Feminism

[Argobot]

There's a new Feminist Frequency video, about a positive female character (in this case, the Scythian from "Sword and Sworcery).
 

 
I was with this video until it showed what the Scythian's ending is 

The Scythian sacrifices herself to save her world. I find this slightly frustrating, since most male characters are not expected to martyr themselves but instead get to be the hero and receive a reward.

 
But then Anita commented that the ending is not ideal for all women characters, just a nice deviation from the norm of the hero's quest narrative.
 
I liked that she highlighted how important having blank slate characters that are women can be. I know that during games with silent protagonists, I generally assume they're male because I'm so trained to see that as the default. I remember playing Portal and being shocked and actively happy when I realized I was playing as a woman. It felt like such a rare treat.
 
Sadly, a lot of the negative reaction I've seen to this video claims that Anita expects all female characters to be blank slates and exhibit no personally. Which? I have no idea how people can watch this video and come to that conclusion, but I guess it helps that they are so determined to disagree with everything that she says. A depressing number of women detractors have been proudly stating their love for sexualized women characters and how they have no problem with seeing some T&A in their games. I really want to sit down with those women and explain that while objectifying other women might make it seem like they will be welcome in the boys' club as the only Cool Girl, it never pays off in the long-term and ultimately you are ensuring that the bullshit gender divide continues.

[Dewar]

I had no idea the Scythian was female or male, I figured it was left ambiguous on purpose. 

 

In that last paragraph seems to me to be a poor male-centric assumption. There are a lot of reasons why a woman might say they like sexualized women in games, it doesn't have to be about wanting to be welcome in the boy's club. That's pretty close to the flawed GG statements that women only play games to try and manipulate men in some way.

[Argobot]

I should clarify that these women were also stating that there was no problem with the way that women are portrayed in games. It just really reeked of a standard practice of women trying to fit in with their male peers by objectifying other women. I participated in some of that behavior myself when I was younger and am glad to have grown out of it. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with wanting women to look sexy! It's just frustrating since that's the only option for women characters and having women act like this is not a problem just contributes to this gross system.

[jennegatron]

As a woman who did exactly what Argobot was describing in the final paragraph of her post, I can definitely attest to the fact that I would go past tolerating objectionable content to embracing it to make it seem like I wasn't like those other girls. I was cool and with it, and by being open to the overt sexualization of all female characters in games, as well as repeating tired sexist jokes about sandwiches and other nonsense, I was just trying to show I wasn't like those uptight harpies that men complain about. Internalized misogyny is very very powerful for women as well as men, and I think it's naive to think that women don't behave that way all the time in an effort to make men/boys accept them.

 

They're subtle about the Scythian's gender, but it is explicitly in the text of the game.

(Seconded with Argobot's second post)

[Dewar]

I should clarify that these women were also stating that there was no problem with the way that women are portrayed in games. It just really reeked of a standard practice of women trying to fit in with their male peers by objectifying other women. I participated in some of that behavior myself when I was younger and am glad to have grown out of it. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with wanting women to look sexy! It's just frustrating since that's the only option for women characters and having women act like this is not a problem just contributes to this gross system.

 

I guess that's the problem with only hearing second hand opinions of lousy comments. I'm sure it would have been obvious to me had I been reading them personally.

[Gaizokubanou]

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with wanting women to look sexy! It's just frustrating since that's the only option for women characters and having women act like this is not a problem just contributes to this gross system.

 

Yeah I'm working with a designer on characters right now and it's really difficult (not impossible, I think we are onto something) to design women character that is beyond the range of 'cute-pretty-sexy'.

 

Like to explain this better, say a character like Akuma from Street Fighter... he looks threatening, powerful, mean, etc.  Trying to capture that theme on opposite gender is really difficult because of our cultural standard of acceptable women-ly look is so dang narrow.

 

Well Akuma is almost inhumane so if you want more scaled down version, say like Kazuya Mishima from Tekken.  Very difficult to capture that theme for opposite gender design wise.

