threetoed wrote:
4. Has the effect of increasing the male audience's perception that real life violence against women is less serious.
Since you gave me no answer, I'll ask it again.
Why is "sexualized" violence any worse than killing and torturing people for fun and laughing about it in games like Postal and GTA?
Why is the violence "sexualized" when the player dominates a helpless female NPC, but it's not "sexualized" when the player dominates a helpless male NPC in a similiar fashion? Because it's assumed that no self-respecting man would ever get sexually aroused from dominating another man? Then what about all those cases where normally straight guys rape another men in prision showers?
If dominating and killing (female) NPCs for sexual satisfaction is wrong and has the effect of increasing the audiences perception that it's ok to do the so in real life too, then why other kind of cruel acts towards helpless NPCs that give satisfaction to the player don't have the same effect?
I remember back in 2001-2004 when I was in school, a large number of young boys of my age group (myself included) bought GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas and Postal 2
only because they enjoyed causing mayhem in those games. Doing things to innocent people you can't do in real life (urinate on them [->infect them with gonorrhea], set them on fire, blow them up, shoot them, beat them with melee weapons) was a major selling point for all of those games
threetoed wrote:It's possible, even likely, that playing a scene of sexual violence against men makes people more likely to downplay the seriousness of violence against men, I don't know for sure. The issue would be that they would have to find an incidence of sexualized violence against men in video games before they could test for it, since such depictions are extremely rare.
Defy sexualized violence.
I dont know what game(s) that study was tested on (
this place gives me a "page not found" when I try to download the document), but examples of same kind of sexualized violence towards women as in that God of War 3 scene that you analyzed earlier are extremely rare. If you ignore the fact that she's topless, then you can find examples of same kind of violence being used against equally helpless male NPCs in the God of War-series.
What's the line between sexualized and "normal" violence against an innocent female NPC? Is all violence done towards female NPCs sexualized, or is it only sexualized in the cases where they are half naked? If you kill a stripper (or a hooker) and a construction worker with a baseball bat in a GTA game, is it sexualized violence when you kill the hooker/stripper only because she wears revealing clothing (because of her job)?
Given the fact that apart from Japanese rape simulation games, there aren't really any games where you can actually rape a NPC, sexualized violence does not require a sexual context or actual sex, only a scenario where the player has the power to control and dominate weak and helpless NPCs, which gives the player a sense of power and dominance and therefore satisfies them sexually. If that's the case, then there are plenty of games with sexualized violence commited against men.
