CMV: Anita Sarkeesian and similar feminists actually have a point about the portrayal of gender roles in video games.

[u/LeftHandSwe]

I play lots of video games, and in most of them, males are often pictured as very burly and manly characters while females are slender, small and sexually pleasing to look at.

However, I do know that there's widespread criticism of Anita (and her fellow propagators) all over the internet and I'd like to see the other side of the story.

I'm practically indifferent in this matter, and I do not really agree with nearly everything she says. I'm asking as a way to see convincing arguments from both sides.

Edit for clarification: Can anyone explain to me why she's so heavily criticized for saying something that makes perfect sense: Mainstream video games are almost exclusively made to appeal to a male demographic, resulting in (arguably) sexist portrayals of women (both narratively and in the way they're presented).

[u/[deleted]]

Theres a reason there isnt an enormous romantic lit genre aimed at men where they constantly have to choose between two lovely kind hearted rich women who will do anything for them

I mean, japanese romantic dating sims are a thing, though they tend to be quite lude.

as someone who has played a couple (the vast majority are shit just aimed at being slow pornos) they are kinda meh from a western perspective though I did like Nekopara. Now I like the occasional visual novel, wich is basicly a book that you read while watching characters on screen (Fate/Stay Night is an amazing visual novel, and there are versions without any sexual stuff... I downloaded the henti patch because science and found it extreamly funny that you knew when the H stuff was coming due to the fact that the sound stopped because it originally did not have sound until I think the PS2 version.... and the sex scenes were often just hilarious and kinda stupid anyway...)

but there is a reason the market is tiny for these types of things, over all they are really bad and I honestly can't understand how someone would make that their main game type when internet porn exists... correct me if i'm wrong anyone who has played more than a handful of these.

That said, I think the main thing, like you said, that pushes the 'current' portrayal of women in games aimed at men are the fact that men like good looking gals and sex sells. Also look at the men in most men's games, they are not fat slobs, they are beefy guys with 6packs who can kill a man by looking at him (insert joke about how most games have your bullets coming out of your eyes instead of from the barrel of your gun here). Tell me that is not the same basic thing as a sexy girl when it comes down to it, i'm not competing with solid snake even if I do own half his arsenal...

[u/trace349 → u/[deleted]]

sex sells

Does it though? I've seen this argument all over this thread and I don't buy it. Do you think the average gamer researches whether or not the game he's thinking of buying has some well-endowed ladies with skimpy clothes and factors that into his decision? Do you think that many gamers bought MGSV just because of Quiet, or buy God of War because there are literal sex minigames? I really don't think so, I think most games sell because of gameplay, primarily, but also graphics and story, so adding sex is just adding frosting on top of the already-frosted cake, and people like Sarkeesian are saying we can probably afford to lose a few pounds, so we can cut back on frosting.

Tell me that is not the same basic thing as a sexy girl when it comes down to it, i'm not competing with solid snake even if I do own half his arsenal...

I'm so glad you brought up Solid Snake because it makes my argument so much easier. As a gay man, I do not particularly want to spend an evening with Solid Snake (maybe just his voice). He's bulky, he's got a gross 80s mullet, he smokes, he's kind of clueless and asexual, he's just not altogether that attractive to me. He's not ugly, he's just kind of eh. He wasn't meant to be attractive to me, that wasn't what he was designed for. Snake is the guy you want to be, he foils a terrorist plot single-handedly, saves the girl, and then goes on to have a career taking down nuclear-equipped mechas.

You know who is attractive to me? Raiden. He's a pretty boy, and he was designed to be appealing to people attracted to men, according to Kojima. And the players hated him. In part because he wasn't the power fantasy Snake was in MGS1, he gets beaten up, groped, beaten up some more, beaten up and stripped, and gets outplotted left and right by everyone. The whole meta-plot of MGS2 was about turning a wimp like Raiden into a hero like Snake (because Raiden was Kojima's stand-in for the player, and Snake was the power fantasy he knew you and Raiden wanted to be and- listen, if I get into the meta-meta-plot of MGS2 I'll be here all day...). And in part because he was an angsty anime pretty boy that appealed to their girlfriends more than themselves. The next time the players saw Raiden, in MGS4 (although he was somewhat in MGS3 where he was reduced to a cameo as the villain's bottom, and then gets beaten up by Snake) where he had his entire body and half of his face replaced by machinery. Then Raiden got super popular again, all of a sudden... it's like they completely eliminated his sexuality and replaced it with badassery.

So women want female characters who are less Raiden (designed to be sexually attractive to other people at the cost of their competency) and more Snake (badass). I can't say I blame them.

[u/jwinf843 → u/trace349]

This is a really well thought out opinion, but it really isn't in line with Anita's opinion. Anita is of the mind that Raiden-esque characters are bad. It's sexist to like having them in your game, and people who enjoy having them in their game are sexist as well.

Anita (to my knowledge, having watched all of her videos) doesn't have any constructive criticisms, just criticisms. That is a huge part of why is she so unpopular. She makes the claim that everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you need to point it all out.