[jenben]

Like to explain this better, say a character like Akuma from Street Fighter... he looks threatening, powerful, mean, etc.  Trying to capture that theme on opposite gender is really difficult because of our cultural standard of acceptable women-ly look is so dang narrow.

 

I hear ya, it can be tough to swim against the tide when it comes to designing characters. For a positive example, Blizzard recently did awesome with their design for one of their Overwatch characters, Zarya:

 

 

Howard Schatz's photos of female athletes are worth googling too, if you haven't already!

[Mawd]

It's not like female athletes exist purely in imagination though. Sure game characters found in fighter games are larger than life but you could find a starting point in female athletes.

I know it's the wrong sport but you coul look at how someone like shotput Olympian Valerie Adams has built her body and apply observations to female characters in other sports.

I mean she's just one example but if I was thinking 'built fighter game character' I'd start there.
Obviously you don't have to go for one archetype for sporty characters.

[Patrick R]

Whenever I play an RPG with robust character customization I just try to make Cheryl Miller.

 

 

I know that video games often have to inform players of game-play through character design, but in reality the best athletes aren't the always the most physically imposing.

[Gormongous]

Yeah I'm working with a designer on characters right now and it's really difficult (not impossible, I think we are onto something) to design women character that is beyond the range of 'cute-pretty-sexy'.

Like to explain this better, say a character like Akuma from Street Fighter... he looks threatening, powerful, mean, etc. Trying to capture that theme on opposite gender is really difficult because of our cultural standard of acceptable women-ly look is so dang narrow.

Well Akuma is almost inhumane so if you want more scaled down version, say like Kazuya Mishima from Tekken. Very difficult to capture that theme for opposite gender design wise.

Yeah, our culture has a very limited number of ways to signify femininity compared to masculinity. It must be frustrating as a creator (and as a woman) to come up against those. The crude-but- effective way seems to be flat out telling your audience that a character is a woman, then making her be however you want, but that lacks some subtlety. Actually, one of the most interesting experiences for me in recent years has been reading Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a sci-fi novel where the default gender and pronoun are female, and feeling my brain totally fail to cope.

Also, this is an inane statement, but it really bums me out to live in a culture where even a small percentage of women feel they have to denigrate and repudiate their own gender to be recognized as people. In my teens, I would have been really enthusiastic to meet a girl who said that she liked T&A just as much as a guy, but now it is the furthest thing from who I am.

[Reyturner]

In my teens, I would have been in really enthusiastic to meet a girl who said that she liked T&A just as much as a guy, but now it is the furthest thing from Who I am.

It's unfortunate that we use "13yo boy" as a non-qualified pajorative when talking about this stuff. Figuring out your sexuality is already froght with peril from patriarchal venom, without having the good guys use you as short hand for the problem. I wonder if it contributes to the number of young men who go crazy reactionary. Having a young son, dealing with this in 10 years is something I think about a lot.

[Gormongous]

It's unfortunate that we use "13yo boy" as a non-qualified pajorative when talking about this stuff. Figuring out your sexuality is already froght with peril from patriarchal venom, without having the good guys use you as short hand for the problem. I wonder if it contributes to the number of young men who go crazy reactionary. Having a young son, dealing with this in 10 years is something I think about a lot.

I was actually speaking non-hypothetically about my own teenage years in this specific instance, but yes, I agree.

[Merus]

I hear ya, it can be tough to swim against the tide when it comes to designing characters. For a positive example, Blizzard recently did awesome with their design for one of their Overwatch characters, Zarya:

 

Justice Points had an interesting discussion around Zarya (who is apparently based on a Blizzard employee): note how Zarya has really large legs, which is something that makes sense for a tank character who's constantly hunched and carrying a Very Heavy Gun, but it's not generally something this kind of character ends up having. The boobplate is maybe not necessary. I think some of cliched nature of it can be excused by the existence of an actual person at Blizzard who fulfils several of those stereotypes.

[BobbyBesar]

Problematic writing and clothing aside, there are a number of kickass looking female wrestlers with a range of body types. Some of the smaller promotions (Shimmer) and Japanese promotions put a higher premium on in ring talent, but even the WWE has had some pretty capable female wrestlers.

