“These women exist solely to be victimized”
These women don’t exist at all.
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We can agree to disagree. I don’t know if you realize that I’m female.
I don’t approve of hyper-sexualization out of context or in a story where women have no true role to play. (Remove all sex, and you remove erotica, which is balanced hyper-sexualization. I have a couple aunts who’d be very unhappy about that.) In the Women as Background trope, hyper-sexualized women aren’t there as “people” but as “furniture”.
In Sin City you are talking about a modern film noir story set in a city that is basically a fictional cross between 1930s Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Sex is part of the storyline, and yeah, someone (Frank Miller) wrote it that way. It’s also a film translation of his graphic novel, and as I wrote above - film noir classically provided some of the earliest strong female roles in film. Even now, Sin City provides a fair balance between killings (both men and women die - in #2, one of the worst injuries is to a man), speaking roles (women are integral to story), who does the killing (women can and do kill men), who is in charge of a situation (women get the drop on men), and more. On the grand spectrum of films to be angry at - this one should be way down your list.
I believe you should care more about content and less about costume - unless costume is pretty much all you get.
I don’t approve of the separation between men and women in advertising. After all, women still do most of the shopping, so we should be being better catered to in those images.
Buzzfeed took a look at some ad tropes.
Business Insider took a look at American Apparel after Petter Lindqvist of byPM did reverse photo shoot showing men in what are typically women’s poses for the company.
Thing that I think is important to remember is that women will be sexualized by men - no matter what they wear, no matter what they do. They can even be made out of bricks - like in The Lego Movie! In it, Wyldstyle tries to explain what’s going on, but Emmet can only look at her and deal with an internal monologue. He doesn’t hear a thing she’s saying, just thinks about how pretty she is.
So, I don’t think that you can erase sexuality, or that you should even try to dumb it down when a story calls for it - but also I think that there’s no excuse for poorly written women. We deserve valid characters. I also have a problem with ads that use women to sell, but don’t do the same with men. That’s not hyper-sexualization - that’s commodification.
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Thank you for the World of Peacecraft clip. When I plunked some money down for a copy of A Force More Powerful (it’s about nonviolent social change) I was appalled that it was just about exactly as much fun to play as World of Peacecraft looks.
It’s a reminder that when War is being sold, it’s being sold to the winners- or the people who think they can win. You wouldn’t think peace should be so much harder to sell, but you gotta sell it to everyone including those who think they would win a war.
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Sarkessian is incredibly wrong. I’m happy to see her improving in this video.
She manufactures outrage by abusing open-world dynamics and misrepresenting game designer intention, in many cases casting a non-sexist issue in a sexist light. Thankfully it happens less in this one. I was able to watch it!
As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of great examples that are worthy of examination, but by approaching this is a sensationalist and dishonest manner she feeds the fire that separates gamers and game designers from the exact behaviors she supposedly implores.
As in the comic book thread recently, manufacturing outrage at a subculture doesn’t encourage that subculture to change. It makes them defensive - especially if they view the criticism as unfair or untrue. This then makes it harder to approach them with valid concerns, and encourages them to disconnect.
Sarkessian is more focused on creating a furor and following than actually improving anything. She’s a feminist version of Fox News.
- Why are our games filled with scantily clad females?
- Why do we objectify people? Is objectification wrong?
- Why must we spend all our free time murdering?
- Why do players react violently & rabidly when (valid) sexist portions of games are called into question?
There are a very long list of things we could examine in both culture at large and gamer culture. We do not improve social progress by turning issues into feminist/sexist ones. There are plenty of examples valid of misogyny/sexism to address without manufacturing them.
Unfortunately that doesn’t enrage the feminists and gamers as much as Sarkessian’s historical approach, so it’s less effective at getting media coverage / views / crowd funding.
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Wow, you are just crotchety. I said her last line was a weak closing argument, not the entire video was weak. Not that I expressed it particularly well, but you definitely came here for a fight.
