259: Vaginophobia

[unwesen]

Lack of data does not evidence make.

Seriously. I applaud your determination to explore this subject. But I could just as easily postulate that games these days really pander to very female fears, by pointing to the success farmville and other "tending" games. You know, even Starcraft could be evidence for a particularly female-infused movement in games: bugs are known to scare the weaker sex, after all. And it's all about nurturing your troops anyway.

Don't pick *some* games, analyze them all from a given period. Include the Wii as a platform, but don't limit yourself to it. List exactly the criteria which you think are specifically about male insecurities, and the criteria which you think are specifically about female insecurities. Point to studies that prove, as much as possible, that these insecurities are common enough to matter. Then gather data according to these criteria, and present the results. Be sure to question gamers, non-gamers, people who consider themselves secure in their sexuality, and people who don't. Include a control group, and feed them things that aren't considered games (e.g. pointless clickery) but show the same things, and record their reactions. And so on.

Until and unless someone does something like the above, I'll dismiss any arguments about gender issues in games.

It's not that I don't think they exist - I'm sure they do, and my impression is that they're frustratingly common and particularly blatant. But opinion pieces about them don't help, and just serve to perpetuate stereotypes, not to further our understanding of games.

 

[AldirTK]

Dom kills his wife to end her pain, and not as to eliminate a potential burden...

 

[hurfdurp]

I don't anticipate a massive overhaul of the way women are portrayed (or not portrayed) in games anytime soon. However, all I can say is: when I unlocked Chris' 'Warrior' outfit in RE5 I heaved a sigh of relief, in that it was at least fair, not progressive by any means, but fair. I played through it again out of spite, just to see his huge nipples basking in the zombie infested fields.

 

[RobCoxxy]

Genderizing everything makes this misogynist a sad man.

Not everything is about penises or vagina's. Some times it's just about pretending to have a big gun, and killing stuff.

"OH BUT THE BIG GUN IS A PHALLIC SYMBOL"

 

[Something Amyss]

I don't understand how people can obsess over sexes and sexual stereotypes and insecurities and blahablahoblahargh. I really couldn't care less about "vaginophobia" in games.

The latter is rather indicative of the former.

 

[Johkmil]

Still an excellent article. The ongoing, adolescent machoism in videogames is one of the major obstacles to overcome in the struggle to make games become art.

I was sick of this arguement when it was first published and I'm still sick of it.

I was gunna make a big point here but it was stupid...

So anyway, On the point about GOW2 for example. The reason Dom' wife was given a measly cut-scene I think you'll find is not some deep seeded fear of emotions and love but the flow of the story. Dom's wife was set up as some a goal to acheive, basically a princess to be rescued from a castle (Thats not an obvious masculine idea... Whose side am I on). So when we actually got to her, deep in the castle we were leading up to a finale which gameplay wise is going to be fast pace,enemy heavy and difficult. Having to do a escort mission in the middle of that would of been both fustrating and pace destroying. So that descision is more due to gameplay than story.

Eh, vaginas are pretty scary, soul-eating things but at least they arn't violent, pulsing rods that you stab into poor innocent victims in a act of power, control and anger.

We are many who would like to know why you are sick of this argument. To condemn the discussion or the opponent's views without any points or facts are simply an attempt to make the opponent seem stupid, a desperate measure to be used when one has no real chance to win the debate.

For the GOW2 thing, this is an excellent example of how the developer believes us all to be immature adolescents with machoistic fantasies, and them being completely correct about it.
Dom's wife's death is the sacrifice of story for satisfying the whims of impatient gamers. With proper storywork, an escort mission would have been the correct, justified, heroic and manly thing to have. Instead, they take the fast and macho way out, killing her as an escort mission would have been a burden to us.
A crime against the hope that games, someday, will become proper art, instead of just a craft.
For the difference between manly and macho see Yatzee's definition: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/art...tion/7597-Extra-Punctuation-Male-Protagonists

For many men, masculinity is a hard-won yet precarious and brittle psychological achievement that must be constantly proven and defended, (...) this fantasy of being under constant siege by a multitude of external feminizing forces is really an unconscious defense that is employed to keep out of mind something even more disturbing - an identification with women.

I personally know several of these; males that seem to have a strong fear of their manhood falling off if they identify with anything even remotely feminine.

 

[quantumsoul]

Maybe I'm strange but I've never killed a prostitute in any GTA game or felt the urge to. I instinctively avoid killing women as much as possible in games. So I find it odd that killing prostitutes in GTA is brought up so often. I much prefer protect the "princess and hold her hand" gimmick of Ico. I must be some kind of women liking deviant, lol.

 

[gamegod25]

"In Gears of War 2, Dom kills his wife in an alien prison because she would be a burden"

That wasn't why he did that. It was because she was too far gone to save, and all he could do was end her suffering. If you really thought he did it becuse she'd be a "burden" then that just shows your own misogony and idiocy.

As others have pointed out this is a very poor article.

