Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Ms. Male Character

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Anita Sarkeesian is of the dwindling ilk of feminists who feel that they’re making the world a better place for women by insisting that, no, no, no! our society continues to be abusive and oppressive for women. Anecdotes to that effect are in themselves no more indicative of reality than are reports of car accidents indicative of apocalyptic mayhem, gore, and twisted metal on our commutes to and from work. That Sarkeesian’s obsession with male oppression is targeting the bow in Ms. PacMan’s hair is a bug in her fiction, not a feature.

Along with insisting that the story for women in this society is one of attack and oppression (rather than of people — men and women, getting along, and pretty much living their lives just fine), Sarkeesian is balking at what we all intuitively know to be true: simplified, stereotypical, and yes, often caricaturish depictions of women have correlates with actual gender differences.

Or is it equally common for men and women to wear stylistic and beautifying accoutrements such as, oh let’s see… large hoop earrings?

Sarkeesian wants to push as hard as her predecessors did, and that’s a commendable impulse, I guess. But to push against the notion that men and women are not the same is to push against one of the unanticipated successes of feminism: that women are free to be women. In an irony that Sarkeesian and my fellow progressives should identify as an irony, Sarkeesian sees gender difference — both its existence and its depiction, as itself an oppression.

For further reading on horrifyingly non-progressive observations such as these, see Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate — A Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Sarkeesian’s pushing against the notion and depiction of gender difference is an indication of how relatively little pushing there is for her to do. That is a triumph of the feminism of her predecessors (and certainly not hers).

Anita, the greater part of your feminist struggle today is this, and to take it on is the true tribute to your feminist predecessors: take a deep breath, and get on with the joy and work of living the life of equity and freedom that is, in fact, available to you in this society.

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She unconsciously gender stereotypes throughout the video. If no one told her Pacman’s name, would she judge the character to be male or female? What about the alligators in Where’s My Water? She laments that the developers use a bow to distinguish. Perhaps she would prefer the Ms. Pacman to be the original drawing and Mr Pacman-Lowenstein (because he took her name with a hyphen) be the original drawing with muscles? But women can be ripped, too. So that won’t work.

I’ve only made it 7 minutes into this video. Does she ever offer any solutions to “just add a bow?”

She states that Ally<sp?> in Where’s My Water is known to be a girl because of her bow and not her slightly larger bottom, slimmer waist, enhanced bust, and eyelashes.

Also, the statement:

“there’s nothing about a bow in and of itself that is intrinsically or essentially feminine. It’s just a piece of colored fabric after all. But our society currently assigns a very specific, socially constructed, and strictly enforced meaning to that piece of fabric. It’s a symbol that conveys the concept of female and invokes the idea of girl-hood.”

I’m not sure what she’s saying here. It sounds like she’s complaining and then making the very valid case for why a bow might be a very appropriate symbol for denoting a female character.

To be fair (having watched more), she’s definitely right about the girl characters being very one dimensional and lacking any cross-gender characteristics like being brainy.

It seems she’s really complaining about the fact that most games are written by men and authors of genres (not just games) write about what’s comfortable and familiar to them. The quote she gives from Pollitt from the New York Times doesn’t seem as controversial when you consider the gender of the games’ authors.

I wonder what would happen if you took the characters she described as gender ambiguous such as the angry birds (before they were feminized) and asked 2 yr olds to label them as boy or girl? I imagine the results might make her sad.

Ugh, now she’s complaining that Bioware’s marketing department promoted the male Shephard to the (I’m guessing) overwhelmingly male customer base. Does she also complain that bubble bath, “Calgon, take me away!”, is marketed to women?

End of video, no solutions offered, just complaining (which is sadly the P.C. word for bitching which men do, too).

