So.  I said I’d do this and here it is.  I have a theory and I wanted to share it. Seemed topical given the online battle going on over video games.

What is up with female representation in video games?  Is it sexism?  Misogyny?  Ignorant?  Well, I have an idea and let me share it with you.  As usual, please, indulge me and read to the end.  It is along read so I hope you all are buckled in.

What is my theory?  That the problems with representation isn’t to do with the negative outlook on women from society.  It comes from the inherent positive view of women society has.  That is to say, the view that women are inherently nice and pure, that we shield women from harm, that society cares much more about the plight of women than it does men.

I’m sure I’ve already lost a lot of you.  But please, read beyond the break.  Give me a fair shake.  I’m a woman and I’ve been a gamer for a long time, probably close to a decade and a half.  I’ve seen these issues evolve and I’ve experienced a lot of this behavior in real life.  So, I’ll say again.

Give me a fair shake.

The Female Power Fantasy

One of the first things society needs to understand is the concept of idealization and the female power fantasy.  A lot of people already understand what a “male power fantasy” is but people seem to ignore even the possibility that a female power fantasy exists.  Male and female power fantasies both involve heavy idealization of their forms, appeal to conventional beauty standards and to be powerful and in control of themselves and others.

The idea of the female power fantasy is not new, though the idea of accepting it seems to be a hurdle society doesn’t seem to like.  Looking at something as widespread as cosplay is enough to prove that many women like dressing up in sexy outfits and looking badass at the same time.  Playing similar characters has a similar effect.

The idea that women must be somehow protected from their own sexuality or idealized forms, when men don’t need to be is pretty condescending.  Many male characters adhere to idealized male forms.  The double standard, of course, is that when a male character is sexy it is empowerment but when a female character is sexy, it is sexism.

Society needs to get over the fact that women can have a power fantasy and that power fantasy can include looking sexy and being badass.

How will this help video games?  Developers can focus on what actually constitutes a female power fantasy and employ it without fear of being chastised.  We’ll see more games and characters like Bayonetta 1 and 2, where powerful, sexy women are prominent and people won’t feel a need to decry it as sexism.  The fact that so many women cosplay as Bayonetta and enjoy the series should be enough to justify why this would do good for female representation in games.

Damsels in Distress:  How We Hate Women in Pain

Let’s be real here.  Society hates seeing a woman in pain.  We, as a whole, dislike seeing women suffer, women hurt and women in general anguish.  Men?  We tend to be very okay with the concept of them dying, being hurt and being injured.

Consider the outcry about a game where a male protagonist spends his time gunning down hundreds of female NPCs.  How offensive would that be to society as a whole?  Now flip the genders, a female character gunning down male minions and suddenly it becomes socially acceptable.

We saw this in the Tomb Raider Reboot, where people were outright decrying the game as misogynistic and fetishizing abuse toward women, as Lara Croft was put through hell and back.  She was stabbed, impaled, crushed, beaten… and well just about every possible thing possible.

An example in media that I like to use is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Consider Black Widow and how much damage she takes in Avengers and Winter Soldier.  Compared to nearly every other character (Hulk notwithstanding due to being… well nearly invincible) she takes nearly no damage in the Avengers.  She gets smacked by Hulk (which frankly should’ve liquefied her but only left her with a limp for 5 minutes).  In Winter Soldier she is shot once, where Steve is shot, pummeled, thrown through glass, stabbed and electrocuted.  Hell, even Wilson and Fury got the crap kicked out of them more than Widow did.

Need more proof?  Imagine the torture scene from Casino Royale with a similar (but tailored for a woman) method of torture.  Imagine the outrage at that.

So why is this important?  Because we use pain to empathize with a character.  We put characters through hell and back, we hurt characters, we make them suffer, because we want to feel something for them.  The creators of Tomb Raider knew this.  Pain and suffering shows conviction, it shows fortitude, it lets us empathize and creates drama.