 

[RMcD94]

*jumps on the terrible article bandwagon*

On the other hand, she dresses like a hooker, the developers bragged about the amount of time they spent making her arse move realistically, and she has a tendency to get naked. Can you see Marcus from GoW or Master Chief doing that?

I read a scientific article on the way men and women's sex appeal works. Obviously it was generalizing, but the reason guys don't randomly strip unlike women characters is because visual stuff doesn't appeal as much to heterosexual women as it does to hetero men. I can't remember the article.

 

[Spinozaad]

Genderizing everything makes this misogynist a sad man.

Not everything is about penises or vagina's. Some times it's just about pretending to have a big gun, and killing stuff.

"OH BUT THE BIG GUN IS A PHALLIC SYMBOL"

Yeah... Well... SO IS A WOMAN'S FINGER!
And... eh... MY PENIS. Oh, wait. Yeah...

Anyway. I feel that most games featuring macho gorilla monkey men wearing space armour protagonists who grunt and growl at women while fingering their triggers are aimed at teenagers/young-adults.

They like that. Just as much as they like boobies. There is no Freudian attitude. Some times people are, in my honest opinion, trying too hard to find psychological depth in every thing. Some times a turd is, indeed, just a pile of shit and not a statement.

 

[ben---neb]

[img hieght =200 width =200]http://cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/articles/article/7705/Thomsen_i235-pull1.png[/img]
Forgive me if I find the first part a little hard to believe

Stastically speaking 97% of all statstics are made up.

OP: It was an OK article. I agree that modern culture does tend towards a lack of responsibility, insecurities and being afraid of intellectual discovery.

 

[RobCoxxy]

Genderizing everything makes this misogynist a sad man.

Not everything is about penises or vagina's. Some times it's just about pretending to have a big gun, and killing stuff.

"OH BUT THE BIG GUN IS A PHALLIC SYMBOL"

Yeah... Well... SO IS A WOMAN'S FINGER!
And... eh... MY PENIS. Oh, wait. Yeah...

Anyway. I feel that most games featuring macho gorilla monkey men wearing space armour protagonists who grunt and growl at women while fingering their triggers are aimed at teenagers/young-adults.

They like that. Just as much as they like boobies. There is no Freudian attitude. Some times people are, in my honest opinion, trying too hard to find psychological depth in every thing. Some times a turd is, indeed, just a pile of shit and not a statement.

True, true, but after Studying Psychology for a few years, I've seen it fit to throw Freudian analysis into anything. ANYTHING.
Good fun, but the only reason. I mean yes, there's something phallic about gigantic weapons, but I think it's hilarious.

 

[BrionJames]

I missed the meeting we had when it was decided that video games are some sort of social view into the lives of "adolescent-men". When I play a game its usually to unwind from a stressful day at work or on my day off when I don't have anything better to do. I don't have any secret wants to beat people to death with a golf club or trade bottle caps to a doctor and then shoot him to death and steal them back, it's mostly about just having fun and taking a load off. I think a lot of these games make easy targets for feminists, but who gives a shit about their tired propaganda anyway. Personally, I don't like to play as a female protagonist in games but there have been some that I've enjoyed. I always enjoy popping some other player across the ocean in the head with a SIG 550 in R6:Vegas, chainsawing some evil locust bastard in half with a lancer, or trying to punching the reporter on the Citadel as Shepard in Mass Effect 2. These things are fun, not some secret hidden fear of not being able to prove my masculinity. If there's some sort of problem that society has with that, so what? It wasn't until the industry was pulling in billions of dollars that anyone other than those who participated in the gaming community gave a shit.

 

[Dora]

This was an interesting article I missed the first time around, so I'm actually glad it was posted again for me to see.

However, while I feel it was interesting, I don't actually feel it was completely accurate. Or, rather, it sort of feels like the author was digging a bit too hard to find meaning in the scenes he used as examples. You can take ANY scene from ANY game and sit down and pick at it and probably find something that you could apply some sort of psychological subtext to. As far as Grand Theft Auto goes, I am a lady, and I have never been offended by any of the content in it; GTA 4 is still one of my favourite games. Anyway, isn't the whole point of that series that it's cartoonishly overblown in EVERY aspect? So much of it is done DELIBERATELY to offend/excite interest that I can't see getting worked up about it or taking any hidden meaning from it.

Also, as far as gaming journalism goes, well, I guess it depends on what part of gaming culture you look at. It seems like the indie scene has a lot more females active in the media aspect than the "professional" scene. IE, I (a lady!) write for an online indie gaming review source, and we have several other women on staff currently, and have had others come and go. Don't see many female names cropping up over at IGN or in the credits in most gaming magazines, but I don't think there's a hidden agenda to it. We're out there. Just apparently not where you're looking.

