Personally I'm a little unsure. There are two sides to this and geniuenly don't know who I would ultimately choose to side with in the end.
I mean I don't want to slut shame, if a pretty young woman is comfortable with her prettiness and has a kind of flirty personality, more power to her. If it's who she is and she likes doing it go for it then fine. I mean hell it's not exactly easy being a good looking woman in gaming presses precisely because of the stereotype of you just using your looks to seduce us gullible men, I mean that whole incident with Jade Raymond of Assassin's Creed instantly being accused of being a 'booth babe' and only hired for her looks just because she was a woman who just so
happened to be reasonably attractive that obviously meant she did no real work whatsoever. If it were a
James Raymond you know as well as I do there would be no equivalent backlash, certainly not that vile cartoon drawn up of her by some repulsive misogynist prick.
Fuck I still get a mixture of anger and amazement when I see people angrily accuse
Anita Sarkeesian of 'dolling herself up for the boys'. I mean for fuck's sake people really will find
any excuse at this point but still my god, she puts on a little bit of eye liner and a little bit (a tiny amount) of lipstick before going before the camera and this is 'dolling herself up?' Couldn't just be to look presentable for the camera, couldn't just be that I dunno
she likes to look nice but I really just can't believe a reasonably good looking woman who uses a little bit of makeup before going on camera is being 'dolled up' now.
Fuck, go away Emma Stone:
Apparently THIS is what glamour looks like:
Yeah you fashion guru, you WEAR that checkered shirt! It was specially imported from a top range boutique in France. Fucking hell...
It's just amazing watching video game players on forums leap to defend the rights of CONSTRUCTED FICTIONAL CHARACTERS with NO REAL AGENCY of their own to 'choose' to dress in outfits too revealing to even be called underwear, THEN spin around and vilify ACTUAL people who have ACTUAL agency over how they choose to dress. Truly amazing to behold.
But then on the other side of the coin is the other issue, namely the idea that what message people like Lisa Foiles or Jessica Chobot or any other 'hot' girl journalists or media personalities may accidentally be sending to the female audience even if they don't mean to. Namely that if you want to fit in with the gaming crowd (or any mainstream media crowd) you
HAVE to be like this. You
HAVE to be gorgeous, that is the textbook standard. IF you are even slightly overweight you are out, if you look older than just turned 21 you are out and if you have any 'unusual features' go to hell you monstrosity. Likewise if you are attractive you HAVE to flaunt it, you have to wear cleavage revealing tops, you have to pose provocatively, you have to put endless amounts of effort into your appearance and likewise you have to be flirty and sexy to your male audience. Because you are female your media personality is 'the hot one', that's all you get to be and you aren't allowed to object to raunchy comments directed at you, you HAVE TO LIKE IT. And you had better start objectifying other women too even if you aren't into that kind of thing not because it benefits you but because YOU ARE REQUIRED TO DO IT BECAUSE ITS HOT and the only way to be accepted is to be HOT. We all know the stereotype of girls who will make flirtatious comments about other women and talking about how much they 'love boobs' and will make out with each other at parties and while doubtlessly there ARE women who genuienly like these things I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable amount of that is in fact social pressure after years of media personalities like this (and every female character HAVING to be sexy no matter what) the message has just been sent saying 'this is the only way you will be accepted'.
I mean hell we see the flipside of this in gaming culture, it may sometimes be bad for you if you're pretty but heaven fucking help you if you are overweight, older or have less than conventional features. I saw a lot of the harassment of Jennifer Hepler for example and the majority of it were really vile fat jokes. That's the cross road girls gamers seem to get, too pretty and your a slut, anything less and you're an ugly cow.
But no of course there's
no sexism issues in games none whatsoever.
