Anita Sarkeesian’s newest Tropes vs Women installment is about the portrayal of women’s butts in video games. The response is exactly what you would expect. And for some reason I’m going to wade in.

Much celebrated at /r/kotakuinaction is a reply to Sarkeesian’s video by American McGee, designer of American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns. These are pretty well-known games, and clips from them are used by Sarkeesian in some of her videos of examples of a woman well-portrayed in video games. So it was interesting to me that McGee himself is very much not on Sarkeesian’s side when it comes to the issues she discusses.

While he often engages in the same psychologizing and disparagement-of-motives-rather-than-substance I see in a lot of criticisms of Sarkeesian’s stuff, nevertheless in the particular facebook post linked to above (here it is again) he presents at least a well organized argument with clear points to respond to, which have at least the appearance of plausibility. That’s great! Imma respond.

It’s important to note that a response to Sarkeesian from McGee is not quite on the same level as some rando (like me) on the internet saying whatever comes to mind. McGee is a well known game developer. Prima facie, his thoughts should have some weight. But what I am going to argue here is that he has failed to understand Sarkeesian’s view, and since that is the case, his perspective as a game developer doesn’t turn out to lend that much weight to his words.

(Who am I? Sort of a gamer, in that I play every chance I get. I just don’t get any chances any more, due to an embarrassment of riches in the having-kids department. Right now I play mostly Heroes of the Storm, and I’m terrible at it.)

Something I appreciate about Sarkeesian’s videos is her delivery style. She maintains a very even tone and an almost completely neutral facial expression. This rhetorical technique both highlights the strength of many of her arguments — she’s portraying them as standing on their own merits rather than on her own charisma — and sets many of her opponents up for criticism when they try to call her out for being in some way angry or hateful. Bit of a Judo move, really. (Indeed McGee himself takes this bait, or at least nibbles on it, when he, at the end of his response, praises Sarkeesian’s outtake video — a link to which I haven’t been able to find yet — for the way it shows her enjoying herself more than her final, published monologues. This is a bit like saying “Smile Anita!”.)

McGee’s response (which I will be responding to in just a paragraph or two or three I swear!) takes for the most part a similar tack, trying to present arguments that stand on their own merit without a lot of rhetorical flair. (His response is a little more pointed in tone, but just a little.) As a philosophy guy, I appreciate that! I feel like I’m in my element! And I intend to keep to the same level of civility here.

Okay so now on to the substantive response!

As I said above, I think McGee largely completely misunderstands Sarkeesian’s arguments. He generally (though not always) understands what views she is advocating for, but fails to understand her reasoning. So when he criticizes her reasoning, he fails to actually engage with her views, and so his criticisms fall flat.

Here’s what I take Sarkeesian to be saying in her video on women’s butts:

In video games, women’s butts are portrayed in an objectifying way much more often than men’s butts are.

2. This is a deliberate decision on game-makers’ part.

3. This fact illustrates aspects of our culture(s) which are harmful.

4. We can do better.

I’ll discuss each of these points in turn, as McGee responds to all of them.

In video games, women’s butts are portrayed in an objectifying way much more often than men’s butts are.

In Sarkeesian’s video, she exhibits and discusses several examples of women’s butts being highlighted in a way that seems to emphasize sexuality, as well as several examples where it seems men’s butts are being hidden from view, de-emphasized, and pointedly unsexualized. Such portrayal of examples with accompanying example is Sarkeesians main modus operandi and it is extremely common for people to interpret her as simply cherry-picking. McGee is no exception:

The trope being discussed is the portrayal of female butts in video games. And, you know, even with all the cherry picking Anita’s so famous for, she does sorta have a point. A fair number of video games, especially those with 3rd-person camera views, have featured some alluring female butts. (Bolding added.)

Here he not only accuses her of cherry picking in general, but applies that criticism to this particular case as well. Interestingly, he grants that she “sorta ha[s] a point,” but the point he grants is just that “a fair number” of games “feature… some alluring female butts.” That’s not her point. She is not just pointing out that some number of games have butts in them, rather, she is making a claim about a difference in how — and how often — women’s butts are portrayed as opposed to men’s. That point he does not explicitly grant, and in fact casts doubt on it indirectly through his criticism of her as “cherry picking.”