Actually, the most personally offensive game I've come across is actually the indie title The Path by Tale of Tales. The whole point of that game is to wander around the woods as young women of varying ages until something terrible happens to them (usually implied rape/death) and then to watch them stagger slowly and brokenly along the walkway to Grandma's House, whereupon you get treated to an artsy sequence of random imagery before you do it all over again with another little girl. For me that's a hundred times worse than Nico Bellic being bored by the vapid female characters in GTA just so he can get them into bed. I can usually look at anything and say, "Well, I don't get it, but someone must like it," but I literally do not see how anyone can play that game and see it for anything but the most pointless sort of torture porn pretending to be an art game.

On the subject of GTA, though, I was thinking recently that I would like to see a female protagonist in one of the games. Not for gender balance issues, but because it would probably silence a lot of the "ROCKSTAR HATES WOMEN" clamour if the next game featured a female playable character as over-the-top violent as Tommy Vercetti, or battered psychologically as Nico Bellic. I'd like to see what sort of female lead they'd give us, and I'd hope they wouldn't tone the world down for her. Of course, if it never happens, meh.

 

[JoeCool385]

"Our secular culture produces all kinds of fear, including fear of the female anatomy."

I literally lol'd at this and had to stop reading for a minute to regain my composure. Our secular culture does not, in any way, shape, or form, "fear" female anatomy. Quite the opposite, actually, to the point that it's hard to get away from it.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/5/7/

 

[Alar]

This article has informed me on a number of things... one of which is: don't play Dante's Inferno.

 

[Terrified Android]

I liked the article. seems like a few others are having issues with it, but maybe it's just hitting too close to home for them - or they didn't read it entirely. good read.

 

[ironlordthemad]

Is anyone else on the forums as sick of being told that you are a vaginaphobic, mentally imature overly macho man as I am?
Mr Pitts if you are reading this please stop putting this type of thing into the Weekly Magazine, even if it is just for filler, because now logging onto the escapist to read the magazine feels like listening too a recording of a Fraudian analysis seminar being given by a scalding mother (deliberate irony) who is speaking directly to you and only to you.
Quote as many statistics as you want but remember that statistics mean nothing to individual. The only people who give a flying toss about statistics are douches in suits and people who make funny t-shirts... and since your tshirts don't do math jokes, you may want too quit with the numbers relative to other numbers before you start too feel like a british newspaper.

 

[hanako]

I read a scientific article on the way men and women's sex appeal works. Obviously it was generalizing, but the reason guys don't randomly strip unlike women characters is because visual stuff doesn't appeal as much to heterosexual women as it does to hetero men. I can't remember the article.

OTOH, the "Women aren't turned on by visuals" meme is pretty heavily saturated in society, meaning that most women have been told they're not supposed to be aroused by visuals. I've *also* seen a "scientific" study that, like, strapped electrodes to naughty bits or something pleasant like that and discovered that:

1. the women swore blind that they weren't turned on by the visuals
2. the readouts said otherwise!

If you ask a sex-positive feminist they'll probably bemoan how this shows that modern women have been so shamed and disconnected from their own sexuality that they can't even tell if they're aroused or not. Ask a less sex-positive feminist and the explanation you'll get is that they're just too ashamed to admit it even to a scientist studying their mysterious womanly urges.

Of course, if you want to see a really stupid debate about visuals and male/female appeal, check the comments threads on games involving long-haired bishonen. The fangirls are positively drooling and wriggling in their seats with excitement, while a bunch of confused men either call the game "gay" or say that the fangirls must all be lesbians, cause THOSE AIN'T REAL MEN!

Quote as many statistics as you want but remember that statistics mean nothing to individual. The only people who give a flying toss about statistics are douches in suits and people who make funny t-shirts...

Unfortunately some of those douches in suits are the marketing department who suggest that all gamers want X and we must shoehorn X into our next release!

 

[My1stLuvJak]

This made for an interesting read, but the article doesn't account for a lot of factors, like players who don't flock to "M" rated games.

I'm all for feminism, but the ideology isn't without it's flaws. They could just as easily say that "the princess is in another castle" is just another power fantasy: being the hero, saving the day, getting the girl. Is saving the princess the real motivator for playing a Mario game, though? Ask half the people that like playing as the plumber, and they'll tell you that they couldn't give a rip about Princess Peach, or whatever they're calling her, these days.

Obviously, there are people out there who genuinely enjoy beating a virtual hooker to death after she get her knees dirty...I'm not one of those people. I've never played a GTA game, even though I own several of them, and the only time I really enjoy pumping some lead into a body, is when the receiver of bullets is an alien, or the opposite army in a war. Killing innocent civilians in realistic cityscapes is not something I will ever enjoy - I'll still probably go back and play GTA 3 to San Andreas, but those games aren't meant to be realistic (you can drive a tank, for gosh sakes!).

Honestly, stereotyping should be criminal. Someone said that men get attraction from looks more than women, but I know plenty of women who are all too caught up with a guy's appearance vs. his work ethic. If you want to think that videogames are just power fantasies for the men of the world, you go ahead and think that. For me, videogames have always been a fun distraction, a challenge to overcome, something to play with others for a laugh or even for some serious competition.