First off: the games.  Obviously there’s Mass Effect 3, but as I’ve mentioned before, there will be a full post dedicated to that shortly.  For now, though, I’ll say that it’s a great addition to anyone’s collection: well-constructed story, superb combat mechanics, good graphics and generally an absorbing and engaging universe.  The ending(s) have caused issues among some fans of the franchise, and although I shan’t say here what they were or why that is, I’ll just say that I had no problem with the way it ended.

Better then that we talk about the Kinect.  I got one at the beginning of March and a few little games to go along with it.  Kinect Adventures is the title that comes with every single sensor (if you’re buying second-hand, be sure to check!) and it is a simple bit of fun.  You use your body to complete little challenges on the screen, collect points and progress through various ranks of adventurer.  It’s a little bit addictive when you first get the Kinect as it’s all very new and novel and amazing, but in the long run it would probably hold the attention of younger gamers or be best suited to family-centred gaming sessions.

I also got Kinect Sports (the first game), which proved much more popular between my partner and I.  You get the option to partake in six different events: Football (Soccer), Bowling (10-pin), Table Tennis, Track & Field (which contains six events in itself), Boxing and Beach Volleyball.  Again, this is a great bit of fun and you can use it for a spot of exercise as well.  You can play against four levels of computer opponent, as well as playing against your friends (or with them) online or in the same room.  You garner points and progress towards Champion status, but really it’s all about the amusement and the potential for collective gaming.

There are another two Kinect games knocking about my living room, but I didn’t want to talk about them as they don’t have the rather pleasing feature I’m about to detail.  The Kinect games that use your Xbox Avatar in-game (especially in Sports) are also populated with lots of other Avatar people as your opponents or team-mates.  Now, this may not sound altogether too ground-breaking or interesting, but for me it was quite nice to see a fairly equal mix of – albeit randomly generated – Avatars of all descriptions.  In simpler terms, they aren’t all male.  Even on team sports that are traditionally ‘single sex’ sports (like football) you have men and women of all ages charging about the pitch with you.  I thought that was a nice little nod – particularly for games that will have a lot of younger, more impressionable gamers – just to say “Hey, women exist too!”.

Now for the depressing stuff.  The company Game went belly-up in March and already my local Gamestation (part of the group) has been stripped bare and locked up tight, never to be set foot in again.  I admit I rarely bought anything from Game or Gamestation, but as the last notable games-only high street chain, it’s sad to see it fail.  As a PC gamer at heart, I felt the group had forgotten about me over the years as it focused more on console gamers – and that’s fair enough if that’s where the money is – but apparently that didn’t bring in enough revenue to save them.

Things were not helped when EA refused to supply the group with copies of Mass Effect 3 on credit and they had to give everyone who had pre-ordered their money back.  Even a few days before they closed up shop, the Gamestation I usually wander around was begging for trade-ins of the title as not a single brand new copy was in sight.  I suspect this may have been the last straw for many customers, but the advent of the internet worked its evil glory too: after all, if you can buy a two-week-old title for £15 on Amazon when it remains £30+ in a high street store, why would you go that extra mile and pay more?

It is, nevertheless, a little saddening to see the group suffer the same fate as many other high street names.  Should they remain, in one form or another, I hope they can take a more competitive stance on the price war with the internet and stop pricing themselves out of the market. Game’s statement has more detail on the immediate results of their entry into administration.

One final word…

Coincidentally, a couple of days before Game was declared a financial black hole, my partner bought himself Skate 2.  You may remember January’s Gamer Diary, where I mentioned watching him play Skate and lamented that there were zero lady-boarders.  Well, in the second instalment, there are girls flying around on boards, and you can also choose to be one.  Super!  Also, the mechanics and graphics are much improved.  It has, however, to me been dubbed ‘Skate 2 AKA “Shut up, Reda!”’.  Don’t worry if you don’t know who Reda is; all you need to know is he talks too much.

Next Time

I’ll be honest: I don’t yet know what the remainder of April will bring for me.  Never fear!  I will locate juicy content for you and in the meantime you’ll soon be able to read all about what I made of ME3 at last.

tags: not just for titles and authors!

Clicky here to see the explosive tag cloud on Amazon for a pseudo-science book about “the private activities of millions of men and women around the world”.¹

I like that a selection of predominantly internet-based feminist thought (can haz meme plz?) is being used to kick up a righteous fuss over what is by all accounts a pile of terrible tosh not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a great example of theory-into-action: the fact that tagging is used on Amazon to  organise and categorise books means that these tags help users identify and avoid anti-feminist writing.

My personal favourites in the tag cloud include mansplaining, gender essentialism, and transphobia.

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

1. *One of many exciting non-facts on the back cover alone. Rather than data gathered from actual people, they used “a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads”. By the same “methodology” I would have concluded that planet earth was dominated by cats with funny captions and spambots for viagra.

Welcome to Hodge’s ALPHABET OF FEMINISM, inaugural entry, number one: pull up a chair, gather your hot beverages round.

The more specific aims of this series of posts will, it is hoped, become clearer through practice, as it works from A-Z.

