[This post originally appeared on Original Shrub.com Blog.]
Earlier this month, Collie of Collie’s Bestiary posted about her experiences with Planescape: Torment.
A short while ago I started playing the computer game “Planescape: Torment,” and stumbled across this issue again, with painfully eye-opening results. Keep in mind, this game won numerous awards for its storytelling and quality in 1999, the year it was released — which makes me wonder in appalled horror just how awful the other games were. But to continue: I first noticed the sexual objectification of women with the game’s job/species designations, which float above the head of the graphical character on the screen. There were monsters, and men and women. As I recall, men were classified about 50% as townsmen and 50% thugs. Women were similarly classified as either townswomen… or harlots.
What?! Um, hold on. Why were there no male harlots? Why no female thugs? Is the game trying to teach us that women can only be for sale, and only men are capable of violence? I found myself bewilderedly wondering: are the creators of the game afraid of women or something, that they feel the need to so dehumanize women in the game?
My first reaction was to attempt to excuse these aspects of the game
as “ignorable.” There’s no need to look at the portrait gallery to play
the game, and the “harlots” don’t actually have much in-game purpose
(they can improve Morte’s Curse ability; that’s about it). It seemed a
waste to miss out on a game that had so much else going for it. This,
of course, is precisely the wrong framing - it puts the burden on the
player to put aside her own discomfort. Besides, there are other
uncomfortable aspects to the game which are not so easily ignored, such
as the geek-girl fetish of the Brothel of Cartesian Dualism Slating Intellectual Lusts, or how every girl’s crazy for a gothed-out Hulk.
A better way of approaching these issues is in terms of the costs and
benefits of the design decisions - is it really worth alienating a
sizable portion of your audience for this?
I. Penalizing Women
There’s been a lot of debate over The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’s character creation process, which gave different attribute bonuses based on the character’s sex, and did it in such a way that male characters were more optimized, especially for fighting classes. As tikae notes:
It’s that if you want to have a female character, you’re going to be punished if you want to be anything except for a mage - and you’re still not going to be as good at that as male characters of most races are. It’s just how the numbers work. Making it a punishment to choose a certain gender is always going to be bad game design, whether it’s political or not.
First edition AD&D had an even more unbalanced portrayal of sexual dimorphism - the maximum allowable strength for women of any “race” was significantly lower than that for men, with no attempt to balance this penalty. In other words, men were penalized for playing cross-gender characters, and women were penalized for playing same-gender characters - again, especially warrior types.
Arcanum goes even farther than that - many of the species in the game are simply only playable as male. The designers cite the extra work and storage space that would be required to include artwork representing female dwarves, gnomes, etc., and explain it away in-game by referring to Victorian convention. The upshot, though, was that players had significantly fewer options if they wished to play female characters.
II. What Is Real? How Do You Define “Real”?
In addition to simply being glossed over, all of these examples of sexism in RPGs also get defended by portraying critics as valuing “political correctness” over “realism,” a defense that’s especially pernicious because it goes outside the game to make claims about the world in general.
But what do we mean by realism in the context of gaming? I’m not talking about the tired idea that, in any story with magic or supernatural elements, there’s no need for verisimilitude - that’s just a defense of bad writing. When we speak of realism in a game, we usually mean two things: immersion and complexity.
Immersion is the believability of what Roger Giner-Sorolla calls mimesis:
As stated before, I see successful fiction as an imitation or “mimesis” of reality, be it this world’s or an alternate world’s. Well-written fiction leads the reader to temporarily enter and believe in the reality of that world. A crime against mimesis is any aspect of an IF game that breaks the coherence of its fictional world as a representation of reality.
Complexity is the depth of implementation of the game world. Immersion and complexity are often in conflict, as every additional detail is an opportunity for a crime against mimesis to be perpetrated. What we call realism, then, is the combination of the two: a world sufficiently detailed that “rings true” to the player.