What I was saying is no one going into the video would disagree with “if we change exploitative games to be less violent then people would notice violence in video games easier”, because it’s true. It just undermines the quality of the video to end it on a highly academic sounding line with little substance to it. Pointing out Papo & Yo and the way it handles things in a mature and meaningful way is a great thing; maybe by saying if more game would capture even a fraction of the meaning behind the character’s actions in that game players would better grasp true human motivation it would better illustrate the message.
As is, she chose to deliver a trite closing line to probably her best video.
Thanks for explaining, it makes your point of view more understandable.
I still can’t help but think, though, having seen Sin City, that it’s made with the proverbial but pernicious male gaze in mind, consciously or unconsciously, and that although women are often subjects instead of objects in it, their being so would be portrayed a lot differently (and better, because less sexist) if girls and women were the target audience. Including their costumes, a difference that would show that they (and thus, looks) do matter in the ways that Anita is trying to expose.
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Thanks for putting that part so early (so I could stop reading so early).
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We’re fine. 
Look, I’m built in the way that causes men to do things like offer to give me babies on street corners - during the day, as I’m walking home from the grocery store in jeans and a t-shirt with no makeup on. I’m really familiar with the “pernicious male gaze”. It really doesn’t matter how a woman is dressed. What matters is whether or not a woman is given any worth as a human or if she’s just window-dressing.
I suggest re-watching Sin City after watching or reading some classic noir. That may change your point of view on the film which is itself referential to a classic genre. Also, you may just not be their target audience, but I may be. Not all people have the same tastes.
Here’s a link to the Sin City wikipage. I’m posting it because I thought you might find it interesting to see how women drove the stories - even the shortest story “The Customer is Always Right” is driven by a woman who isn’t incidental. She appears in that story and is also a driving force in a second story line - “The Big Fat Kill”.
Please realize that I consider myself a feminist.
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All the writing is lazy, including the victimized women tropes, because there isn’t any way to justify going on murder sprees, and deep down most of us know this. But violence excites us - we love it - so we seek an excuse, permission to watch violence or partake, and any paper-thin bullshit will do. Any fig-leaf that we’ve agreed will paper over the fact that doing the cool fun violence stuff automatically means you’re another bad guy. It would be better to use a less corrosive bullshit than this constant victimizing, and maybe it would be even better if we were man enough to drop the bullshit and add a trope whereby the movie/game always ends with the protagonist in jail at the end with life sentences. Have the fun, but acknowledge the crime and the price.
In the words of the immortal Edmund Blackadder: “Tell me, have you ever visited the planet Earth, sir?”
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It doesn’t have to do with validity as much as her right to speech. It is clear that if anybody wants to discuss the topics of misogyny in gaming, then they are going to pay a price, be it death threats, rape threats, hacks, harassment, etc. That was my point, and you COMPLETELY missed it.
I never said all gamers were attacking her. That was your strawman (which I’m getting used to with every comment you make). But again, I pointed out that this wasn’t academic. And what did you do? You made it academic. All that I did was point out that she has received death threats and that this is fucked up and scary. You were the one who used that to talk about why not all Christians deserved to get criticized for attacks on abortion centers.
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I enjoy her videos quite a bit. Still we do not live in a bubble. Moral censorship is a bandwagon that gets nudged along by both political parties. Tell me, does Hillary Clinton stand a decent chance of being the next POTUS?
And… if your belief is that the culture itself needs to be addressed, that line can be directly taken from the other side of the political table:
I’m deeply troubled about the culture that surrounds our kids today… I’d like to see us clean up the water in which our kids are swimming. I’d like to keep pornography from coming up on their computers. I’d like to keep drugs off the street. I’d like to see less violence and sex on TV and in video games and in movies. If we get serious about this we can actually do a great deal to clean up the water in which our kids and grandkids are swimming.
- Mittens
Although… what does that verbiage imply, coming from a political candidate?