[Reyturner]

I was actually speaking non-hypothetically about my own teenage years in this specific instance, but yes, I agree.

Oh yeah, you were also speaking non-hypothetically about my own teenage years in this specific instance, and I shudder to think how much worse they would have been with the internet in play.

[Gwardinen]

Also, this is an inane statement, but it really bums me out to live in a culture where even a small percentage of women feel they have to denigrate and repudiate their own gender to be recognized as people. In my teens, I would have been in really enthusiastic to meet a girl who said that she liked T&A just as much as a guy, but now it is the furthest thing from Who I am.

 

Absolutely this. I actually have a friend who operates as a strange kind of time capsule of this. We were at college (in UK terms, so 16-18) together and she was always part of jokes about her really thinking "more like a guy" - she liked T&A, casual sex and video games, as a few examples. At the time I had a huge crush on her, inflamed no doubt by some of this stuff (though she also has a lot of genuine qualities that I still admire now), but it's struck me in the years since how much of that persona she still carries.

 

Her absolute blindness to feminist issues and her acceptance and even espousal of gender stereotypes for both men and women now kind of rub me the wrong way, and I find it difficult to talk about meaningful topics with her. It's uncomfortable because as a man I don't want to lecture a woman about feminism, but at the same time keeping schtum when such things come up doesn't feel right either.

[Apple Cider]

1.) Zarya is actually not based on a Blizzard employee, it's a fun rumor but not true (I saw the tweet that was circulating that.)

 

2.) Internalized misogyny is absolutely a thing you will see VERY quickly if you were a woman who went through the same, trust me on this one. A lot of women, especially those of us who grew up fairly nerdy or on the internet, spent a lot of time believing men's opinions of us are extremely important, that was reinforced by "you're not like other girls!" and "you're chill/cool" for basically pretending we're not affected by sexism, but those same men will turn on you in a heartbeat. For me, it was when none of my male friends in Warcraft thought it was a big deal to make jokey threats about rape to me, unbeknownst that I was a rape victim and it straight up triggered me. They eventually got very chilly when I made a fuss, and I realized it was a bigger deal to me than I had initially anticipated. That's kind when the shell cracked in half and I started realizing that maybe feminism was a real thing. 

 

There are women out there who absolutely will shove other women under the bus if it means that men will like them better. It's a sad fact but it's true, so Jenn and Argobot are correct. I saw the same comments on the Anita video and it was really sad. A lot of women prior to getting into feminism believed that sexism was over, that feminism was a sham, etc. Trust me, if you folks knew me around 2007, you'd not think I was the same person. 

 

As an addendum, as a queer woman, a lot of conceptualizations of sexualized women are still incredibly alienating and are completely designed with a solely straight male audience in mind. How women are portrayed in a "sexual way" are also still made in a way to empower men's interest in them, power over them, not to make me feel attracted to them or make ME feel great about myself. 

[Problem Machine]

As an addendum, as a queer woman, a lot of conceptualizations of sexualized women are still incredibly alienating and are completely designed with a solely straight male audience in mind. How women are portrayed in a "sexual way" are also still made in a way to empower men's interest in them, power over them, not to make me feel attracted to them or make ME feel great about myself. 

It's a weird thing to admit, but in a lot of ways one of the big things that pushed me into feminism is how completely dead and uninteresting I found and find that constructed 'sexy' ideal, how inhuman and dishonest and alienating. I honestly just think, like, diversity and empowerment are hotter. Of course I just went right around and turned all that energy into a bunch of depraved fetishes, but the nice thing about those is that they're so clearly separate from reality that it makes it a lot easier to keep them from distorting my perception of real women as like actual human being people.

 

I'm not sure where I was going with this. Never mind.

[Apple Cider]

[Problem Machine]

I guess if I had a point it's that sexualization is kind of a red herring, or at least isn't quite what it appears to be. The kind of 'sexualization' that shapes a lot of game characters isn't really sexually attractive so much as culturally coded to be sexually stimulating. It's sex-as-brand, as far away from actual human attraction and interaction as the pringle from the potato. Because of this, sexual dissatisfaction with the cultural product can actually be a catalyst for feminist understanding, and sexual interest can actually drive understanding instead of leading someone to defend the sexy video game womens status quo.

