I flip when a fella brings me flowers

Being a girl is hard. Being a girl in a technical/management role is super hard. There is so much inherent, naturally occurring misogyny in this world. Some people don’t even realize they are being sexist; they get a girl on the phone for technical support, and their gut instinct is that they should be talking to someone else, anyone else, as long as that person has a penis. People are dismissive of your efforts and skills because of your ovaries and it is really frustrating. In my office, where I am the boss of 4 fairly enlightened men, we make jokes about skirts and broads and birds and dames, but it is a joke, right? I’m starting to think that I shouldn’t even encourage this behavior with them, because it seems to increase my tolerance to real discrimination. Almost every time I answer the phone, the person on the other end asks to be transferred to technical support. Oddly, the women ask more than the men, confirming that women are usually way more sexist than men.

Then, as Villi and Dave are playing DOA 4, I get even angrier about the state of women in the world. Half the characters in DOA are women and all of them are accomplished martial artists. In my mind, that makes them athletes, and yet when they fight they fight braless, in dresses and high heels, and with their panties showing and the breasts jiggling. When the male characters in the game complete their stories they train or fight or steal. When the women complete their stories, they some get felt up or use their feminine whiles to seduce skeletons. It's totally fucking ridiculous. I know this game is designed to be played by boys, but that seems like more of a reason to design these women in reality, not less. These boys will, intentionally or not, form conclusions that girls can do two things: flirt and kill them.

DOA is one of many games that has helped me form my theory and evolving opinion on what I call “the booby algorithm.” The booby algorithm was the culmination of one man's love for video games, programming, and pornography. The booby algorithm is a precise mathematical equation that when applied to a video game will make a woman's breasts jiggle just so. This algorithm has been a long time in the making. If you look back at earlier female heroes, they were all stacked like a brickhouse, but their boobs looked like those early breast implants that got all rocky and terrained, like the Sierra Madres. Gradually, the graphics in the games improved and so did the breasts. With 2 million colors, higher refresh rates, and better graphics cards, the world was finally ready for perfectly animated breasts. Presenting the booby algorithm--the crossroads of ascending technology and descending society.