Why feminist gaming discussions confuse and infuriate me: the modern schism of reappropriation

[FieryTrainwreck]

Feminist gaming discussions give me white hot murder frenzy of the purely academic variety. There seems to be an alternating premise of reappropriation versus objective criteria, and the choice for deployment corresponds very closely with whichever argument happens to be more successful in any given situation.

I'll try to sum up the apparently opposing theories as best I can:

1) Certain traits are inherent to women, and a character who is rich in the positive female traits while offering little or no representation of the corresponding negatives is an example of a good, feminist-approved character.

2) Certain traits are inherently positive regardless of gender, and a female character who demonstrates a wealth of these positive traits without succumbing to as many negatives (male or female) is an example of a good, feminist-approved character.

I think the confusion between these two lenses, and the random and rapid interchange between them, generates the vast majority of the frustration with this issue. And it's not just that people are talking about different things and failing to communicate those differences. I think people adopt one theory or the other for the sole purpose of being right in any given argument. The inconsistency and lack of clarity is fucking intolerable.

Should we think about labeling these ideologies more distinctly so that people generally know what the hell everyone is talking about? Do the terms already exist and we're just not using them?

Captcha: pea brain...

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

These are the two branches of modern, third wave feminism. The first is actually pretty small, mostly belonging in groups of feminist that comes from very traditional societies (you could also say deeply religious feminists). The other stance, that traits are universal and society ascribes them to gender, is far more common in the large majority of feminism.

It all depends on whatever your feminism wants to "promote the greatness of the feminine" and embrace the female gender role as empowering (I think it is stupid, since that gender role is exactly what all previous feminists have fought against) or if you want to go for complete gender equality and a less gender-focused society.

If it is any consolation, these two differing viewpoints tend to be at odds within the feminist movement too and the debate can be pretty ugly at times. I'd suggest PMing Evilthecat on this forum, he probably knows what their scholarly names are.

 

[Phasmal]

Your screenname is an appropriate forecast for the thread.

Though looking at your definitions, I can't say I'm `arguing` for either of those, but if I had to choose I guess it would be the second one?
But I'm not saying female characters have to have `less negatives` than male ones.
Now, I'm engaging my parachute so I can watch this thread explode from a safe distance.
Farewell!

 

[Smooth Operator]

Yet again in the gaming section, take this to politics and religion where you can flame on freely and we can all happily ignore it.

 

[Nickolai77]

If i learnt anything from that "Anita's done her research" thread, it's that a number of Escapists are more Feminist than they realise...but are just massively bias against the movement itself. The number of times people quoted me to argue that Anita's wrong to think that behaviour is a universal, non-gendered trait and i had to explain that Anita actually agrees with you...I kind of realised that ironically enough the posters i was responding to were more Feminist than i was.

Anyway, statement 1 in the OP would reflect the view of a minority of Feminists who are connected to the New Age Movement and believe in emphasising positive "natural" feminine qualities. Most other secular feminists would disagree that such positive feminine traits are inherently female and can be applied to men as well.

Statement 2 would reflect the more mainstream view of Feminism- that behavioural traits are universal and not tied to either gender, therefore good female (and indeed male) characters should display a variety of behaviours- some of those behaviours not traditionally ascribed to the characters sex.

I think prejudice against the Feminist movement is a problem which prevents coherent discussion as people are approaching the debate with inaccurate views about the subject and this leads to the kind of problems that the Op describes. I think part of the problem is that many people (myself included, to an extent) feel that once anti-discrimination legalisation against women was passed it was mission complete for feminism, so really the Feminists are beating a dead horse. If a woman can vote, run for political office, work full-time and get paid equal wages- where this the patriarchal oppression?

I've been through university and had the pleasure of working with many highly intelligent and motivated women, but none of the women i met were really interested in Feminism. In fact when we looked at it in International Relations (Yes, there is a Feminist perspective to IR) it was met with a significant degree of derision from both men and women alike. The only people who i've met who are actually interested in Feminism have been from the LGBTQ community. So i've never got the impression that heterosexual women feel oppressed because of their gender- but i do often hear complaints and fears expressed of sexual harassment. Many women feel threatened by sexually aggressive males, but they don't connect it to the wider perspective argued for by Feminism.