And, yes, in fairness, games that let you choose your gender typically do avert this.  And fighting games do usually involve female characters being beaten up.  But those tend to be in the name of context and immersion.  It’d be odd seeing the female characters in, say, a bloodbath like Mortal Combat  walk out of a  loss unscathed.

How will this help video games?  If developers could no longer fear the backlash like Tomb Raider got, we’d get more female characters in action roles.  We could see more female characters put through hell.  Consider the games where male characters are put through that hell.  Adam Jensen, nearly every iteration of Snake, etc.  Their pain has purpose and the story they’re in wouldn’t be the same without it.

Femtality:  Violence and Women

This is a minor one.  Most people realize that women can kill, can fight, etc.  But I’ve noticed a general trend.  Women tend to avoid brutality and their kills are usually very clean, save for the case of self defense.

Let’s go back to Marvel.  Black Widow.  Consider her entire combat repertoire.  We see Thor, Iron Man and Cap all do relatively brutal things, ranging from pummeling, smashing and generally ‘messier’ kinds of fighting.  Even Hawkeye, who is similar, tends to have more brutal kills due to him using a bow and arrow.

We don’t usually see women resort to brutal tactics EXCEPT in cases where they’re defending themselves.  We, as society, don’t like to acknowledge that women can be extremely violent just because they can.  We don’t have a female Kratos, for example.  In fact, I think given the amount of brutality Kratos exhibits, a lot of people would be put off by the fact that a female character would be eviscerating, impaling and slaughtering enemies like he does.

How would this help video games?  Like I said, there are women who kill in video games.  But lessening that social construct that women cannot be merciless killers or hyper violent would allow for some better depictions.  It’d help female characters break into genres far more dominated by male characters.  It’d get rid of the ‘damsel’ idea a lot of people have about women in video games when you, clearly, have women who’d be fine hacking and slashing her way through a wave of enemies.

Women and Morality: The Event Horizon

And this is where I get the hatemail.    Society does not like to address the fact that women can be monsters.  Nobody likes to admit that women can be abusers, sexual predators, pedophiles, alcoholics, drug addicts, sociopaths or psychopaths.

I applaud Dredd for the character of MaMa, but even though she was inherently cutthroat she didn’t really do much.  She had a male right and left hand to do the skinning, murder and killing for her.  And while she was clearly a corrupt and deadly character, we didn’t see a lot of that in action.

Women are usually portrayed as manipulative, liars or succubi, relatively non-violent, more passive failings.  Men often get portrayed as violent, abusive, alcoholic, murders, etc.  But in the real world, women can be these as well.  Society just doesn’t like to talk about that though.

Society is inherently better accepting that a man can cross the moral event horizon, rather than a woman.  In Fallout New Vegas, the characters with downright evil karma, the cannibals and rapists, are all men, for example.  Alice, the Madness Returns, has a male character that does very much cross the moral event horizon.  Hell, I don’t think I can recall a female protagonist with a drinking problem, like full blown alcoholism, drowning at the bottom of a bottle.

Society needs to come to terms with the idea that women are not infantile angels, incapable of atrocity or awful things committed against their fellow human beings.  It needs to stop condescending toward women, acting like they’re incapable of these acts.

How does this help video games?  Simple.  It gives us a greater range for characters.  Characters are often driven by their faults.  Rage, alcoholism, abuse, etc, are all extremely viable flaws for a protagonist to grapple with and come to terms with.  Meanwhile, some of the darker flaws, like torture, abuse, predatory nature, can create some truly disturbing villains, ones that become extremely memorable.  It allows women to have flaws… which ties into…

Unrealistic Standards:  How Female Characters don’t have to be Perfect

Women are not perfect. Women can have flaws.  Women can be weak or have failings.

I hate when characters like Lara or Ellie get criticized for being ‘weak’ and therefore it is a bad depiction of women.  Sorry, but women can and do have weakness, just like men do.  If anything, the fact that we don’t have male characters breaking down and showing this level of weakness shows society’s inherent discomfort with MEN showing emotion.  If anything, this gives female characters a greater range of emotion to explore.

