That is an interesting article, although far too limited for the scope of the topic, which, to be honest, is massive. I’ve really enjoyed reading the responses to it in this forum, with people coming at it from a far more intelligent and a wide variety of angles. I’m glad to see that there are intelligent gamers out there.
Sexism is prevalent throughout our culture, not just in nerd or game culture. For example, look at the way products are advertised in print media: women are portrayed as sexualised beings in the most ludicrous of situations just to allure men towards purchasing a product. Look at the following example:
http://trendland.net/2010/04/18/40-best-sex-ads/best-sex-ads-1/. As a product for men, the woman’s scantily clad body, focusing on sexualised parts, is only there to lure men to the product via connotations of what the male viewer might be able to do with the body, thus perpetrating the over-sexualisation of women.
Granted, here in Australia, many television advertisements potray women as smarter than men, who are portrayed as idiots, but in most other forms of media, women are portrayed as nothing more than sexualised beings willing to pleasure men.
When I was a young boy and teenager, I have to admit to enjoying the sexualised portrayal of women in games (and other media) but as I grow older, the amount of sexism in games when developers are purposely aiming for ‘realism’ is quite perverse. Most males will probably admit to the allure of a sexualised woman, and there’s nothing wrong with that in games, because sex is part of being a woman (and a man for that matter, which is rarely portrayed, but that’s another topic). But once you get beyond that, female characters in games are portrayed as hollow beings who need rescuing or being told what to do. Princess Peach is the epitome of the princess in need of saving, and the ‘dumb blonde’ who always gets into trouble. In
Sonic Adventure Amy Rose is portrayed as a stereotypical woman, only interested in shopping and her ‘man’ (Sonic). Granted, there are actually women out there like this, but this is usually only one side of them and there are also women who have much more depth to their personality, which is lacking in videogames in general. And these two characters are in games aimed at children!
What concerns me is the message that games are sending to the unenlightened, especially children. Are children, who don’t know any different, expected to grow up thinking that men are supposed to dominate women whose only purpose is to sexually gratify men? Are girls expected to take on this role of being an object of men’s desire willingly? Judging from the portrayal of women in games and other mediums, like film, the answer is yes. This makes for a very hollow society in my opinion. But we all know this portrayal is false.
Like many other forum members have posted, women should be equally entitled to be who they are, as men are, regardless of their gender. This needs to be reflected in the sorts of females portrayed in games. There’s nothing wrong with having women portrayed a femme fatales or sex kittens, because there are people out there like that, and roles for these sorts of characters within stories. Videogames are, after all, meant to be a portrayal of fantasy. However, there needs to be an equal, if not larger, number of strong, realistic females portrayed in games. For every blonde bimbo there should be three or four strong willed women in games. Equally, there needs to be men who are not portrayed as strong, buff characters, but men who are weak and flawed, just like in real life. In other words, what we need is equality in videogames: men and women who are portrayed along the entire spectrum of who and what they can be or become.
This issue is not just confined to videogames, but to society in general. And until steps are made towards this equality in the real world, it is unlikely to occur in games. Still, we have come a long way from the days of women being confined to the kitchen and being subservient to men, as portrayed in this advertisement:
http://www.collapseboard.com/everett-true/attempted-clarification-on-the-triple-j-sexism-blog-entry/attachment/sexism-4/, so progress is being made, but perhaps not as fast as we would like or fast as women deserve. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of society: change is usually slow.
One other aspect I’d like to briefly touch on is that men are wired to see women as sexual objects. I’m not saying this to be chauvinistic, but in the real real world (ie. not what society portrays as “reality” – think of the natural world, or of our cavemen ancestors) our priority is survival of the self and the species. If men were not wired to see women as objects for sex, then we wouldn’t be alive today. Granted, we live in a more (one would think) mature society, so one would think we could be more intelligent about it, and portray women as the equal to men (because, let's face it, they are just as good, if not better (depending on the person) than men. Yet it is still part of our DNA. Therefore, to get to overcome this situation, of women being portrayed as sexualised objects, men’s brains would need to be rewired, in a psychological sense, where they grow up viewing women as their equals. I can’t see this coming to full fruition in a patriarchal society, but perhaps it’s possible in a matriarchal society.
In the end, sexuality is part of being a woman, just like it is for a man, but there’s much more to women than being objectified and it’s the responsibility of the people who create opportunities for the portrayal of women in media like games to reveal this to their audience.