This should be a worry for Feminist scholars because it appears to me that their main pool of supporters- female university undergrads, is drying up. Quite a few students, both male and female if asked will identify as feminist, but only in the liberal traditional sense, meaning they believe in legal and moral equality between men and women. They're more...disinterested shall we say in other areas such as patriarchal norms in society or the social construction of gender. They aren't post-modern Feminists. To an extent, i feel the feminist scholars have themselves to blame because i get the impression that they and other post-modernist scholars have devoted more time and energy into winning academic respectability (with use of fancy terminology amongst other things) at the cost of alienating ordinary people and in particular undergraduates getting the discipline stuck in an ivory tower.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I just like to play games, myself. And if they happen to feature lovely ladies, why the hell not?

The longer these feminist threads keep continuing the more simple minded I seem to be getting.

 

[WoW Killer]

I don't know. I really don't know. I've read a fair few of the Sarkeesian topics (who I'd never heard of until there was such a backlash against her; shows how counter-productive that backlash is) and I do not understand what the argument is about, who is offended by what and why. Particularly, I don't understand why the argument is so heated and emotive.

To me, Feminism is something of importance predominantly to the third world. In South America, Africa, the Middle-East and South-East Asia, woman are uneducated, impoverished and constrained to an animal cycle of reproduction and child care. The result is mass poverty, for both men and women. As John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill argued in The Subjection of Women, it is economically ludicrous to have a society where half your population is unable to contribute outside of the home*. Women's freedom, reproductive rights and the rights to education and work, is in fact the most powerful tool there is in the fight against poverty around the world (perhaps something that is under appreciated in the West now that we have such things). That's Feminism as I see it.

The current argument, and particularly how it pertains to gaming, seems to be about offense. In other words, we shouldn't be offensive to women, and that which is offensive to women is bad. I think this can be stated in a more clinical and less emotive manner (and one that is more appealing to the industry). Women play games. Women buy games. The market is not male dominated, or not anymore. Perhaps twenty years ago it could be said that gamers were predominantly male, and that the focus of developers in making games aimed at a male audience was mostly "correct" from a business sense. But not anymore. If you offend women, then you offend people who might otherwise have bought your product. It is in the developers own interests to acknowledge their female customers, and frankly, to not piss them off. That's all we need here; we don't need a moral basis for this.

As for what is offensive to women: I hate to state the obvious here, but something is offensive to women if and only if women are offended by it. As a non-woman, I'm very happy to take a step back and let women decide for themselves what they are offended by. It's really not my place to define such a thing on their behalf.

*Consider you're putting your nation at an equivalent of 50% unemployment (assuming perfect employment among males, which will never happen). Compare this with current day Greece (well known to be in the shit), which has an unemployment figure of less than 25%.

 

[veloper]

The most interesting characters in games, cinema and books are flawed characters.

The funny thing here is that there's so much confusion about whether sex appeal is a good or a bad trait.

There may be some people who really want to be unattractive themselves, but I'm willing to take the bet they would be the tiny minority.
So that means that there are situations where people dislike seeing positive traits in other people, real or fake. Positives become negatives. This is understandable, in a competition.

Considering the games sell, young men must atleast be okay with seeing the idealized forms of characters, both men and women, in their games. These characters are often very shallow, as in poorly characterised.

Focussing on changing just the appearance of these characters, doesn't make them any less shallow.
At best such toned-down characters may appear to be, on the surface, a little more commonplace.
This is never, ever going to happen, aslong as shallow B-movie characterisation is all we're aiming for, regardless of whether the NPCs are clothed in bikinis or overalls.
B-movies attract a certain audience for a reason and this is no different for videogames. That reason is all the conventions that go with the genre.

If anyone wants to advance the gaming genres for real, what they should ask for is properly flawed protagonists and not make self-contradicting demands about "the female protaganist has to be strong, athletic, but not sexy, but not too ugly either, a little sex-appeal is okay" blah, blah, blah and more very shallow demands.

Ask instead for personality traits in game characters, including undesireable ones.

 

[yuval152]

I just like to play games, myself. And if they happen to feature lovely ladies, why the hell not?

The longer these feminist threads keep continuing the more simple minded I seem to be getting.

This,seriously who cares? I don't care if the protagonist or the antagonist is a man or a woman I just want to play the game.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Request to move to religion and politics.