 

Thus, in many cases at least, I think defense of the sexy video-game lady boils down a lot more directly to a cultural investment than to the actual sexual interests of the person defending them. I'm not sure if I'm saying something completely obvious or completely out-there at this point, so yeah.

[Gwardinen]

As an addendum, as a queer woman, a lot of conceptualizations of sexualized women are still incredibly alienating and are completely designed with a solely straight male audience in mind. How women are portrayed in a "sexual way" are also still made in a way to empower men's interest in them, power over them, not to make me feel attracted to them or make ME feel great about myself. 

 

Actually, in a discussion with the aforementioned time capsule friend, I had a lot of problems expressing this as a problem with porn. I was trying to explain how the vast majority of porn is constructed from the point of view of what men want, and I was having difficulty even explaining "male gaze" and how the fundamental assumptions born from the fact that most porn directors and producers are men can create issues with it. I was saying this as a man who watches and often (though actually not as often as you'd think/want for a pasttime focused on pleasure) enjoys porn and still having difficulty getting past the automatic "What? Porn's not sexist. I love porn." barrier she was putting up.

 

Edit: Actually this has contributed to me thinking I need to get more educated about feminist discourse, rather than just the ideals. If I'm going to end up being a "speaker for feminism" in certain groups I should probably figure out how to do so properly. Being around all of you more knowledgeable Thumb feminists may have made me a little complacent about my own role in the wider world.

[osmosisch]

Even worse to me, is that it's not even from the point of view of what I believe most men would want in a vacuum, but what men are supposed to want in the culture, which makes it self-reinforcingly awful.

[Apple Cider]

I guess if I had a point it's that sexualization is kind of a red herring, or at least isn't quite what it appears to be. The kind of 'sexualization' that shapes a lot of game characters isn't really sexually attractive so much as culturally coded to be sexually stimulating. It's sex-as-brand, as far away from actual human attraction and interaction as the pringle from the potato. Because of this, sexual dissatisfaction with the cultural product can actually be a catalyst for feminist understanding, and sexual interest can actually drive understanding instead of leading someone to defend the sexy video game womens status quo.

 

Thus, in many cases at least, I think defense of the sexy video-game lady boils down a lot more directly to a cultural investment than to the actual sexual interests of the person defending them. I'm not sure if I'm saying something completely obvious or completely out-there at this point, so yeah.

 

I sorta get what you're saying but I think a lot of it is meant to still be titillating, as I've seen posts postulating what Liara's sweat tastes like, all the way out to people making machinima porn of Lara Croft that treads so close to the actual game that it's fucking terrifying. I don't think it's so far removed or abstracted from what people want or think they want even if it's fictional. Or, I guess to agree with you, it DOES have an impact on how some men perceive women, however. It shapes, even if it's not a 1:1.

[Merus]

I cannot deal with internalised misogyny. I just have no idea how to argue the point.

 

I remember having an argument in my guild about women serving as infantry, back when the Australian Army removed gender restrictions on combat roles, and a women who does parkour chimed in saying that there was no way the women were going to be as effective in combat as the men if they weren't required to meet the same fitness standard, and I didn't really have a good reply to that.

 

The answer, apparently, is that the Army redefined 'combat effectiveness' to include the culture of the unit and their ability to engage effectively with non-combatants and civilians (because the effectiveness of your efforts is severely hampered if some of your battalions are committing war crimes, or merely pissing off the locals). It's well-known that a diverse team is more effective, so if you're defining combat effectiveness to include more than just kills and casualties, diversity is more important than fitness.

 

I will forever treasure the brief moment we had of militaristic feminism.

[Apple Cider]

Honestly, the idea of men stepping in to chastise women on internalized misogyny makes my teeth fucking itch because there's no way you're not still kinda complicit in the culture that creates it. It's ideally best left to other women to talk to, since it's essentially an intra-community issue.