So is she cherry picking? First I’ll say what seems obvious to me but which also seems rarely to be acknowledged by Sarkeesian’s opponents in these discussions. Then I’ll say something about what it would actually take to determine whether or not Sarkeesian is cherry picking. I don’t know of anyone who has actually done that hard work.

First, the obvious point. Of course women’s butts are portrayed more often and more alluringly than men’s butts. Who could seriously doubt this? We are talking about products of pop culture marketed mostly to males. It is well-established that sex sells. If games were an exception, that would be miraculous. Sarkeesian hardly needs to present an explicit argument for this point. It genuinely goes without saying.

But suppose someone doesn’t grant that. (And perhaps they shouldn’t — careful investigation often overturns common sense!) What should they do? Simply calling “cherry picking” isn’t enough. What is needed (and btw I’ll say it would be interesting if Sarkeesian herself were to undertake this as well. I don’t think she needs to — see above — but it certainly could be done) is for a large, randomized sample of video games to be collected, operational definitions terms like “alluring” and “highlighted” and “obscured” need to be created, and then a team of researchers needs to look at the samples and apply the definitions. Then we’d have numbers that can be used to definitively show either that women’s butts are more typically portrayed and centered as sexy, or that they’re not.

But again: I mean, come on. We don’t really need to do that. We all know this is true (right?) and for this reason the criticism of “cherry picking” fails. The premise is already established by what we already know about how pop culture works. Finding examples is not cherry picking because the examples aren’t what is supposed to establish the premise.

This is a deliberate decision on game-makers’ part.

This is where McGee’s profession becomes most relevant, and where he comes closest to making a good point. In this particular video, Sarkeesian does make a claim that the decision to portray butts this way is deliberate, and does not offer any specific, explicit support for this view. McGee responds:

Just imagine for a minute that butt position IS mentioned during design meetings — how high of a priority does it get in relation to all the other considerations going into the design and tuning of a game? Aren’t there people in those meetings who are into necks? Thighs? Ankles? Does she really think there’s a room full of people who sit around debating these things?

But I don’t think Sarkeesian is implying that a committee explicitly discusses the butt question. (Note: For all I know, they sometimes do. Honestly I’d be surprised if this wasn’t the case on occasion, McGee’s own experience on his own games notwithstanding. But more importantly, I don’t think this is what Sarkeesian is implying.) People don’t have to explicitly discuss the question in order for the butt phenomenon to be deliberate. An artist simply needs to make a decision to portray the butt in a particular way, and a director just has to make a decision to put that asset (oh god that was unintentional I swear) in, conscious (or half-conscious) of the allure of the butt and its likely effect on sales. This is deliberate, even if never explicitly discussed.

McGee displays another misunderstanding in the quote above, when he asks “Aren’t there people in those meetings who are into necks? Thighs? Ankles?”

Sarkeesian simply isn’t arguing that the portrayal of women’s butts is led by the sexual proclivities of the game designers! Rather, her claim is that these things are driven by the desires developers think they see, so to speak, “in the market.” (Though she doesn’t say this explicitly in this video, it seems clear this would be her position given the general leftist tenor of her criticisms. I am sure I’ve seen her say it elsewhere but the appropriate reference eludes me right now. Bad blogger! Baaad blogger!)

That may seem a small point to make in the scheme of things but I think there’s an important disconnect between critics’ understanding of Sarkeesian’s views and reasoning, and her actual views and reasoning. This is a great example of just that.

Similarly, he says:

To suggest that one person (presumably a sexist, man-pig) can walk into this kind of environment and say, “make her butt the center of attention!” reveals Anita’s lack of understanding about how games are made and the people who make them.

But she literally never suggests that, nor even comes close. Again, this is a typical example of the way in which Sarkeesian’s critics often assume she believes things she’s given no indication of believing.