Guilded Lilies points out that what breaks mimesis will vary from player to player, citing the requisite detail for any discussion of sexism in gaming, Lara Croft’s breasts:
I feel it is pretty safe to say that women and men have different impressions of male and female game characters in computer games. Exaggerated female body parts may fall into the category of fantasy elements that men are willing to accept, but for women, this might just be the fantasy killer that interrupts her experience of suspended disbelief. A woman knows intuitively that having to haul around an enormous rack would make, for example, Lara Croft’s acrobatics impossible. For a male playing the same game this might never arise as a conflict, and likewise enjoying the presence of such things, he may never be aware that suspension of disbelief is required to maintain his immersion in the story line.
III. Reality is Overrated
The thing is, realism alone - i.e., the combination of mimesis and complexity - is not necessarily entertaining. There are games which are perfectly consistent and coherent in their game worlds, but simply aren’t a lot of fun because those worlds aren’t very interesting to the player (for me, strategy games like Railroad Tycoon and Colonization fell into this category, as did Oregon Trail when I wasn’t trying to make my friends die of dysentery). And there are other games with interesting, believable worlds, but whose complexity bogs down the gameplay until it’s intolerable. Realms of Arkania is the classic example in PC RPG-land; Xenosaga and Star Ocean: the Second Story approached this point for me with their multiple point-advancement systems. What game designers should be asking themselves is not whether a feature will make the game more realistic, but whether it will make the game more fun.
IV. Scope is a Design Decision
The realism that’s being defended in the above examples is selective at best. Some elements get focused on while others are ignored entirely; it’s not so much that these design decisions are expected as it is that they “feel right” to the perceived core audience of male gamers. Gaming, especially fantasy role-playing, has been a “boys’ club” for so long that these little touches of sexism have become cliches that players take for granted. If an area is poor, the reasoning goes, it will have prostitution, and that will invariably take the form of female streetwalkers, no matter what the rest of society looks like. In a multi-species society like Sigil, why would all of the prostitutes be human women?
What the realism defense ignores is that any game - indeed, any narrative or documentary medium - is limited in scope. The game designer makes a conscious choice about what to model in the game world; including sexism under the guise of “realism” makes a statement that sexism is sufficiently important to be included in the world model.
V. A Misguided Attempt at Anti-Censorship
If these aspects of the game could be omitted without notice - since few people complain about the details that aren’t in the game - why does criticism of them always raise such a fuss? Aside from the general backlash against “political correctness,” I think there is a more specific backlash against perceived censorship of games a la the “Nintendo Code,” where adventurers went to cafes to drink soda pop and called each other “spoony bards.” The problem with such a response is that it conflates legitimate design decisions with “fixes” superimposed on the games - the equivalent of renaming the “harlots” to “dancers” or something and blurring the artwork, cosmetic changes that serve to break mimesis by emphasizing what’s omitted.
VI. Boys’ Club Backlash
I also think there’s a subgroup of players who are simply reacting to having their privilege challenged. The following entitlement-laden Usenet post on Planescape: Torment started a sizeable flamewar:
I also appreciate the way the women are dressed, showing much of their breasts and buttocks. To me it is not the main thing of course - who would buy a game just because some of these tiny little figures look a bit sexy, it is just not enough for any real erotic thrill, but it is a small aesthetic delight that adds to the overall thrill of the game. I think a bit of sexiness belongs within a RPG. As I understand it, it is part of the fantasy-world.
The later replies defending this mindset use all the standard arguments - it’s PC, they’re just trying to make games less enjoyable, there aren’t enough women players to matter, etc. I guess when the games are being specifically targeted to you, there’s nowhere to go but down.
Conclusion
Game designers would benefit from asking the following about any design decision, especially those that involve gender:
- Why am I including this feature?
- How will this decision make the game more enjoyable?
- For whom will this decision make the game more enjoyable?
- For whom will this decision make the game less enjoyable? Is there any way to minimize this?
Designers and players alike need to stop using the idea of realism - “that’s the way the world works” - as an excuse for condoning sexism in games when they’re called out on it. It’s simply passing the buck.
[This post originally appeared on Official Shrub.com Blog.]
I recently saw a commercial for the Sony Bravia which billed itself as “The World’s First Television for Men and Women.”
At first, I thought they were advertising something like this, but after checking out the web site it turns out that it’s just a marketing campaign for a high-end HDTV.