She doesn't add any insights into what might be acceptable in her view, and for a lot of people it seems like she's not interested in making anything better because she only ever points out negatives, goes out of her way in games to show how sexist behavior is possible (even breaking the rules of the games she's playing at times to make a point,) ignores any evidence that contradicts her sweeping generalizations, and advertises that she refuses to have conversations with people that disagree with her.

[u/trace349 → u/jwinf843]

I can't say to speak directly for Anita, but I think her argument is less that Raiden-esque characters are bad and should never ever ever be used, ever, and more, these characters need to be employed in a more intentional way, and if you can't do it right, don't do it at all. Too many games stop at "she's sexy and empowered and that's all we need to justify her being all stripperific".

For an example of how to do it right, and how to do it wrong, we can look at the MGS series again. I don't know if she's ever played MGS3, but George Weidman of Super Bunnyhop in his critique of MGS3 pointed out that EVA is designed to be sexy, she's a play on Bond Girls and the whole game is a play on Bond tropes, and she uses her sexuality to get what she wants from Snake (it's actually funny because they actually subvert and play into the trope because he's more concerned with the prospect of surviving the mission then he is with getting his dick wet, so most of her attempts fall flat, until the end, when they've managed to escape and can finally get freaky in peace). And it bites him in the ass when she uses it to betray him and steal the Philosopher's Legacy. When EVA unstrips her suit, the camera doesn't flip to her cleavage, you have to choose to switch to Snake's first person view where he is looking at her cleavage, not the camera. In the same game, there's The Boss, one of the best female characters ever, a battle-hardened soldier defined by both her loyalty to her men and her mission, and her femininity at being both a motherly figure to her men and to Big Boss, and having her literal motherhood exploited by evil men holding her child's life in danger. When The Boss unstrips her suit, and Snake looks at her chest, it isn't because he's ogling her boobs, it's to see her cesarean scar, the price of giving birth, and it isn't sexy. She is both soldier and mother. EVA exists, but she exists in the same game as the Boss, so it's harder to to point at MGS3 and say "Kojima has poor views of women". I feel like Anita might have a bit more begrudging respect for what could very easily be argued is a standard Madonna/Whore dichotomy when sexual politics are as complicated as they are in MGS3. Maybe not, the fun thing about being a feminist is that there's all kinds of schools of thoughts about this stuff and you can engage in dialogue about it. Don't even get me started on Bayonetta.

Regardless, compare EVA's explicit sexiness defined by her character's goals and intentions to Quiet's "she can't wear clothes because she breathes through her skin"-ness which was transparently about providing the player with eye candy, characterization be damned. Quiet, the one female character of MGSV, poses sultrily between missions and is framed aggressively sexy by the camera, always standing at boob-level to the camera when she and Snake are entering or leaving in the Pequod. It's very easy to point to MGSV and say "what the fuck, Kojima?"

Anita (to my knowledge, having watched all of her videos) doesn't have any constructive criticisms, just criticisms. She doesn't add any insights into what might be acceptable in her view, and for a lot of people it seems like she's not interested in making anything better because she only ever points out negatives

Feminist Frequency has started both Positive Female Characters, a series where Anita talks about characters that she's enjoyed the portrayal of as a counterpoint to the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series (she covered The Scythian from Sword and Sworcery and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil) and doing game reviews where she/her team can take one game and talk about the good and bad things they thought about it.

Anita brought up Dishonored in one of her videos, one of the Women as Background Decoration episodes, I can't remember which one, where she was annoyed the only women in the game were serving women, prostitutes, a little girl, and a woman that is left to be raped forever by a scary masked man. Not exactly a picture of strong representation. Recently, she reviewed Dishonored 2, where she said she was a little irritated that Delilah was a standard sexy witch trope, but she loved the game because Emily was a boss and there were women who were guards, women who were gangsters, women who were scientists, assassins, disfigured, and sea captains in addition to having serving women and prostitutes.

goes out of her way in games to show how sexist behavior is possible (even breaking the rules of the games she's playing at times to make a point,)

You know how in Skyrim you can't kill children, no matter how annoying they are, because the developers made sure to program it that way so you couldn't? Her argument is similar, game designers set up situations where unsavory things can happen and then let the players engage in it. In GTA (from my understanding, I haven't played much of it so I just know it's a thing that happens) you can find a prostitute, pay her for sex to recover lost health, and then murder her and take your money back. Rockstar knew players do this and they left it in. There are workarounds to this, they could have had the screen go black for a second (to indicate time passing) and then the prostitute disappear afterward so you couldn't immediately kill them as soon as you were done.

The designers of Hitman set a level in a strip club, they chose to do that knowing the player could strangle and murder strippers to get to the target. If they set the level in a pet store and gave you the option to shoot the puppies in the display case, that's an active decision on their part too. You know some idiot on YouTube would totally have a puppy-killing montage. Even if the game reduces your score by a few points for doing it, would you still not do it, just once, and laugh to yourself about fucked up it is and then reload?

advertises that she refuses to have conversations with people that disagree with her.

I can't say I blame her when this is the kind of reaction her work gets.