全 29 件のコメント

[–]russinista 11ポイント12ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thanks for this!

One thing that I really like is the whole 'Naked Ogre' discussion.

Personally my biggest gripe with popular culture (movies, games, etc) is the lack of 'ugly' female characters.

The only times 'ugly' females are allowed is when they are transformed à la 'the ugly duckling' story.

It is also disheartening that one outcome of the feminist fight for equality is that men must start to pay attention to their looks and not that women can stop doing it - but I guess that's what we get for living in a capitalist society

[–]Sithrak 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

The only times 'ugly' females are allowed is when they are transformed à la 'the ugly duckling' story.

The other exception is hags and witches. But that is not helping, is it. Simply reinforces the massive ageism non-young women struggle with.

[–]CorenMajere 5ポイント6ポイント  (3子コメント)

Yay, this finally made it to menslib! A bunch of random thoughts in no particular order.

  • When you say, "to address the “Naked Ogre” problem, I tried removing all the cards I tagged as “ugly.”", what exactly did you mean? I can see two obvious ways of doing this that would lead to dramatically different results: (1) removing them from their respective categories but keeping them in the population and (2) straight up removing them from the population. Could you clarify this?

  • For women, your categories all relate to clothing or the lack thereof (also almost true of men, but they get one category--muscles--that isn't directly related to clothing). I don't want to argue that those categories are inappropriate, but I do think they are incomplete. Did you consider other possible categories, such as playfulness, intimacy or vulnerability being shown in poses or expressions? Those can be more powerful than simple nudity in terms of sexualization.

  • This paragraph really resonated with me, though possibly not in the way you intended.

The strong association leads to female characters that are nonsensical and hard to relate to. Warrior females end up wearing “bikini armor,” even in winter environments. Characters that are supposed to be hardened warriors have a disconcerting focus on attractive hair and clothing. The immersion is broken and for female audiences, these details can feel alienating, as many of us are not sexually attracted to women, and are instead looking for heroes we can relate to.

The way you put this mirrors the way I feel about male characters eerily well, particularly that last part about looking for heroes we can relate to and not finding them breaking immersion. I look at most of these fantasy men and find myself thinking they belong on the cover of a romance novel rather than in a game--fighters expose areas of the body that shouldn't be exposed in a given environment, the wrong muscles are emphasized for the weapons, armor and skills the character is using, etc. I usually end up playing female characters (when available) just because their portrayal doesn't break the immersion for me as much--though admittedly the fact I find men ugly and unattractive probably also contributes to that. ;)

  • Finally, I was wondering if you could expand your thoughts on this statement a bit.

The issue of sexualization is really one of inequality, so games wanting to feature sexual characters should focus on diversity and equal representation.

Specifically, how do you think the demographics of the target audience should play into this? I'm personally a bit torn on how I feel about that, as I think there is a very real danger that saying all games need to have equal representation will simply cause all games to be blandly developed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Personally, I'd rather see us push for something more like what we see in books, where while you rarely see a single book with equal representation in terms of relate-able characters, nearly everyone can at least find some books with characters they can relate to these days. As applied to games, that'd be make a wider variety of games rather than trying to stuff everything into every game.

[–]simplyelena[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

I removed the "Naked Ogre" cards from the population. You can compare those results with the results with the "Naked Ogre" cards still included, in the first two sets of results.

I considered other types of sexualization categories, like poses. I think I should have discussed my thought process about this more in the post because other people brought it up, too. The issue that I had is that I needed clear, objective criteria that I could observe to prevent claims that the results were biased. So I stuck to clearer features like clothing and skin. I considered other categories, too, like overall attractiveness, but again I just couldn't think of way to deal with it objectively.

I don't think that the demographics of the audience really play into the analysis if you're talking about social issues. What really matters for social issues are the implications and biases in the game, and how they relate to the larger social context. If it wasn't for the social context we live in, where games are primarily made with female characters sexualized for heterosexual male audiences, then it wouldn't be a problem to have some games out of a variety of games dedicated to heterosexual male audiences.

I'm interested in hearing more about what you relate to and don't relate to in male characters, how they make you feel about standards of ideal masculinity, and just your other thoughts about that, if you're interested in sharing.

[–]CorenMajere 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

If it wasn't for the social context we live in, where games are primarily made with female characters sexualized for heterosexual male audiences, then it wouldn't be a problem to have some games out of a variety of games dedicated to heterosexual male audiences.