I’m trying to figure out what the advertisers were thinking this one. I’ve narrowed it down to the following possibilities:
- They noticed that purchasers of HDTVs were disproportionately male, and saw women as an untapped market; however, they were worried that a women-centered ad campaign would lose more male buyers.
- They’re looking to provide the stereotypical man with justifications to his stereotypical partner for the purchasing decision.
Given the blatant sexism of the advertisement, I’m leaning toward the latter.
The headings for the reasons “why men like it” and “why women like it” are identical: “Amazing HD Picture”, “Wider Viewing Angles”, “Broader Color Gamut”, and “Slim Design.” However, the ad copy below has some important differences. Under the first heading, the explanations for men and women read, respectively (emphasis added):
With its lightning-fast response time, the BRAVIA LCD TV displays an HD picture that never lags. That means no more ghosting around your favorite running back. Its new S-PVA panels divide pixels into more segments that have an incredibly fast 8-millisecond response time that increases its refresh rate, making your favorite car chases even more exciting. Plus, the picture automatically adjusts to ambient light conditions so you get the same quality any way you watch it.
The BRAVIA LCD TV automatically adjusts to ambient light conditions. So whether the lights have been dimmed to watch your favorite cable show with the girls or turned off completely while you trick your beloved into watching a beautiful love story, the BRAVIA LCD TV consistently gives you the amazing HD detail you desire.
The “Mars” and “Venus” programming choices are the most obvious examples; I’m guessing her favorite cable show isn’t Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica here. (Actually, I think the last love story my girlfriend and I watched with the lights out was Re-Animator.) But the idea that women need/want to “trick” their (presumably male) beloveds into watching love stories is just plain insulting, as is the treatment of dramas (again, emphasis added):
So, the next time you escape the daily grind by sitting down to your favorite prime-time drama, even if what you’re watching doesn’t reflect real life, at least you know your television’s color will.
Silly women, watching dramas that don’t reflect real life. Not like men, who watch car chases.
The sexism in this ad goes beyond the gendering of programming, though. The “for men” copy actually tells you far more about the TV than the “for women” copy - we get specific data about the response time, while the copy “for women” doesn’t even mention response time or refresh rate. I don’t know if the writers were just lazy and couldn’t think of a gendered reason for women to want these features. After all, if “chick flicks” are just people talking and don’t have explosions or special effects, why would women care about refresh rates? And “8 milliseconds” sounds suspiciously like math.
In fact, a lot of the reasons “why women like it” have nothing to do with actually watching TV:
Why does the couch always have to be in the middle of the room? With the BRAVIA LCD TV it doesn’t have to be. Its 178° viewing angle gives you 178° of space to design. So rearrange the living room any way you want. You’ll still get an outstanding picture no matter where you sit.
It’s called the Living Room, not the TV Room. And the designers of the BRAVIA LCD TV haven’t forgotten that. With its slim design and stylish look, the BRAVIA LCD TV only steals your eye when it’s on. If only the same could be said for his football lamp.
Yep, that’s right. Sony expects women to plunk down several thousand dollars for a high-end HDTV in order to not watch it.
I hear the lines at Best Buy and Circuit City are around the block.
[This post originally appeared on Official Shrub.com Blog.]
So my latest infatuation is Terry Moore’s comic Strangers In Paradise, which I discovered through the immensely fun Scans Daily Livejournal community. It’s well-drawn and well-characterized, and is erasing that reluctance to check out indie comics that the hipper-than-thou movie adaptation of Ghost World instilled.
What struck me, though, was a letter to Mr. Moore printed in the second issue of the first run, which asked:
I do have some criticism about the writing… is it me or do you hold a dim view of males?
[Spoilers for the first issue of Strangers in Paradise follow.]
Now, I’m assuming that these letters were published in the original printing of the second issue, which means that they’re responding only to the first issue. In that issue, we’re introduced to the following male characters:
Freddie: The boyfriend of Francine, one of the lead characters of the comic. At the beginning of the issue, they are fighting because Francine doesn’t want to have sex with him. She then catches him cheating on her, at which point he breaks up with her. Francine suffers a nervous breakdown, and injures herself crashing her car.
