So. I made a joke on twitter the other night. It went like this:

“I want more strong women in games!”

~does literally nothing to promote female bodybuilding~

you are all scum



I hate having to explain jokes, because I thought this one was pretty self-evident, but I guess it wasn’t, ‘cause I got some responses about it. Figured I’d go ahead and talk about what I meant here, because this is a joke that’s making two distinct comments about the role of women in fiction.

So, we have one character making a statement and then not acting on it, and the other responding to this apparent hypocrisy.

The Joke is that “strong women” is taken in the most literal, physical sense of the word. This is pretty foundational to my sense of humor; I like making jokes based on the potential ambiguities of the English language. I’m intentionally misinterpreting a remark to subvert the expectations that come with that sentence.

The First Comment I’m making with the joke is that “strong women” is something of a meaningless term. Here’s a great article that talks about why “strong female characters” aren’t enough. Reading it is, I believe, central to understanding the point I’m making here, so please do that. One excerpt in particular sticks out to me:

Let’s come back to Sherlock Holmes. A better question would be – “What is Sherlock Holmes like?”

He’s a brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, polymath genius.

Adding the word “strong” to that list doesn’t seem to me to enhance it much.



Personally, when I see people write about “strong female characters,” I see them writing flat, boring characters. Peggy Carter’s mentioned in the article, but since it was written, her TV show has begun airing. I love the show, but I’m a bit bugged by how it’s playing out so far.

Peggy is the “strong female character.” She can fight and she doesn’t take crap from anyone.

Problem is, Peggy Carter’s problems are “women’s issues,” and women’s issues only. In a tv show like Suits, the protagonists have a foil in the form of Louis Litt, a vain, greedy, manipulative, cruel lawyer. Litt’s competitive relationship with the protagonists is an interesting and enjoyable conflict to watch. If the protagonists of Suits were women and the series’ writers the same as those on Agent Carter, I can’t help but feel that all the interesting conflicts between them would be gone, with the one monolithic issue of sexism reigning supreme in its place.

In other words, to make her a “strong female character,” the show seems disregard all the things that might make her a multidimensional character and just face her with things she can either fight or mock. Sure, throw straw misogynist guy who’s secretly a coward! She can’t actually handle anyone or anything tougher than that, because she’s just a strong woman!

To me, that seems pretty silly.

I want multidimensional, interesting female characters, not merely strong ones.

That said?

The Second Comment is about gender roles. I picked female bodybuilders for a reason, but before I get into that, there’s this great series of articles about the role of women in games that you should read. Here’s the first part.

One part that stuck out to me was this one:

Dragon Age Inquisition then displays a narrowing in the types of women it depicts compared to previous Dragon Age games despite the overall scale of Inquisition being larger. The Dragon Age franchise used to be something I considered a gold standard title regarding equal inclusion of well-written female characters. I can’t say that anymore because it’s narrowed female gender expression.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Inquisition lacks the diversity of women present in Dragon Age: Origins. This was actually something that bugged me a great deal. Whenever I entered the “war room,” I did so with a bunch of white women and one white man. Desire demons were noticeably absent. Women were almost entirely portrayed as good (I believe I only encountered one woman as an enemy, and she was like Starscream to the villain’s Megatron but with less personality), strong, leader types.

The same is true of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. The previous game had a bunch of women, villains and allies. These women had different body types too. The Pre-Sequel’s protagonists (both NPCs and PCs) were all thin, attractive white women who had to put up with crazy men. The villain, Zarpedon, was also an attractive woman, though I don’t think she was white.

I played quests where I had to go kill a man who was harassing his (attractive white) wife, or save a ship’s AI (who looked like an attractive white woman in the pictures) from an evil crazy crewmember who was a man.

…I hate doing this. I hate talking like this. I hate that I felt this way playing the game. But… it’s the game I played: crazy men of all backgrounds (I sent an Indian Midget Man to Space!) and the white women who tolerated them. I think there was one exception to that (the People’s Liberation Front or whatever it was called).

My point is: I’m seeing calls for diversity, but apparently, “diversity” is just replacing the brown-haired, brown-eyed handsome guy with the five o'clock shadow with a brown-haired, brown-eyed pretty woman. It feels like we’re getting reskins rather than actual diversity.

Additionally, we still experience “acceptable” and “unacceptable” gender roles. For instance, I’ve seen all kinds of dudes in games. Fat dudes, muscular dudes, skinny dudes, you name it, it exists. Character creators are particularly generous with guys when it comes to this. Want a short guy? Cool, you can have a short guy. Tall guy? Absolutely.

Where women are concerned, you’d be lucky to get a woman as toned as an off-the-job Gina Carano. Good luck trying to build, say, Chyna. Women, occasionally, can be fat, but they can never be muscular, it seems (indeed, some called Dead Rising 3 transphobic because, to them, it was more likely that the game’s female bodybuilder was a man who identified as a woman rather than a woman who simply liked bodybuilding). For that matter, these games often suffer from the same gender role issues. You’re never going to find the kind of relationship that Big Barda and Scott Free have–she’s the physically dominant one in the relationships, and they both like it.

I see a world where people are demanding more diverse characters, but not actually, like… doing that. I think the only character creator that’s actually let me build a buff woman so far is Dragon’s Dogma. I think Cate Archer’s character path in No One Lives Forever and its sequel were awesome, especially when Cate flirted with the American operative.

In today’s current climate, I don’t see an empowered woman flirting with a guy based on his looks but ultimately blowing him off the way Cate did. She started off with “hey, he’s attractive,” and then “nah, I’m definitely not interested in this guy.”

It seems like games writing isn’t comfortable with female sexuality, especially if the object of desire is a man. It seems as though any woman with a sexual interest is automatically slut-shamed in modern feminist discourse. Heaven forbid that a woman might be interested in the male body.



Which actually brings me to a weird point: it seems as though, when a work of fiction has an independent, capable female character, the temptation for a lot of people is to make her interested in girls. Maybe she’s a lesbian, maybe she’s bisexual, but it seems as if people are incapable of making a strong woman without also making her reject men.

I was involved in a recent conversation where someone suggested that Agent Carter become a lesbian. In The Legend of Korra, the title character ends the show with Asami, a woman. I’ve seen this suggestion a lot–that strong women should be lesbian or at least bisexual–and it bugs me: why can’t an independent woman have a relationship with a man? For that matter, why can’t she have a relationship with an equally strong man?

This kind of writing puts both genders in a box by saying strong women can’t be compatible with other men. It also makes the mistake of assuming that men can’t abide a relationship where the woman has any power. It’s an inherently sexist viewpoint which argues that men must dominate women or else, which is utterly absurd.

Not every relationship is a top/bottom thing. I know and have seen plenty of couples that work precisely because both parties are independent people. Sure, some relationships need a dominant partner and a weaker partner, but certainly not all of them.

Basically, this kind of storytelling limits heterosexual relationships, female power, and male tolerance. It’s 'you can’t’ storytelling. It limits what people can be by ignoring the basic realities of human relationships. One of my favorite relationships on television is the one between the Burkes on White Collar. It’s a relationship that feels real to me because it’s one I’ve seen many times first-hand.

So.

Bring on a diversity of body types, more diverse gender roles, meaningful relationships between independent individuals, and stuff like that. At the end of the day, I want to see a broad array of great characters, not just reskinned brown-haired dudes.