So right now it's kind of a crossroad and both ends lead to someone losing. The best I could say is that I wouldn't want people like Lisa Foiles or Chobot or any number of other pretty flirty faces to vanish from gaming media, but I also don't think it's fair for that to be the sole representation either. However there is one person I can think of on the interwebs who does it perfectly and is a great spokesperson for how the female gender could be represented in future 'geek media' (and yes I am a manly manly manly man and therefore my maleness might make me not the best spokesman so you can perhaps take this with a grain of salt as there are some thing women are better at discussing than men and perhaps this could be a case of that)
Lindsay Ellis, a.k.a the Nostaliga Chick:
Now sure Lindsay is a good looking woman, a
very good looking woman. Hell given enough makeup she can downright look
radiant. But she also defies the trap that Foiles and Chobot have fallen into for several reasons:
1: Her persona is not entirely based around 'look how sexy I am'. She is funny, she is very informative. When I watch her videos I laugh and feel informed at the same time, she knows her stuff and has a dry cool wit and unlike other female media personalities I never get a sense of 'look how quirky and adorable I am'. She
is quirky and has an adorable charm about her but it comes across more like that's just her rather than a show for the cameras, no more than Doug Walker with his little eccentricities during his 'Nostalgia Critic' reviews. Unlike other 'quirky girls' who are blatantly trying to portray the ideal nerd girlfriend Lindsay really does feel like a 'by women for women' sort of a thing.
2: She doesn't look sexy all the time. Like I said sometimes she can be gorgeous, in the Nostalgia Critic Moulin Rouge review for example or the Show Girls one or recently in her Addams Family review. But she can also just look normal, dressing in normal clothes with the bare minimum of makeup put on. Hell a lot of the time she doesn't even bother with that, sometimes she looks like she just got out of bed and it's laundry day and do you know what that takes from her persona? NOTHING. She's still funny and she's still informative and has a likeable presence. Hell she's so adverse to the stereotype of girl reviewer must look sexy that in her Charlies Angels review she actually spent the whole thing in a 'Burka' (was actually something else, Nella mentioned... more on her in a moment). So the message this sends when she does don attractive clothing is not 'I have to be sexy or the boys won't like me' but rather 'Yeah I like to get dressed up sometimes, deal with it'. This is the message I'd like to see sent, there is nothing wrong with being sexy but you don't HAVE to dress yourself up if you don't want to.
3: Nella. Her most prominent right hand woman in her videos is Nella, who is overweight, wears glasses and is not unattractive so much as just unconventional and her being there and being funny as hell and likeable as hell sends the message that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. That 'sexy' is not the ONE thing a woman can bring to the table and that in turn there is more than one way to BE sexy.
That's just one example of a female persona I really like and why exactly that is and I think that Lindsay represents how an ideal female host should be. Be normal, don't be super sexy and upfront all the time and don't be afraid to have some variety in the types of women represented. You can still have sexy flirty ladies, don't think I'm against that. I know there are women who geniuenly are that flirty and hell I'd defend Sasha Grey's right to be as flirtatious and raunchy as she damn well pleases and express herself sexually in any way she pleases (provided it stays strictly legal) and would angrily speak out against people trying to use that fact as a reason to vilify her. A woman can be sexy or flirty as much as she pleases, if Natalie Portman or Eliza Dushku want to pose nude and are comforable doing it, more power to them. If Anne Hathaway wants to go topless in a movie and rub against Jake Gyllenhal's muscles fuck she was Catwoman and the best singer in Les Mis, she can do that to her heart's content and I think no less of her for doing so.
There is nothing wrong with a woman who wants to be sexy and a man who finds her sexy because of it or the reverse. This is a thing that happens in the world and it is perfectly natural.
However when I see female characters reduced to objectified pieces of meat to be oggled over or hear a story about some conference where the women left in disgust because some idiot didn't even think it was worth asking if they were comfortable having strippers running around, when I find out that certain actresses did nude scenes because they were contractually obliged to and not because they wanted to and when I see time and time again the reinforced image that the only place for a woman be it in media real or fiction is if she's sexy I get angry.
There's nothing wrong with sexy women, the problem is that there is no real alternative. We need more female media personalities and lead characters who break the established mold and can say to women as a whole that their appearance is not an issue and no matter what they look like or their sexual appetite they are
people and are accepted as such.
...Wow this post went on too long. Back to homework now.