But put simply, the idea is to address (with reasonable neutrality), the make-up of the English mother-tongue, to consider how the language has evolved over the centuries, and in the process to prompt some questions about how gender issues are woven into the fabric of the language we use everyday.

Incidentally, when I refer to ‘the dictionary’, I am referring to the Oxford English Dictionary.

A

AMAZON

“This. I Have No Use For This. Remove It.”

The Tea Towel

For those readers who never owned the Greek alphabet on a tea-towel, the ‘maz’ sound mid-Amazon is the same ‘maz’ you find in ‘mastectomy’ and its (mostly medical) cognates. This is because the Amazons in question – a race of female warriors alleged to have lived in ancient Scythia, and the first definition for the first word of the Alphabet of Femininism (hoorah!) – were said to have been rather expert in just this procedure. Or, as the dictionary puts it, rather dryly – and, indeed, euphemistically – ‘they destroyed their right breast to avoid interfering with the use of the bow’.

In so self-mastectomising, this army of women obviously lay themselves open to the extended (and more explicitly gender-specific) meaning that amazon took on around the mid-eighteenth century. Here, an amazon is ‘a very strong, tall, or masculine woman’, unsurprising since they are, etymologically, removers of those most vexed of female glands in favour of ease in brandishing weaponry (more generally considered A Man’s Job).

This all said, the original Amazons do not appear to have been either an (exclusively) lesbian tribe, or even an anti-maternal one: Strabo, the Greek geographer, would have it that they periodically had a baby-breeding field trip to a neighbouring male tribe (the Gargareans). The resultant boy-children were exposed or sent back to their fathers; the girls kept and trained up In The Amazon Way, a rare gender upending for the olden days.

Alas! My Girdle!

But perhaps the most famous of these dedicated Amazons is Hippolyte-slash-Hippolyta, the owner of a  magical ‘girdle’, which Hercules stole in one of his less catchy labours (bit pathetic altogether, isn’t it? It’s got a bit of a spotty thirteen year old boy feel to it, in fact. ‘Hey Hercules! See that woman? I dare you to steal her girdle! Yeeah, dude, you rock!’ – That said, I’ve never been completely sure what a ‘girdle’ means in Ancient Scythia: I can’t really imagine an army of one-breasted women in the habit of frequent ‘bow handling’ being particularly concerned about how cinched their waists are. My childhood book of Greek Myths And Legends depicts it as a sort of extra snazzy belt, so that’s what I’m going with).

Amazon in trousers, Attic vase, circa 470 BC

Ahem. Post-Hercules, Hippolyta appears in every battered school copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as the future wife of Theseus, who ‘wooed her with his sword’ (oh Theseus, you charmer), and ex-flame of Oberon, King of The Fairies. Shakespeare, whose use of language is so influential that you can expect to bump into him frequently in these dark and twisted lexical corridors, isn’t otherwise a great user of the word amazon, although he does make it into the dictionary’s quotations for the word’s extended, more generic sense, as ‘a female warrior’, which is the first in a pair that ends in the aforementioned ‘very strong, tall, or masculine woman’, unsurprisingly considered ‘forbidding to men’ by the author of Sermons To Young Women in the eighteenth century.

Dot Com

One contemporary application this more general sense has had, curiously enough, is in the modelling world, where the ‘freakish’ aesthetic of catwalk models (and presumably also their exoticism) makes the designation ‘amazon’ / ‘amazonian’ in its sense as a ‘very strong, tall, or masculine woman’ surprisingly true to its lexical origin (annoyingly, if fittingly, for the inaugural post of an alphabet, the prominence of a particular shopping site ‘everything from A-Z’, and the tendencies of said supermodels to write their autobiographies, obscures any such instances of the word on Google, so you’ll have to take my nonspecific memory for it).

Moving on, I particularly like the further sense amazon acquired sometime around the sixteenth or seventeenth century – now, alas, obsolete – as ‘the queen in chess’, who I always thought of as quiet sort of feminist icon, maintaining, as Francis Beale asserts, ‘alwayes…her owne colour’, and zipping around the board with an alacrity denied to her technically more important consort.

To the men an Amazon never fails to be forbidding.

JAMES FORDYCE, Sermons To Young Women (published 1767)

The Queen, or Amazon, is placed in the fourth house from the corner of the field by the side of her King, and alwayes in her owne colour.

FRANCIS BEALE, Biochimo’s Royall Game of Chesse-play (translated 1656)

Yes, But How Many People Does She Shag?

As will become tediously common during these gynocentric word-journeys, it seems virtually impossible to think of a ‘strong, masculine woman’ without at some point branching into her sexuality; thus, the final meaning of amazon (unsurprisingly, the Victorians’ contribution) as in opposition to a ‘vestal’ (another group of women bound together tribal-style, although for an altogether different purpose). As in, ‘Oh man, that girl’s no vestal; she’s an amazon.‘

However, amazon is actually a bit of a relief because its overwhelming lexical impression is one of a guarded kind of respect: Hippolyta would, I think, be satisfied.

NEXT WEEK: B is for Bitch