin whorehouse? I'm not sure who you'd expect to find in a whorehouse other than, you know, prostitutes. Who tend to be women. Sorry if that's sexist, but vagina services tend to sell better than dick services.

As for servants, yeah, we see maids. The game needs to populate otherwise empty rich people's houses with some form of staff, so I guess you could argue that there should've been male servants, but then I'm sure we'd have another argument about "why are there no women anywhere, why are even the servants men, why is it that the only place we see any real concentration of women in the whorehouse?" What I'm saying is, in the settings we visit, there's not a lot of opportunity to show women in other occupations other than ones that would put them in rich people's houses.

Billie can't join the City Watch cos she killed a Serkonan aristocrat. She couldn't even find shelter amongst the underworld element of Dunwall; there's no way she'd be allowed to join a legitimate organisation like the City Watch. Why couldn't she join before she killed the aristocrat? Probably for the same reason "kids from the street" don't tend to join the police. They don't trust them and they've spent their entire lives seeing them as the enemy. You don't cross the floor if you have any loyalty to your roots.

Jessamine was not killed because she was a woman. She was killed because Burrows fucked up and was trying to cover her tracks. He would've killed the ruler regardless of sex.

Also re: Jessamine, where's the goddamn patriarchy in ensuring she's married and has a legitimate heir? Her father was emperor before her and yet Jessamine remains without an arranged marriage or even a named father to her daughter. No one gets on her about that. No one bats a goddamn eye or calls her a slut or makes speculation. They deride Corvo for sleeping with the empress, but not her for sleeping with Corvo, as if Corvo should've known his place, known his role, known his class.

Most of the things you're pointing out as evidence of sexism can be chalked up more neatly and easily to evidence of classism. Class is kind of THE BIGGEST DEAL in Gristol. The entire reason the rat plague came about was because Burrows is an asshole who hates poor people and wants them killed off. Titles are incredibly important. Even when he's taken part in killing her friends, Callista still refers to Treavor Pendleton as "Lord Pendleton". The entire reason we don't know which Boyle sister to kill is because she's referred exclusively to her title as "Lady".

Corvo is looked down on as being a low-born foreigner pretending to be of nobility. City Watch officers round up common folk for Sokolov's experiments but refrain from even saying the word "weeper" to the wealthy merchant Pratchett. Galvani's and Bunting's houses get extra protection despite being empty while occupied commoner houses are just left to rot. Authority goes with money and class.

Evidence against the claim of rampant sexism in Dunwall: Ladies go about unmarried (Ladies Boyle, Jessamine, Granny Rags), owning property (Ladies Boyle, Jessamine, Granny Rags, Cecelia), owning businesses (Madam Prudence), working in government offices (Morgan's prostitute), working determining their own fates (the women looters, that one plague victim who barricades herself in the flooded district). Women work and have careers outside of the house without chaperones, which is a huge thing.

Women (of high birth) can have sexual flings with underaged servant boys and no one disdains them or calls them out for their sexuality, just the "servant boys" thing. And on a really shallow, cosmetic level, everyone wears pants. there's none of that Victorian era "fainting vapors" thing going on with the women of Dunwall; no one's begging for delicate treatment for the delicate wimminfolks.

And, god's sake, combat is not power ok? "Activeness" and "aggression" have nothing to do with power. An aggressive sheep is still a sheep; the City Watch being aggressive doesn't inherently give them power. You wanna talk about power, talk about the authority of the City Watch, the fact that by wearing a uniform and being part of that occupation, they have license to bully and not be questioned for it. They bully everyone in the lower class, regardless of sex (tallboys hunting down groups of fleeing civilians anyone?). The fact that they are shown to be men is not indicative of "men bully" as it is "people with authority bully". Which goes back to the class thing.

tl;dr most of the sexism can be chalked up to classism