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I agree with many of Anita’s assertions regarding representation of women and minorities in media. Her claims here, fall a bit flat for me. There is certainly an element of gender “Orientalism” for lack of a better term, but her critique of Ms. PacMan hits the nail on the head: when dealing with limited visual bandwidth, what is the most expedient method of conveying the gender information? In this particular case, I certainly do not fault the sprite designers, they are essentially making the most of what they have. As for the advertising firm’s choices, I would be surprised to learn that the game designers were invited to these meetings.
I believe that sensationalizing and demonizing the use of cultural visual signifiers will lead to fewer female characters, and not more. Video games, except in rare instances, are not known for putting fully developed and realized characters in front of the customer. In fact, I could be equally critical of the physique and emotional stoicism that male characters are traditionally assigned. Video games, especially earlier ones, are a poor place to find accurate representations of anything, be it male or female, but this is primarily due to the restrictions of the medium, itself, and to look at them as anything other than “visual shortcuts” is a bit intellectually disingenuous.
In an effort to test the premise that these representations are inherently misogynistic, I would propose a study that investigates how female gamers self-represent. What are the aesthetic choices female gamers make when designing their own avatars? How do women design their Wii characters? What choices do they make while designing their World of Warcraft characters?

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I’m very pro-woman. I always have been. I have a 10-month old daughter whom I want desperately to grow up to be a strong person and not be limited by her gender. I constantly over-think my choices around her to make sure I’m not unconsciously steering her into a pink stereotype. I push back on my wife when she wants to go overboard on pink.

However, I can’t deny human nature either. At 9 months, she walked over to the toy bin and pulled out a football and a pink purse. She naturally, if left alone, will grab a cute “girly” toy or stuffed animal. My son never did. I want her to be strong, but I also want her to be free to be a woman. That means, she can wear pink ribbons, costume jewelry, and tiaras while we cook breakfast in the driveway on a camp stove (eventually) or operate a drill press (also, eventually) which are both activities I did with my son when he was 2 years old.

Being a woman is not limited to having a vagina. It’s ok to be feminine as long as that’s not you’re complete sum.

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I just watched his Ted talk about the reaction to that book and it included a line which sums up, I think, how I feel about Sarkeesian’s video:

criticism without clarity, attention to aesthetics, and insight into human condition

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I assume that the man in Pacman would indicate male to many people.

I love it when people comment on a video without actually watching it first.

She mentions many signifiers throughout the video:

The most commonly used gendered signifiers or feminizing accessories are bows, lipstick, long eyelashes and the color pink, but there are a whole host of other design elements that, in combination, serve the same purpose. Other signifiers used to differentiate women from men are pigtails, high-heeled shoes, painted nails, pronounced makeup (especially blush and eyeshadow), midriff baring outfits, exaggerated breasts with exposed cleavage, and a heart motif in their design or powers.

Acknowledging that society treats a bow as “feminine” does not mean that she thinks it is appropriate.

Are men unable to write interesting female characters or are they choosing not to because they do not think it is important to represent half the population in any significant way?

I am sure she is well aware that kids start learning gender stereotypes at a young age. And she probably would not be surprised if kids identified the angry birds characters as male when they did not have any specific gender signifiers. But that kind of reenforces her point that kids are taught that “male” is the norm and “female” is the variation.

You may want to rewatch the end of the video where she points out games that do not rely on the Ms. Male Character trope.

I find it interesting that you know that the word bitch is an insult directed at women, but still feel the need to use it when talking about how women are stereotyped in games.

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I would be careful running to Pinker for the authoritative perspective of humanity. I do suggest people read the book, but take it with a grain of salt what the linguist is telling you about human nature. He puts forward a hypothesis, but it sure as hell isn’t “theory” stage yet. You can rule out the nature and nurture extremes perhaps, but the balance is still a question intellectual honest folks are fighting over with only all nature and all nurture having been ruled out.

Further, it is laughably easy to show that the US hasn’t hit a nature/nurture balance with regards to the choices women make regardless of where the final balance is. You can easily point to the scandinavian nations as places with much higher gender equality and happiness, which is pretty conclusive proof that social forces are still producing inequity above and beyond anything nature might be providing.