Who, but you, said anything about censorship?
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Jack Thompson = Censorship
I think you’ve misunderstood that quote.
You write that “[the strippers] are there to be an obstacle,” as if it’s a flaw in her argument, but it’s actually her point. They are objects to be acted upon. You can choose how to act, but that’s what they’re there for. The strippers are a CCTV variant. You can either fool the camera or smash it. That sexualized women are used instead of cameras is the “background decoration” part.
She also addressed the “drops your score” part when she points out that penalties are often minimal (I’m not sure whether she wants a heavier gameplay consequence or more obvious moral finger-wagging). But I’ll admit that, of course, any penalty is huge if you’re playing for perfect.
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I had the same issue with her brief excerpt of Sleeping Dogs, where she showed a clip of a player attacking a prostitute and shoving her in the trunk.
a) it was 15 seconds out of a 50+ hour game
b) I’ve played about 80 hours of Sleeping Dogs and until I saw that video wasn’t even aware that you could attack the prostitutes…it’s certainly not something the game encourages or rewards (I always have cops chasing me the second I look at NPCs wrong)
c) the reason you can shove the prostitutes in a trunk is you can do that with any NPC in the game.
I saw something similar in a SkyrimYoutube video where a player goes to an area filled with female characters, kills them, and then steals all their clothes. Not sure what the video creator got out of that, but it’s inherently possible in an open world game where you can kill NPCs and do horrible things to them in general.
OTOH, I agreed with her about the prostitute rescue mini-mission in Red Dead Redemption. That one loses any tiny amount of value it may have had by being repeated over and over. I always hated the dialogue on that one as over the top and offensive.
But that’s the main problem with her videos. She hasn’t played all those games either. (Note, I am not saying she is a fake gamer like some of her idiotic haters, just that there’s no way she played all those games and she clearly gets her clips online).
A lot of her videos come across like someone who found a few paragraphs of a 500 page novel excerpted online and says “aha, I can use these three de-contextualized paragraphs I ran across online to describe the entire novel without reading it.”
I would really like to see her do an in-depth analysis of a specific game like Hitman that she has actually played through.
The best thing to come out of these videos is not meaningful discussion of sexism in video games or the video game industry ( I have no idea if that kind of thing has ever existed online), but the incredible amount of misdirected rage, which, in itself, indicates that there is a problem.
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I’m not even close to arguing for censorship, and the only reason I mention Jack Thompson is because another commenter posted a link to a video (now deleted by moderators) that equates Thompson with Sarkeesian. There’s really no comparison there.
Sarkeesian isn’t arguing that these games shouldn’t be made. She’s pointing out lazy, sexist writing/programming/game design. Pointing that stuff out often enough will hopefully make gamers and authors question their reasons for that design.
If you’ve thought through all the ways you could create drama for your player and still settled on “His girlfriend was brutally murdered in her nightie,” and you can give excellent reasons for that to be your narrative? Bravo. But it’s not novel anymore, if it ever was. It’s clearly a short-cut designed to appeal to a small percentage of the population: In this case straight, predominantly white males of a certain age.
If that’s your hook to get me into the game, I say to you: You can do better than that. Show me something interesting. Give me something I’ll remember.
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The difference between quoting three pages of a book versus a small part of interactivity in a game is still pretty massive, though.
And we excerpt portions of books for the purposes of critique regularly. To wit:
In 2009 the bad sex award was won by a best-seller. Because the book was incredibly popular should we overlook the fact that some of the writing wasn’t up-to-snuff?
And her point about that “15 seconds out of a 50+ hour game” is that a large number of people had to contribute work to make that interaction possible. Animators, voice actors, writers, programmers and motion capture actors all had to come together to produce the ability to put a woman in a trunk.
Why that particular action? What was the artistic choice that went into that decision? If they had not given the player the ability to do that, what would have been lost in the game? Could the designers have turned that energy to some other small portion of the game?
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