More than a year has passed since I have commented at any length on feminism and the issue of gender equality because frankly, the blog/YouTube wars and constant bickering between feminists, the men’s rights crowd and those who are somewhere in between made my head hurt. As such, I’m a little bit behind the curve in becoming aware of this Anita Sarkeesian person, who seems to have made quite a stir in the atheist and gaming community with her long-form videos about misogyny in gaming such as this one:
I recently became aware of her because of a recent interview she conducted with Stephen Colbert. While I have not watched all of her videos, I have watched “Damsel in Distress” parts one and two, in which she claims that the majority of action and adventure video games depict women as merely pawns or objects in male-centric narratives. Men, in her view — and she provides example after example — take the lead role in most of the games, with any females taking a backseat as secondary characters or love interests that the male character must rescue from certain doom because the females are disempowered, weak and incapable of saving themselves. In the first video in this series, Sarkeesian mainly focuses on two of Nintendo’s largest franchises, “Super Mario Bros.” and “The Legend of Zelda.” I was never as into Zelda, so I will focus on her critique of Mario Bros. As she recounts the story of the game, the princess, Peach, is captured by the villain, Bowser, and Mario must go through eight grueling levels to save her. Sarkeesian thinks that Mario, Zelda and other longstanding franchises that began decades ago could and should have been modernized to more robustly include strong women characters into the narrative.
First, as The Amazing Atheist pointed out, (and my linking to him doesn’t imply that I agree with him on every point) Mario and most of the other games she talks about follow the monomyth narrative structure, in which the protagonist begins the story in his or her everyday life, something unusual or bad happens and the hero goes on an adventure to right a wrong. Or, as Joseph Campbell put it:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
True, a majority of the action and adventure games that follow this structure feature a male protagonist and a female character that the male must either protect or rescue from peril. Like Mario, as in more modern games that follow this structure, the male typically goes through all sorts of dangerous challenges to protect the female because he either loves her or she is an important person.
Obviously, high-profile exceptions to this pattern exist within the gaming industry, but since they go all but unnoticed by Sarkeesian, I will briefly mention some here.
In many cases, like “Assassin’s Creed Black Flag” and “Red Dead Redemption,” female characters guide players through certain parts of the game and are imperishable parts of the storyline. Annie Stoakes, a cattle rancher and important character to the central story of “Red Dead,” competed in a gun duel tournament against male opponents. The game’s Wiki page had this to say about Stoakes:
Annie’s father did not adhere to the gender roles of the day: He raised his daughter to be a successful, independent rancher in a violent, male dominated society.
In “The Last Of Us,” the main character, Joel, lost his daughter 20 years before the main storyline begins. Through the early part of the game, he is accompanied by a female ass kicker named Tess, who helps him escape Boston. Through most of the rest of the game, Joel partners with a quick-witted and emotionally unflappable teenage girl named Ellie, who becomes an ass kicker in her own right.
In her two videos, Sarkeesian paints the impression that there are virtually no strong female protagonists in video games, now or in the past. While there are certainly fewer males than females in leading, playable characters in video games overall, which is probably because of the demographics of people who play action and adventure games and the demographics of those who development them, Sarkeesian conveniently fails to mention some prominent females that did actually command lead roles.
Metroid, which was another of Nintendo’s most popular franchises, follows the protagonist Samus Aran. In the first game in the series, players did not know until beating the game that the main character was, indeed, a female. This goes unmentioned in Sarkeesian’s analysis. More modern games that have featured woman in prominent and empowered roles, including the following:
- Lara Croft, “Tomb Raider”
- Chell, “Portal”
- Aveline de Grandpre, “Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation”
- FemShep, “Mass Effect”
- Joanna Dark, “Perfect Dark”
- Jill Valentine, “Resident Evil”
This doesn’t mention the countless number of strong female characters in the Final Fantasy series and other role playing games over the years. For more examples of lead female roles, see here:
In two videos that cover almost 50 minutes of content, Sarkeesian concedes that there has been a “moderate increase” in the number of lead female roles in video games recently, but can only be bothered to specifically mention two titles, “Beyond Good & Evil” and “Mirror’s Edge,” in 30 years of development. Also included in her list of games that disempower and objectify women was “Dante’s Inferno,” which I thought was a head-scratcher since the game is based off Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” one of the greatest works of literature of all time, and in the game, the main character literally claws through the terrors of hell to save his love, Beatrice.
Sarkeesian does not seem like a person who is interested in presenting a fair picture of the video game market or even the entertainment market. Unlike Sarkeesian’s uneven presentation of the problem — and misogyny and violence against of women in video games is a problem, just as it is in real life — the video game industry has produced a number of strong, empowered female characters. I would be interested to know that if the roles were reversed and a large number of video games suddenly came out with female characters victimizing males and that somehow spoke to a larger problem in society, would Sarkeesian come to the defense of disempowered males? I should hope so, but for some reason, I’m not sure.
Of course, I wouldn’t care if she didn’t; I would just like to know if she’s at least willing to be consistent.
Last, I couldn’t help but wonder why Sarkeesian’s critique was limited to video games. If the problem of disempowering and objectifying women is prevalent in video games, it is certainly prevalent in movies and television, and perhaps it’s prevalent in the entertainment industry because it is, most unfortunately, prevalent everywhere. The problem, then, is not violence in video games, or even violence in movies and TV, but violence, abuse and objectification of human beings, male, female, gay, lesbian, black or white. Assholes and abusers will probably always exist, so I’m not here to offer a particularly optimistic view on stamping out all three of those anytime soon, but in this case, video games provide yet another example of art imitating life, not the other way around.