David: An art student who meets Katchoo, the other lead character of the comic, and goes out for coffee with her. When Francine crashes her car, it’s David who pulls her out of the wreck.
…And that’s it. Two men. One good, one bad. When the two are Batman and the Joker, nobody takes this as a statement on masculinity, but add women to the mix and suddenly a less than flattering portrayal becomes man-hating. (I do have a few issues with how being skinny, attractive and independently wealthy get mixed up with each other and with being “good,” but that’s a rant for another time and place.)
Now I’m still making my way through later issues, so I’m not yet sure what the overall portrayal of men in Strangers in Paradise is. But honestly, Terry Moore’s opinions on gender are not the point of such a letter, nor is actual “man-hating” the point of any of the accusations that get levelled. I’m convinced that the main reason such accusations are phrased as “hating men” - rather than making a more specific response - is to reframe. Instead of being about the comic itself and the behaviors described therein, the discussion is shifted to Mr. Moore’s own opinions and men as gestalt. It’s not so different from the pre-emptive defense that’s meant to make the respondent forgo criticism. The effect this has is to dismiss the criticism by applying it to “males” in general rather than a specific behavior; we can no longer see the tree for the rest of the forest that’s sprouted up around it.
Terry Moore’s discussion of the letter:
Basically I told him I don’t have a dim view of males, or of women. I do have a very dim view of the games we play with each other and so does Katchoo.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this: most charitably, it reads as “I don’t hate men; I hate the patriarchy”; but it has hints of “Women do it too” - i.e., of accepting the reframing. Freddie’s entitlement-minded behavior in the first issue is a very specific form of harm that deserves more criticism than simply being lumped in with “games” like waiting a day before calling a romantic interest back.
Still, the comic itself has a compelling story - I do like romances, even if I try to make sure I don’t take them too seriously - and I enjoy the art style, so unless something comes up that makes me want to throw the book across the room (I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin), I’m going to stick with it.
[This post originally appeared on Official Shrub.com Blog and on Patriarchy Hurts Men Too.]
There have been quite a few discussions lately - on Hugo Schwyzer’s blog, at Punk Ass Blog, and at Pandagon (also this post), Saucebox and Neurath’s Boat - about young men who think that feminism and heterosexual male sexuality are incompatible. Which is even more interesting given the discussions here and Putting the “Fist” in “Pacifist” about how most men aren’t feminist *enough* to be worth getting involved with.
I originally started this post as a “how-to guide” for these (presumably) sincere but frustrated nice guy types (I’m probably giving their professed sincerity more credence than it deserves, but the ones who are just the larval form of MRAs don’t really deserve much mention - I’m talking more about the ones Protagoras calls “Shy Feminist Men”), but was quickly overwhelmed by how much “how to” would be needed, and it was increasingly obvious what was fueling these misconceptions.
I. Patriarchy and the Single “Nice Guy”
I think the main problem this sort of “nice guy” has is that, while he tries to meet a few feminist standards (no means no, don’t harass, etc.), he still buys into a lot of patriarchal bullshit, namely:
- Sex and desire are inherently dirty, shameful, and degrading;
- Being attracted to someone entitles you to their time, attention, affection, body, whatever;
- Women are less interested in sex than men (and consequently use it as a means to achieve other ends);
- Women are less attracted to “visual” characteristics than men - so if she’s not attracted to you, it’s because (a) you did or said the wrong thing; (b) there’s something wrong with her standards (she only likes “jerks, “she’s a “gold-digger,” etc.); or (c) she’s a lesbian.
- To not have your attraction reciprocated is a serious insult, or a statement about your worth as a person;
- Heterosexual “courtship” consists of an active man approaching a passive woman, and her acceptance or rejection of his “offer”;
- Any interaction that doesn’t ultimately lead to sex is a failure;
- A conventionally attractive partner is a symbol of status and a panacea for depression;
And so on. But because the feminist imperatives are explicitly expressed while the patriarchal ones are harder to dig out, feminism gets all the blame for the conflict, and the “nice guys” conclude that feminism is something for when they’re older, but not now when it would involve work or sacrifice.