I would word this a bit differently. I'd say that games in which female characters are sexualized are primarily made for heterosexual male audiences, and further such games make up the vast majority of games in which any characters are sexualized. That last part is where I think the problem is. I think heterosexual men tend to be turned off by the sexualization of men just as you describe women being turned off, and thus it makes sense to me anyway to make more games that appeal to women rather than trying to equalize things in every game, either by reducing the sexualization of women or increasing the sexualization of men. Doing the former just means that we're saying that playing out sexual fantasies is wrong, while the latter will probably just make more people uncomfortable rather than really helping women.

This is why I made the comparison with books. There are some genres in which one gender is sexualized to a greater extent than the other in order to appeal to a specific audience. For example, most romance novels sexualize men more than they do women because they are written to appeal to heterosexual women looking for a sexual fantasy. Similarly, there are sub-genres of fantasy where the opposite is true--particularly relevant here since Warcraft and thus Hearthstone inherited a lot from them. There are also genres in which sexualization is not present in any meaningful way for either gender. Similarly there are lots of games which do not sexualize female characters (admittedly including many that simply don't have any female characters) that still primarily target heterosexual male audiences simply because "gamer" (or perhaps, "hardcore gamer") is practically synonymous with "heterosexual male" in many people's minds.

I'm interested in hearing more about what you relate to and don't relate to in male characters, how they make you feel about standards of ideal masculinity, and just your other thoughts about that, if you're interested in sharing.

I don't have time to do this justice at the moment, but I'll try to address it either later today or sometime this weekend.

[–]cash-or-reddit 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I would say that books are definitely better on representation than video games, but I wouldn't hold them up as a standard of equality. If you look at mainstream fantasy and sci-fi, for example, the characters are still largely male, with female characters primarily serving as love interests. The existence of romance as a genre doesn't really balance this out, since sci-fi and fantasy are theoretically gender-neutral genres.

[–]icanteventho 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

These are really interesting and there is a dearth of info on it generally so thanks for posting!

[–]xmrsmoothx 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thanks for doing some work with regards to sexualized men. I agree it's probably a more complex role than that of sexualized women, but I appreciate that you took the time to look at it.

[–]kylecat22 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

I really enjoyed this article because it explained things and didn't point fingers or blamed people. It fairly and objectively looked at the system and explained the inequalities, using the game as an example

[–]ProfM3m3 6ポイント7ポイント  (5子コメント)

I think it's important that we keep in mind that its a cartoon art style which relies on exaggerating normal features of people so you get things like the warrior looking like the human version of Kobe beef and sounding like a death metal vocalist.

A small note about "alienating to people who aren't attracted to women" I may be wrong but judging by the comments I see on Danzig music videos, and the things that my female friends say about Chris Hemsworth, there should be plenty of eye candy for people who like muscular men or cartoon depictions of them rather.

The author also mentions difficulty for some people to be able to relate to the hearthstone characters though I have no idea how anyone relates to these characters at all considering that they pictures that have like 10 lines of very simple dialogue like "hello" and "good game" and have no character development whatsoever.

I also dont like the idea the author has of bare thighs or midriff being an inherently sexual form of dress is overly puritanical and kind of regressive. There are plenty of places where people dress with thighs and midriff exposed for the pure practicality of it, where I live even men will wear short shorts if they have to be out in the heat for a significant amount of time.

The part about form-fitting clothing is somewhat puzzling too, if it were an overtly sexual form of dress then why do so many men and women wear skinny jeans and tight shirts every day?

In the cleaveage section the author uses and example of an elf and then talks about what's acceptable in real life in our American culture that still has a heavy puritanical influence. Also in many forms of fantasy, especially works by blizzard, elves of both genders are depicted with significantly less clothing than humans would wear and fictional elvish culture usually emphasizes an appreciation of nature and preservation of things in their natural form.

I dont have time to go over the whole thing now but ill post an edit with the rest later

[–]simplyelena[S] 9ポイント10ポイント  (4子コメント)

Hi thanks for your comments and honesty. I am the author btw. I think that I need to clarify that none of those characteristics were intended to be negative things. I think that wearing sexy clothes is fine and healthy. I just think the issue is that women and men are not sexualized equally, and sometimes the degree that women are sexualized takes away from immersion in the game. Sometimes it's nonsensical, like when female characters wear bikini armor in snow. And sometimes it's about characterization, like when a tough female warrior dresses in a way you know she would never choose to. These are just cards, true, but they are based on characters built up in the Warcraft universe that people do relate to.