(Funny thing though — towards the end of his response, McGee recounts a case in which a game exec did almost exactly that. McGee discounts this as a single instance not showing any general pattern. But it’d sure be surprising if this single instance was absolutely, utterly atypical. That exec has his job for a reason. And who knows what filters exist that may prevent McGee himself from seeing this kind of behavior more explicitly in other contexts?)

McGee offers alternative explanations as to why women’s butts are placed the way they are in games, in terms of gameplay mechanics and what the player needs to be able to see on a character’s body in order for the UI to work best for the player. This does not address the apparent differential treatment of men and women in games which Sarkeesian gives examples of — so to this point I can only gesture above and repeat, of course such a differential exists, and if you really don’t think so, it wouldn’t be that hard to prove it doesn’t exists to within a degree of rigor appropriate for internet conversation.

With all that said, there does remain the question: Is this kind of thing a deliberate decision on gamemakers’ part? I can only imagine this is going to get a different answer for any given game’s context. Moreover, I am not sure why it would matter. Deliberate or not, the decision is made, and the question isn’t so much “are they doing it on purpose” but “does it matter that they do it and can we do anything about it?” So, on to the next points.

This fact illustrates aspects of our culture(s) which are harmful.

This is the fundamental “why should we care” point in Sarkeesian’s arguments, and it’s the one most fundamentally misunderstood by her critics. Very typically (and McGee is no exception) critics portray her as arguing that the portrayals she highlights in her videos are worth discussing because they have a specific, direct effect on the way women are treated. Sarkeesian has explicitly acknowledged in the past (again: bad blogger can’t find references) that the science is at least ambiguous as to whether this is true. But this isn’t why the portrayals are worth discussing! Even if they have no effect whatsoever on how actual women are treated, it practically necessarily remains true that these portrayals are caused by factors which, in turn, also harm women. Hence, these portrayals are discussed, in Sarkeesian’s videos, as examples and illustrations of the way our culture, and gaming culture in particular, acts as a signal showing that something is wrong.

Here’s what I mean, because I know that was probably a little vague. When Paul Revere runs through the streets of some colonial town or other hollering “The British are coming the British are coming,” it would make no sense to respond by saying “Well, Revere’s not causing the British to come, so we can safely ignore him!” This is silly of course! Instead, we recognize that Revere’s call acts as a signal that something is wrong, and we respond accordingly.

That’s the role that discussions like Sarkeesian’s can (and should) play, even in the absence of a direct causation relationship from games to the treatment of women.

(And I am not granting there’s no causal connection. As it happens, I think there is, but my point here is not about that but about the logic of Sarkeesian’s own discussions, and how they and their role are misunderstood by critics like McGee.)

This invites an interesting question which McGee (and in my reading, most of Sarkeesian’s critics) don’t ask because they don’t get what she is doing in the first place. If it turns out there’s no direct causal connection, and discussions like Sarkeesian’s instead serve to highlight a signal that something is wrong, then is it really a good idea to focus efforts on changing gaming culture? Wouldn’t that be something like shooting Revere because he brings us news of danger?

That issue may be complicated but I can say this at least. What the portrayal of women in gaming culture signals, is something we should all be talking about, because talking about things inspires the doing of things. If we talk about these issues by talking about gaming culture, then that is all to the good. And if we do something about these issues by doing something about gaming culture, then that too is all to the good.

We can do better.

Of course we can.

McGee doesn’t really address this point, because he seems to think there’s not a “better” for us to “do.” He does gesture at his version of “better” right at the end of the piece, when he suggests that Sarkeesian, just like the game exec who insisted on a game including an “upskirt” view of a female character, is “an unfortunate person who [can’t] see beyond the surface of a game character’s 3D model to the story inside.” So then, the suggestion from McGee would seem to be, Sarkeesian (and others sympathetic to her views, like me) should be thinking more about the people inside the sexualized portrayals, rather than the portrayals themselves. But of course the correct response to this is to remind McGee that there is no dichotomy between these two things. One can see the person inside the portrayal (if there is one) and the portrayal itself. Every good critic — and every good game designer — knows how to pull this off. It’s an integral part of thinking about how to tell a story — not only do you ask yourself what story you want to tell, but you ask yourself how you want to tell it. Both are important, and worthy of discussion.