Anyone who is interested in this topic would probably benefit from checking out the book "From Girls to Grrlz : A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines" by Trina Robbins. She talks about changes in female characters, female readers, and female creators in American comics over the decades.

On a tangent, The American comics industry has recently been blindsided by the huge amounts of American girls buying Japanese and Korean comics, when they had long insisted that girls just weren't as interested in comics as boys were. Now they are struggling to catch up and figure out how to actually market to what has turned out to be a huge demographic right under their noses. In Japan, females buy comics just as much as males, and there are plenty of working female cartoonists. Its sort of a chicken and egg question whether having more female creators brings in more female readers, or more female readers means more girls growing up to be cartoonists. In either case, the publishers in Japan know that there is money in comics for girls and women. Now that publishers here have begun to reawaken to this reality as well, there are going to be a lot of changes that are going to filter into tv and movies down the road. It's all about the money after all, and if the money is there, they are going to be chasing it.

I think as well that the notion that boys won't watch/read things with girls as the main characters is going to change more and more in the future as the possible roles that female characters take are expanded. You just have to look at the success of the Buffy franchise to see where things are headed.

This was one of his best interviews so far. Of course, she can always claim that she was joking, but she seemed to really not get it. Maybe she's already had her lobotomy...

I think that their smug attitude towards how much money they think she needs and how easy it must be for her to get it is interesting. Especially considering that the tuition they were talking about ($1800) was obviously not going to Duke. If the woman had been a Duke student she would have needed nearly $16,000 a semester; for tuition alone. There are probably Duke students stripping to help them get by.

Of course, we all know that it's impossible to rape a loose woman, so let's let these poor atheletes off the hook, they are just exercising their priviliges as our social betters.

Detroit's male Muslim community not clamoring for men-only days alongside these women? After all, modesty rules in Islam apply to both genders, right?

I second the point that this is hardly new as far as Japanese games go. In a lot of Japanese game stores the 'dating sim' games are right out with everything else, bare breasts on the box and all. There's a whole gamut from cutesy to hardcore. They even make these for girls, with stables of rainbow haired 'pretty boys' to choose from. Japanese girls and women buy their fair share of sexually themed games and comics, and they make them as well.

The Japanese have a very different idea of the boundaries of depicitions of sex in pop culture for young people. While they have their own issues of course, the artistic freedom is a wonderful thing.

I also thing that it's worth noting that the Japanese didn't have Witch Trials and that Christianity is a very minority religion in Japan. The witch thing is probably not a whole lot more than a cute magical girl costume to the developers. Kind of like a french maid or naughty nurse. Also, there are lots of witch themed anime that, serious or humorous, have no more to do with witch trials than 'Bewitched' or 'Sabrina the Teenaged Witch' do.

For the people who are continually upset by the subject matter of games currently on the market, would you please enlist yourselves in the game industry and start designing and producing the sort of games that you would like to see? For everyone person who loves GTA or Silent Hill, there's somebody else who loves Katamari Damacy or the Sims, and it's good that there are all these choices.