Finally, it frankly doesn’t matter in the long run where the final line between nature and nurture is drawn. Even if tomorrow you were to prove beyond all doubt that the normal curves of male and female personalities, independent of culture, are different in particular areas, it does mean much. It would mean at best that you might be able to settle with slightly skewed outcomes. You still can’t settle for skewed opportunity, as you are talking about two normalish curves with massive overlap. Out there, there is a person of the opposite gender is more or less just like you. They deserve to live in a world where they are afford the same opportunity and assumption of competence that you get.

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I think this is bad for both sexes. I don’t know what it’s like to be a female games enthusiast frustrated by the tokenism with the representation of your sex in game characters but I know how I feel as a man toggling through the poor cliches of male characters on offer. I generally chose the female character in games because I find the meatheaded characters appallingly cliched and insulting. That’s even if I want to play one of the endless first person shooters which seems to be all the console world thinks we’re interested in. My brother’s a games producer and I brought this up with him and he said that when it takes 2 years to complete a game the risks are too high financially for established companies to go against the grain. I guess it’s the same in the film world and it takes independents without that risk to shake things up. I think that’s starting to happen with the rise in casual gaming and the sudden “durr” moment when games companies realise they’ve been ostracising 50% of the population. This isn’t to say that casual gaming = female, quite the opposite. I’m sure there are a lot of guys like me who want the absurd skew in game development to be cracked open so we all have more choice - not just in the cosmetic appearance of our characters but the games we are playing.

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I think it’s interesting so many commenters perceived her as attacking these games, when she was, I think, very neutrally observing. Why do so many men feel attacked by even the mildest forms of feminism?

For example, she pointed out that Ms PacMan is dolled up with stereotypically girly features. That’s not an attack, it’s a fact. The bow is a stereotype because there’s no reason in physics or chemistry a man can’t wear a pink bow on his head. But in our culture, this would be seen as wrong, because it’s putting a female signifier on a male head.

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I hate to go all Holden Caulfield on folks here but, Anita strikes me as a opportunistic phony. I have watched a number of counter-arguments to her tropes videos and have seen the same piece of video in many of them where she is speaking to a class room and states something along the lines of, “I don’t play video games, I hate video games.” And then in other interviews, she claims that she’s a, “life-long video game player”!!! Perhaps this doesn’t change her message, but it does make me have a hard time taking her seriously…

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independent film makers don’t lack the risk, they just have a whole lot less to lose, and a whole lot less invested (most indie films are not billions of dollars in production)

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How about the Hawks? Or the Marlins? or the Jets? Why does it have to be the “other half” of the male mascot?

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Black Caps?

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That was my point.

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This is what frustrates me about the issue. Pacman and Angry birds don’t have to be male OR female. They’re just non-human cartoon characters and it should be OK to leave the question of their gender open. Then someone gets the idea that girl gamers are being ignored and will only respond to a specifically female character. Solution? Introduce female characters with gratuitous girly girl stereotypes to differentiate them from the neutral original characters. Now all the original characters are male by default, even though they didn’t have to be. Hmm… Now girls are complaining that their characters are weak and girly. I know! Let’s make a new tomboy character with pink army clothes! Sigh. Most people can’t tell the difference between males and females outside the human race, so why not carry that over to gaming?

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Incidentally, for anyone wondering why women get their own special day and men don’t, happy International Men’s Day! I’m going to celebrate by going on a walk with my family.

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I have always, ALWAYS wondered why I couldn’t stand playing male characters in World of Warcraft. You’ve finally figured it out for me. Almost all of the male characters are ridiculous - absolutely ridiculous and look meat headed. The only male characters who don’t look meat headed are the gnome (duh), the pandarian, and male blood elf (who is a caricature in other ways).

Ignoring the issue of how armor looks on female characters compared to how they look on male characters (I’m just talking about the character sprites, not their gear), the playable females are the most normal looking bunch of characters in the game. I don’t want to look at a complete meat head the whole time I’m playing.

So it’s kind of depressing that the queen of video game feminism decries women tropes in video games yet isn’t interested, at all, in the fact that there are almost as many tropes about men in video games as well.

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It’s because of that smirk.

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If you want to lose your faith in humanity, just go over to Kotaku’s coverage of this video and read the idiocy in the comments. It’s totally insane.

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Fixed that for you.

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