"Fake companion" service offered on Facebook

Rabid Badger wrote:

I just re-read the original article, and it would seem the 'service' is intended only for straight guys since they keep mentioning the phrase 'Cloud girlfriend' over and over.

So that leaves out straight women, gay men, lesbians, any of the trans folk...congratulations, Facebook! You're well on your way to alienating what probably constitutes at least HALF of your constituancy!

Well played, sir! Well played!

But do they do fictional characters?
(also, just because it's female-only doesn't mean they can't be gay, right? Lesbian relationship with Tifa Lockheart++)

Rabid Badger wrote:

I just re-read the original article, and it would seem the 'service' is intended only for straight guys since they keep mentioning the phrase 'Cloud girlfriend' over and over.

So that leaves out straight women, gay men, lesbians, any of the trans folk...congratulations, Facebook! You're well on your way to alienating what probably constitutes at least HALF of your constituancy!

Well played, sir! Well played!

If you re-read the article, you might also have noticed that this is a company independent from FaceBook. Sure, it is launching their li'l application that takes full advantage of lonely people via FaceBook, but the application doesn't originate from FaceBook themselves. FaceBook might not even condone it:

The same article Badger so carefully read wrote:

It's not clear yet whether the service will violate Facebook's terms of service, which include provisions against stealing other people's identities, but not creating fictional ones.

However Ms Bendall said she hoped it would shut the profiles down and had done so in the past.

So, before you go screeching that FaceBook is alienating their user base, give them a chance to respond, yeah?

What a surprise. Sex/companion related things are targeted towards straight guys.
News at 11.

Rabid Badger wrote:

I just re-read the original article, and it would seem the 'service' is intended only for straight guys since they keep mentioning the phrase 'Cloud girlfriend' over and over.

So that leaves out straight women, gay men, lesbians, any of the trans folk...congratulations, Facebook! You're well on your way to alienating what probably constitutes at least HALF of your constituancy!

Well played, sir! Well played!

Wait, why would it leave out straight trans men?

Maybe Badger's implying they have more sense than that. :p

Good grief these people using fictional people as fuck-buddies are pathetic.

Isn't that so, Shadow?

Transguys are still duders. You know, arguably unable to say they know what it's like to be a woman (ie. experience life as womanly identified).

Verandering wrote:

Transguys are still duders. You know, arguably unable to say they know what it's like to be a woman (ie. experience life as womanly identified).

But didn't transmen used to physically be women?

TheHedonist wrote:

Lady Anne wrote:

But didn't transmen used to physically be women?

Lady Anne wrote:

physically be women?

Lady Anne wrote:

physically

"You don't know what it's like to BLEED for a week!"

"Well, yeah, I did at one point."

sigh.

I think the point is that, because they are or were at one point physically women, they were still socialized in the same way as women are and were - or still are, depending on whether they've transitioned yet, how well they pass, etc. - treated the same way. So you'd expect for them to have more empathy with regard to women's situations, sexism, etc., than someone who's biologically male because they've been there, even if their reactions were different because psychologically, they're male. But obviously, that's not always the case because people are more complicated than that.

Nihilist wrote:

Funny as in, dude, your're genderherping again.

Yeah. There's a difference between 'this gender stuff sucks, nobody should have to deal with it' and 'this gender stuff sucks, I shouldn't have to deal with it'. Trans women write some bollocks about other women too. There was one site I stumbled upon which was all about the stereotype that men and women have thought processes that deserves mutually exclusive terms and metaphors, and said that women were so attuned to nature or whatever that civilisation would crumble if men weren't around to impose their technological will on the land.

Sutremaine wrote:

Nihilist wrote:

Funny as in, dude, your're genderherping again.

Yeah. There's a difference between 'this gender stuff sucks, nobody should have to deal with it' and 'this gender stuff sucks, I shouldn't have to deal with it'. Trans women write some bollocks about other women too. There was one site I stumbled upon which was all about the stereotype that men and women have thought processes that deserves mutually exclusive terms and metaphors, and said that women were so attuned to nature or whatever that civilization would crumble if men weren't around to impose their technological will on the land.

...What? What does that even mean?

Sutremaine wrote:

Nihilist wrote:

Funny as in, dude, your're genderherping again.

Yeah. There's a difference between 'this gender stuff sucks, nobody should have to deal with it' and 'this gender stuff sucks, I shouldn't have to deal with it'. Trans women write some bollocks about other women too. There was one site I stumbled upon which was all about the stereotype that men and women have thought processes that deserves mutually exclusive terms and metaphors, and said that women were so attuned to nature or whatever that civilisation would crumble if men weren't around to impose their technological will on the land.

I'm a woman, and though I love my gardening and hiking, I'm also great with technology.

Stereotype fail!

Hahaha I am here raping Gaia so you can feast upon our bastard offspring

Lapin wrote:

...What? What does that even mean?

Can't believe I managed to find the site again so quickly.

Here's the particular page. I misremembered it slightly as it doesn't say that women are attuned to nature, but that when men alter the natural world it "intrude[s] upon the special temporal domain of females". The part about crumbling civilisation goes:

Quote :

Only when women can speak as women AND like women will they be able to tame the Inner Frontier with the same pioneer resolve of their male counterparts in the wilds of the old one. But a warning: the real danger is that women will seek to make over their brothers and subjugate the, as Surely as males had done to them. Whether out of revenge or through ignorance, we might turn the tables on our brothers and force them into the mental prison from which we are just escaping.

"So what!", a militant feminist might ask. So this: if we allow the pendulum to swing the other way, we will hobble our ability as a species to deal with a savage environment. Things that are intrinsically obvious to males would elude us, and the men we had cast in our image. The infrastructure would eventually crumble and we would fall with it, once more into the wild world we so recently anguished in. And then... when culture and science were gone, males would rise once more as the dominant species and force our great grand-daughters into slavery anew.

The human species is apparently unhobbled by male>female inequality.