When I started researching my latest Character Select for GodisaGeek, I had no idea how many people were annoyed by Bayonetta. It was actually hard work choosing which outraged and sketchily-reasoned commentators amused me most.
If you're interested, I suggest you go and read the article and then come back here. Finished? Good.
I am a feminist in that I believe in equality between the sexes, but I believe in equality for everyone and there's no word for that. A "personist"? What's the word for "not being a racist", for example? There isn't one. Anyway, when I say "equality", I mean "equality", which is why I question what often strikes me as knee-jerk reactions to depictions of women in games. Women everywhere really, but games because I know a lot about them and they're a lot less complicated than real life because video game characters don't actually exist.
In Uncharted 3, Nathan Drake gets captured by pirates, strapped to a chair and beaten. In God of War, male Kratos is depicted as a rippling lump of angry man-meat hell-bent on violent destruction. In Mass Effect 2, a female Shepard can pursue Jacob, who is impossibly attractive and perfectly proportioned. When you get him back to your cabin, he strips to his waist and FemShep gazes at him admiringly, as the audience is invited to do (FemShep remains clothed).
Alright, I haven't trawled the darker recesses of the internet (feel free to prove me wrong, comment box affictionados), but I don't remember anyone ever going "how can they abuse Nathan, stereotype Kratos and objectify Jacob in games! Show men some respect, blah blah blah..."
That's because no-one thinks doing those things to fictional men in a fictional story is inherently a bad thing, so why on earth is it such a problem when it happens to female characters? When Lara Croft gets beaten up, when Princess Peach mopes around waiting to be rescued, when the camera lingers on Bayonetta's body, everyone is up in arms. This is ridiculous. Maybe I will regret saying that in the morning once everyone has stopped following me on Twitter (NOOOOOO) and I am never allowed to write about games again, but come on. If it's ok for men to be treated in a certain way by fiction, it's ok for women to be treated that way too.
I said in the Bayonetta article that I don't think the argument that the historic (and in many places, still current) imbalance between men and women means that women should not be portrayed in certain ways holds any water. If you want to keep on being owned and controlled by an unpleasant history, then keep making reference to it, and keep looking for reasons to hark back to it.
There are still horrendous imbalances facing women all over the world, in all sorts of different ways, and if you care about equality, go and tackle actual problems, don't whine about something as minor and arbitrary as whether or not Bayonetta is wearing a bra, especially if you're not going to afford Jacob the same consideration.
Ridding the world of the cast of Dead or Alive is not going to prevent rape or stop human trafficking. It will not change ingrained attitudes towards women in the minds of those with no wish to change, it will just annoy people who like Dead or Alive, most of whom are not chauvinistic rapists. People who like looking at pretend woman in bikinis aren't necessarily bad people, they just like looking at pretend women in bikinis.
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Trying to repress or erase artistic (stretching the meaning of the word a little with reference to Dead or Alive, but anyway) representations of things is not a practical or realistic way of addressing actual problems. Sexy video games aren't really a cause or a symptom of anything ingrained in our culture, they just exist because some people like sexy video games.
More on this later (oh, you lucky, lucky people), but now it's bed time, and I feel I'm in danger of starting a flame war.
At least I would be if I updated enough to have more than four regular commenters.
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| Bayonetta from behind. |
If you're interested, I suggest you go and read the article and then come back here. Finished? Good.
I am a feminist in that I believe in equality between the sexes, but I believe in equality for everyone and there's no word for that. A "personist"? What's the word for "not being a racist", for example? There isn't one. Anyway, when I say "equality", I mean "equality", which is why I question what often strikes me as knee-jerk reactions to depictions of women in games. Women everywhere really, but games because I know a lot about them and they're a lot less complicated than real life because video game characters don't actually exist.
In Uncharted 3, Nathan Drake gets captured by pirates, strapped to a chair and beaten. In God of War, male Kratos is depicted as a rippling lump of angry man-meat hell-bent on violent destruction. In Mass Effect 2, a female Shepard can pursue Jacob, who is impossibly attractive and perfectly proportioned. When you get him back to your cabin, he strips to his waist and FemShep gazes at him admiringly, as the audience is invited to do (FemShep remains clothed).
Alright, I haven't trawled the darker recesses of the internet (feel free to prove me wrong, comment box affictionados), but I don't remember anyone ever going "how can they abuse Nathan, stereotype Kratos and objectify Jacob in games! Show men some respect, blah blah blah..."
 |
| Jacob in Mass Effect 2. Phwoar! By which I mean "this is a shocking example of objectification, men needed to be treated with respect, or something." |
That's because no-one thinks doing those things to fictional men in a fictional story is inherently a bad thing, so why on earth is it such a problem when it happens to female characters? When Lara Croft gets beaten up, when Princess Peach mopes around waiting to be rescued, when the camera lingers on Bayonetta's body, everyone is up in arms. This is ridiculous. Maybe I will regret saying that in the morning once everyone has stopped following me on Twitter (NOOOOOO) and I am never allowed to write about games again, but come on. If it's ok for men to be treated in a certain way by fiction, it's ok for women to be treated that way too.
I said in the Bayonetta article that I don't think the argument that the historic (and in many places, still current) imbalance between men and women means that women should not be portrayed in certain ways holds any water. If you want to keep on being owned and controlled by an unpleasant history, then keep making reference to it, and keep looking for reasons to hark back to it.
There are still horrendous imbalances facing women all over the world, in all sorts of different ways, and if you care about equality, go and tackle actual problems, don't whine about something as minor and arbitrary as whether or not Bayonetta is wearing a bra, especially if you're not going to afford Jacob the same consideration.
Ridding the world of the cast of Dead or Alive is not going to prevent rape or stop human trafficking. It will not change ingrained attitudes towards women in the minds of those with no wish to change, it will just annoy people who like Dead or Alive, most of whom are not chauvinistic rapists. People who like looking at pretend woman in bikinis aren't necessarily bad people, they just like looking at pretend women in bikinis.
Trying to repress or erase artistic (stretching the meaning of the word a little with reference to Dead or Alive, but anyway) representations of things is not a practical or realistic way of addressing actual problems. Sexy video games aren't really a cause or a symptom of anything ingrained in our culture, they just exist because some people like sexy video games.
More on this later (oh, you lucky, lucky people), but now it's bed time, and I feel I'm in danger of starting a flame war.
At least I would be if I updated enough to have more than four regular commenters.