[JD]

I want to take the generally rising level of sexual tolerance in today's world forward into one where governments have less power to restrict and more people can dictate markets with their credsticks.  While corporations undoubtedly police internally for unapproved deviance, they would certainly not let an untapped market escape them.  That said, I think the world of 0f 2070 is about as sexually liberated as technology allows.

IMO you overlook/ignore that governments and corporations generally don't care which body parts people insert into whom, or how, as long as only consenting adults are involved - very little profit to be gained by alienating part of your voter/customer base.

Superstitious people care, but for sad, sad reasons (Crimsondude mentioned some), we can't mention love and its physical manifestation, sex, or make fun of organized superstition, in a commercial product made for entertainment - even one that glorifies hyperviolence and heinous crime seven ways from Sunday.

The world is a weird place.

[firebug]

Superstitious people care, but for sad, sad reasons (Crimsondude mentioned some), we can't mention love and its physical manifestation, sex, or make fun of organized superstition, in a commercial product made for entertainment - even one that glorifies hyperviolence and heinous crime seven ways from Sunday.

The world is a weird place.

Society is learning.  Compared to even 20 years ago?  Society is learning.  Maybe I'll live to see the day when sex isn't such a taboo subject that schools across the country still think the best way to stop teen pregnancy is to tell all the teens to never ever have sex ever.  Hopefully during that time we'll learn to accept sex being used in the media for things other than teenage pandering and base eroticism.

[SlowDeck]

Firebug, don't count on it. That kind of society is the thing that entire religions were founded to fight against.

[Crimsondude]

Hrm.

Just because the LGBT community won the right to marry once people saw enough harmless, white gay couples doesn't mean we've moved more than that one fucking inch on civil rights in 25 years. Obama? Don't make me laugh.


That's one of the things that I miss about earlier material in SR before it took a giant left turn in the 2000s. The Japanacorps were ultra-conservative, non-Japanese humans knew they were second-class, and rarely the twain should meet. God forbid you were in love with a kawaruhito? No. You just weren't, or you weren't long for the corporate life. The other corporations were also racist and conservative, as corporatism leads social structures to be, in their own ways. There is nothing to suggest to me that racism should have changed at all in 25 years beyond some minor cosmetics. It doesn't go away. It just gets more insidious and clandestine, even covert, to make people doubt themselves when they do see racism.

[firebug]

I wasn't talking about civil rights or anything.  I honestly don't know enough about that sort of stuff to make any argument.  I just meant society's general use of sex and how acceptable people consider it to be to like sex and have be an actual big part of your life (as I believe it should be).  But I really shouldn't pull this argument away from Shadowrun and into a discussion about real world societal issues.

Racism (or metaracism or any other similar thing) is still going strong in Shadowrun from what I can tell.  Actually, nothing I've seen suggests otherwise.  Lines are drawn in sand every chance.  Ethnicity, metatype, social class, loads and loads of subcultures... Just to name a few.  I actually like Shadowrun for the opportunity to include that kind of thing in roleplaying.

[Fizzygoo]

...I think the world of 0f 2070 is about as sexually liberated as technology allows.

Eh. Sure 5th ed. core book (pg 41-42) says "Like everything else in the world, sex has been commodified, a slickly packaged product designed to make you forget it once meant something real. Prostitution thrives where it’s legal (about 99.998 percent of the known world)."

But with generally sexist institutions/organizations like the Mafia/Yakuza/Japanacorps, etc.; the patriarchy still dominates. Which means the GM is free to exploit 500 AD taboos against female sexual expression if they so choose, especially within such organizations.

While hopefully the world will be far more liberated in 2075, there's enough leeway in Shadowrun for the GM to promote either extreme or somewhere in between.

[Crimsondude]

I wasn't talking about civil rights or anything.  I honestly don't know enough about that sort of stuff to make any argument.  I just meant society's general use of sex and how acceptable people consider it to be to like sex and have be an actual big part of your life (as I believe it should be).  But I really shouldn't pull this argument away from Shadowrun and into a discussion about real world societal issues.

But sexual liberation is intrinsically tied to increased tolerance and poltiical/social power by historically underrepresented groups.

Though I guess if you treat sexual gratification as literally nothing more than a commodity, you can permit all sorts of representational behavior without actually permitting it to occur in the "real world." Though that actually seems far more terrifying, because it suggests a stronger amount of control and repression than even now. With the collusion of corporate and illicit worlds to control and manipulate people through their base urges (a tacit approval of limited black markets is critical to sustaining a totalitarian state), this could result in a really funky set of circumstances where everything is available, but most people are either too afraid to indulge or do so with the understanding that it means giving their masters more power over them.

[Kincaid]

I wasn't talking about civil rights or anything.  I honestly don't know enough about that sort of stuff to make any argument.  I just meant society's general use of sex and how acceptable people consider it to be to like sex and have be an actual big part of your life (as I believe it should be).  But I really shouldn't pull this argument away from Shadowrun and into a discussion about real world societal issues.

But sexual liberation is intrinsically tied to increased tolerance and poltiical/social power by historically underrepresented groups.

Though I guess if you treat sexual gratification as literally nothing more than a commodity, you can permit all sorts of representational behavior without actually permitting it to occur in the "real world." Though that actually seems far more terrifying, because it suggests a stronger amount of control and repression than even now. With the collusion of corporate and illicit worlds to control and manipulate people through their base urges (a tacit approval of limited black markets is critical to sustaining a totalitarian state), this could result in a really funky set of circumstances where everything is available, but most people are either too afraid to indulge or do so with the understanding that it means giving their masters more power over them.

This seems to be the status quo in Shadowrun's version of France, which is a hyper conservative state with a degenerate and corrupt underbelly, presumably based on the later years of Versailles.