 

[McMarbles]

Wow, what an appropriate username.

*looks forward to yet another discussion involving men telling us what feminism REALLY means*

 

[Scorpid]

You know this makes me think about an example of what I hate about games. Recently I got a friend of mine to loan me Freelancer after he's been telling me how awesome it is for years. So I'm playing through it and all through the game from mission one on, you have a female wing man named Juni. She's this asian lady and she's a completely confident pilot never acting meek or backing down from a challenge. Sure she panics sometimes but it's reasonable considering the circumstance and it's clearly not because of gender, if they had swapped her out for a male Wingman from the start and he paniced it wouldn't of raised an eyebrow. BUT halfway through the game you meet a guy and he wants you to attack this heavily guarded fortress with his small band, and your character says "Well what about Juni" (who's around and certainly at the base but not present for this one meeting) and the man responds "We're doing this alone. Just us." If given the option I would of been like "...wait why?!" but instead the player character responds "Makes sense.". IT MADE NO SENSE, there was no reason to not bring Juni along except for the fact she was a she, which apparently made her unfit for such a risky mission. EVERY mission up to this point has been fighting off or running away from overwhelming odds but when it came time to purposefully run towards overwhelming odds Juni became some sort of liability. Oh and Juni hears about this as you GUYS are flying off to do this mission and she's just like 'whatever just please come back safe' she's not insulted not asking 'WTF!?' just wants her man to stay safe.

 

[Snowbell]

Ok, that's it, enough with the feminism threads! All those in favour of becoming gender male so these silly gender arguments can stop say aye!

...

*a tumbleweed blows past in the gentle breeze*

'come clean' ok captcha, the truth is I'm just tired of everyone defining 'good' and 'bad' traits of women, can't we just let women be who they/we want to be? I only want to play my video games I don't want to have to keep analysing who I'm playing as, if it's a well written character can't I simply play the game?

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Wasn't really a feminist thread. It was actually about the role that semantics, and confusion of basic premises, plays in discourse. People seem to rotate their feminist arguments depending on what might succeed in a given discussion. That's why it "never ends".

If you're talking about an empowered but typically sexualized female character like Bayonetta, you've got people decrying her overt physical traits and cock-tease mannerisms. If you're talking about a strong and relatively asexual character like Alyx, you've got people decrying her lack of traditionally feminine characteristics.

There doesn't seem to be any proper discussion of the lenses we use to judge these characters, and I think this is why all of these threads degenerate into flamewars.

Incidentally, it's rather comical that a number of people responding to this thread completely missed the fucking point. It was not "the same old feminist" thread.

 

[ResonanceSD]

These are the two branches of modern, third wave feminism.

What exactly is "third wave" feminism? Is it the empowerment phase?

 

[FalloutJack]

Problem with feminism: Some women are both the eye candy and like being the eye candy, complete with certain fetishes and no hang-ups. I have no problem with women being the way they want to and objecting to whatever it is they want to object to, one way or the other. But it's not a united front, so please keep that in mind.

 

[DevilWithaHalo]

These are the two branches of modern, third wave feminism.

What exactly is "third wave" feminism? Is it the empowerment phase?

You'll get plenty of answers, but they usually boiled down to the following for me...

First wave Feminism - fought for equal rights.
Second wave Feminism - fought for equal opportunity.
Third wave Feminism - fights for equal treatment.

Treatment often involves ideas such as; gender roles, social protocols & expectations, and concepts of priviliges. The big "argument" comes on the specifics of how each side perceive equal treatment for the involved genders in the given circumstance.

I'll stop here.

 

[General Twinkletoes]

You're not writing an essay for uni here, it doesn't need to be so obtuse and complicated.
"the modern schism of reappropriation"
Was that part of the title even necessary?

Anyway, OT:

If you're talking about a strong and relatively asexual character like Alyx, you've got people decrying her lack of traditionally feminine characteristics.

How many people decry that, save for idiotic 13 year old's who want boobs and only boobs from their video game characters? How many people who honestly want a good character really complain that Alyx's personality isn't defined by her gender? I don't think feminists do, and the ones that do are those crazy one's. Keep in mind feminism isn't a single unified movement, and some members of it are idiots, just like in any other group.