But even then, not every woman needs to be strong in the way you think.  Everyone criticizes Princess Peach.  Peach is the perpetual, stereotypical damsel, right?  So why are you measuring her by her ability to kick ass when she’s a princess?  She’s a debutant, a princess, royalty.  Do you expect her to bust out a hammer and start kicking ass?

What people seem to forget about Peach is her character.  She is kind, compassionate, caring.  Her people love her, she is the heart of the Mushroom Kingdom.  We’ve seen repeatedly that her subjects adore her and worry for her when she is in danger.  Everyone forgets games like Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door where she tries to escape herself, where she is extremely kind, extremely gentle and extremely compassionate, to the point where she actually sways a computer into caring about her.

Princess Peach is not some kick ass warrior.  She isn’t perfect.  But she’s a different kind of character.  And a good one when you look at her in that light.

Hell, even in the same universe we have an example.  Who the fuck gives Luigi shit for acting the way he does?  People love Luigi.  Luigi is awesome.  But he’s cowardly, lazy and has an inferiority complex.  Which is to say a lot more personality than Mario has.  Luigi isn’t perfect but nobody says that Luigi sucks.  No, Luigi is made all the better for his flaws.  And Peach is the same.

And this is where people bring up “Metroid: Other M” and say gamers don’t WANT a woman who has flaws.  Bullshit.  I’ve heard, repeated sentiments that Metroid: Other M would’ve been a great game if it was “Metroid Genesis”.  If it was a fresh, new Samus coming to terms and facing Ridley for the first time and being inexperienced.  But it wasn’t.  People were angry because Samus’ reaction was not what we knew from where she was in the timeline, where she had faced Ridley at least twice (and upwards to a half dozen times before if you count Prime games) prior.  She was supposed to be a badass Bounty Hunter at the time.

People need to get over the idea that every female character needs to be perfect.  There are other ways of being strong, other ways of being a good character.  Characters having flaws makes them interesting and combined with the previous entries here, it would be a good thing to keep in mind.  Flaws, not strengths, make or break a character.

The Booker Explanation

I think this entire report could be summed up with a single question.  Would Bioshock Infinite work as well if Booker was a woman?  The answer is no.  The game relies on too many of the above issues that a lot of people would be made extremely uncomfortable with a female Booker Dewitt.

Booker is an absolute monster.  Would people be as accepting to a woman who sold her daughter?  Who was an alcoholic?  Who committed war crimes?  Who was unapologetically racist as Comstock and who killed her husband?  Who kept her daughter locked in a tower?

And Booker is violent.  How do you think people would react to you brutally drowning and bashing the head in of a female Comstock?!  How do you think people would react to a female booker snapping the necks of female police officers?  How would you feel about gunning down a dozen members of “The Sorority of the Order of the Raven”?

And Booker gets put through hell.  He is nearly killed by a claw hook, nearly falls to his death, has his hand stabbed (potentially), is pummelled repeatedly and thrown out of a blimp, and is ultimately drowned.   In the DLC you see him get impaled and killed in first person.

I admit, in Burial at Sea 2, Elizabeth does do a lot more than a lot of female characters do.  But not nearly as much as Booker.  She’s a stealth character, making her less violent.  She is tortured and hurt, though not nearly as much a Booker (and the fact that it was meant to put Atlas squarely into the “absolute monster” position) and she does make a mistake.  But even then, everything she does apparently turns out for the better, even her mistake ends up causing something really good to happen.

I honestly feel that if Bioshock Infinite was released with a female protagonist, it’d be ripped to shreds by a lot of people for the above listed reasons.  You want that game, with a female character like Booker?  You want characters with that level of depth, story and fault?  Then we need to stop acting like this is the work of ‘misogyny’ and start realizing that it is because society has an overwhelmingly positive view of women.

Thank you all for reading.  If you enjoyed this, reblog and recommend to others.