Something that can annoy me sometimes, even make me angry, is when people go out of their way to find something sexist or homophobic or whatever their cause is. People can really ruin something fun like an ad on TV that has humor and BAM! someone shows complete lack of humor and just knocks it down because it made fun of women being portrayed in a special way.
Not that I condone portraying women bad, but there’s this huge space between making something funny in a 30 second ad to having an evil master plan. And sometimes I even feel sorry for those people that can’t look at an image without trying to find something politically wrong with it.
But sometimes there’s the freak occurence when they actually have a point! And I think Feminist Frequency may just have one, even though I think they mistaken in other areas. Who? “Feminist Frequency a video webseries that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives.” says their website. It’s created by Anita Sarkeesian and they have published two long YouTube videos on the subject of how women are portrayed in video games. Not today, but even back in the 90’s. Video 1 is here and video 2 is here. Waiting for video 3.
When I started watching it I was hoping it would be just another feminist trying to prove there’s an Illuminati conspiracy to portray women as inferior beings. And she partly goes into that territory which I think isn’t really helping their case. I’ve played games for a long long time and I haven’t reflected much on this issue. And had there been a long running plan then they seriously failed, at least with me. Another issue I had with the videos was – “what point was she really trying to make?”. Most of episode 2 is covering how women are portrayed as fragile pieces of porcelain that needs rescue (“Pretty Woman” anyone?), right? And then she goes on with statistics of how many women are victims to spousal abuse? How did a (“women being fragile in computer games”) result in b (“women are being beaten because of how they are portrayed in computer games”)? Or did I miss a step?
I can give her points that there is a real lack of women heros in the gaming business. And when cutting so many games together with the common theme like “your wife dies and you have to save your daughter” then yeah it’s apparently lack of creativity on the writing-side of things. We need more Mass Effects and Diablo 3’s where we can chose the sex of our hero to make this even more of a non issue. Although I have to say she missed Diablo 3 when writing up exampled of “women turned evil so you have to kill them” 🙂
I have for a long time thought that treating something like a non issue is a good way to live. 2 guys wanna get married to each other? Not an issue. But Takei made me rethink that by saying that “if we don’t treat it like an issue we’re sweeping it under the rug and pretend there isn’t violence toward the gay community on a daily basis”. And he’s right of course. And I guess it’s the same here, for me it wasn’t an issue of women being portrayed this way. But if we don’t see the issue it won’t change. And not changing our ways is bad.
stoff
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