prokopetz:

snugglebunchesofeyes: rathianrosa: agidine: skipperthethird: This is fine This is fine This is fine. This is fine This is fine This is fine This is fine This is fine This is fine But these are bad Here’s the thing, any gender can be sexualized. So when criticizing the way a character dresses, don’t let your personal thoughts interfere, try to be objective. IS DEMI FIEND REALLY BEING USED AS AN EXAMPLE OF MALE SEXUALIZATION IM HOWLING [presents a bazillion examples of male power fantasies] IM BEING OPPRESSED those guys don’t grunt/moan like they’re on the verge of orgasm when they get hit in game, and don’t have alt costumes such as “sexy swim suit edition” or “virginal schoolboy”. nice try though. Plus, a big part of it is choice. If you want to play as a burly dude prancing about in a speedo, you can totally do that, but you don’t have to. Relatively few games feature guys dressed like that to begin with, and even those that offer it often don’t make it mandatory.

On the flip side, in some genres it’s legitimately difficult to find a female protagonist who isn’t wearing what appears to be the Sexy Hallowe’en Costume version of whatever her real outfit ought to be have been. Even leaving aside the sex-fantasy-versus-power-fantasy issue (and your typical straight guy’s inexplicable inability to distinguish between the two, particularly when lady characters are involved), treating the two classes of depictions as interchangeable necessarily depends upon the premise that they’re equally accessible, and this manifestly is not the case.



Also, look at their poses!



Stand up and try posing the way the women in the pictures here are posed. Feel how impractical that would be for the fighting they look like they’re supposedly doing? There’s no physical power in their stances, they’re precarious at best and literally going to hit the ground facedown at worst. How powerful do you feel posed like this, do you think you could win a fight against someone of equal skill if you were posing like this?



Now try posing like the men. They’re mostly shown with feet either planted or in a boxer’s stance, arms loose or realistically posed. Their torsos are not twisting into a weird and uncomfortable position to display themselves to the viewer. Feel the difference between this pose and the others.



The male characters are designed to be your stand-in to do things. They’re maybe a little more muscled or attractive so you can enjoy the feeling of being powerful or attractive. They’re meant to appeal to men, they’re supposed to be what men want to be. But they’re also meant to move in a way that feels normal and reasonable without being distracting.

The female characters are there to be looked at. They aren’t designed to apeal to women, they don’t have women’s power fantasies in mind, they’re not supposed to be what women want to be. They’re supposed to be what men want to see. They pose unnaturally in order to display their bodies for sexual titillation. The realism of their movements is less important than their purpose as sexy art for male players.