II. And Everything You Thought Was Just So Important Doesn’t Matter
About this point, I realized that there were going to be far too many of these patriarchal assumptions to go into detail about all of them, other people had already begun to do this, and besides, they could be summed up in a single sentence:
“Everything you’ve heard about relationships is wrong.”
III. Shoehorning Life Into Glass Slippers
The reason why our model is so erroneous, I think, is because of the essentially private nature of most relationships, which means none of us have much in the way of direct observation to rely on - and observations of any relationships other than our own are likely to be incomplete (i.e., we see them as they are in public, but not as they are by themselves). What fills the gaps in our knowledge are “cultural narratives” - ideas about how the world works that we’re generally familiar with and sound plausible enough. When it comes to (heterosexual) relationships, the cultural narrative is one of “storybook romance,” and it’s one that’s fundamentally flawed.
The problem with “storybook romance” is that life isn’t a storybook, and attempts to force experience into a narrative structure are not only prone to getting it wrong, they’re prone to getting it wrong in systematic ways, and those ways promote harmful misunderstandings.
IV. And There’s Gonna Be A Happy Ending, But That’s Only the Beginning
The first way that the cultural romance narrative gets human relationships wrong is by assigning a beginning, middle and end to them - and by encouraging us to look at relationships this way while they’re in progress. This gives us expectations that our relationships will take these forms - most notably:
- That a nonreciprocated attraction is merely a relationship in the “beginning” stage;
- There’s a “middle stage” with easily identifiable and understandable conflicts; and
- If those conflicts are successfully resolved, there’s a “happily ever after” stage in which the relationship has no more major problems.
Though I’ve been using the phrase “storybook romance” to describe this cultural narrative, even something as conventionally “unromantic” as a one-night casual fling can get mapped onto this structure (meet, flirt, go off together; beginning, middle, end), with the same harmful assumptions (if she’s not into you, flirt more; once you’ve left together it’s smooth sailing, etc.)
V. What’s Montage? It Is Nor Hand, Nor Foot, Nor Arm, Nor Face…
The second way that “storybook romance” as a cultural narrative lies in the necessity to compress the relationship (and the character introduction) into 90 minutes of film, or 400 pages, or a three-minute song, or whatever the medium dictates. So we usually get, instead of a real incipient relationship, a quick montage of “fun dates” (usually culminating in a scene on a playground) without problems, “downtime,” or any concerns whatsoever, either within or without the relationship.
VI. Attack Of the B-Plots
“Storybook romance” is also problematic because of our insistence in including it at every opportunity. I can’t remember the last CRPG I played that didn’t have a romantic subplot (probably one of the NES Final Fantasies); hell, I’ve even seen sports games that had a rudimentary dating sim tacked on. And pretty much any random movie is going to pair off the leading man and leading woman by the end of the film. In a patriarchal movie culture where “lead actor” and “leading man” are virtual synonyms (with the exception of movies where the romance is the main plot), this has the effect of making leading women into love interests first and characters second.
VII. But I Like Those Stories!
I’m not advocating that we do away with romantic plots and subplots, any more than I’d advocate that we chuck high fantasy because the magic described therein isn’t real. I’ve enjoyed plenty of stories in each genre - and that’s pretty much what this romance narrative is, even when it’s not published by Harlequin: a genre with its own conventions and expectations, that’s there to make it easier for the audience. It’s just that when it comes to fantasy, we don’t expect the conventions of the genre to accurately reflect our own experience, and we don’t demand that every story include elements of the genre.
Conclusion: What Now?
“Everything you’ve heard about relationships is wrong.”
So what do we do? At this point, where all we know is our own ignorance, we’re all pretty much without a net, which can be both liberating (I don’t have to play this role that isn’t me!) and terrifying (so what do I do instead?).
What’s needed, I think, is a way to get these patriarchal assumptions, and real-life counterexamples, out into the open, so that we can develop a more authentic understanding of what a truly feminist form of initiating heterosexual relationships would belike. (You’d think with all the time abstinence-only sex ed frees up, there’d be plenty of time to talk about relationship stereotypes…) Heterosexual feminist/pro-feminist men, in particular, need to combat the assumption that this patriarchal model of “romance” is the only reliable one for relationships.
