Women, Video Games, and Violence

WARNING: this post contains graphic images and nudity.

"The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights."

--Gloria Steinem 

Today marks International Women's Day. It's a day to pay tribute to the accomplishments of women -- past, present, and future -- and to draw attention to oppression and inequality that continues to affect women in the work place, in the public sphere, and in domestic life.

Today is as good a day as any to comment on something that's been bothering me for some time: the objectification of women and the fetishization of violence against women in video games. Let me be clear right away: this is in no way a problem unique to video games. It's present in many forms of media, including television, movies, magazines, graphic novels, etc. But this is a blog dedicated to video games, and this is a problem that haunts the industry.

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows how I feel about video games belonging to the world of art. As such, I maintain a hostile attitude toward censorship. Nevertheless, I think it's important to comment on the ways in which video games contribute to a culture of violence against women and the ways in which video games fetishize that violence.

This is an issue that began long before the controversy of Grand Theft Auto -- in which players can engage in sexual activity with a prostitute and afterwards kill her -- and has endured long after. The examples below are from the past two years.

The first and most revolting example of normalized and sexualized violence against women in video games is the E3 trailer for Hitman: Absolution.

The issue here is with promotional material not with game design. But if a company markets its game by combining gratuitous violence with sexualized imagery, then who is the intended audience and what is the intended effect? This trailer is insidious because it casually mixes images that are meant to sexually excite -- lingerie, high heels, makeup -- with violent and bloody images. Even the opening seconds are symbolic: Agent 47 puts on his clothes as the female assassins strip off their own. There was a good amount of controversy that hung around this trailer, but many video game journalists seemed reluctant to engage with it, to deconstruct it. Apart from a few brave writers, notably Keza Macdonald of IGN, most ignored the problem. Some were outright dismissive of the backlash.

That was last May. This January another controversy popped up: the special edition of Dead Island Riptide. Along with a steelbook case, downloadable content, and collectible artwork, the special edition came with a hand-painted figurine of a decapitated big-breasted woman in a bikini. Forget the tackiness of the figurine for a moment and linger on its imagery. Again, it combines something highly sexualized with something very violent.

In what living room in Hell would this be a conversation starter?

Some of you might argue that marketing is very different from the actual product, but in 2013 the line between the two is virtually invisible. Marketing embodies all the sensations one hopes to experience by buying a product, whether it's an SUV rolling adventurously over rugged terrain or a party of good-looking friends drinking beer together. In a way, marketing IS the product.

Turning from marketing to in-game experiences, we have Duke Nukem Forever, one of the most misogynistic video games ever made. The entire game is littered with weird, hateful jabs at women, but the biggest offender is "The Hive," a level in which Duke stumbles across the abducted women of Earth, naked and bound to alien organisms. The implication is that the women have been forcibly impregnated by alien invaders. It's a deeply troubling episode that's played entirely for laughs.

I think the image here speaks for itself.

I want to reiterate that I consider video games to be art, and would fight back passionately against any legislation meant to censor them. But that same freedom of speech that should be applied to games also allows me to voice my personal discomfort with imagery that fuses the super violent and the hyper sexualized. Such imagery contributes in a negative way to a culture of violence against women in media and in the real world.

Video games have every right to be offensive, disgusting, and morally ambiguous. But they should not aggravate a very real and pervasive attitude that sanitizes -- even glamorizes -- brutality against women and sexual violence against women.

It goes without saying that the great majority of video games, advertisements, and fans aren't misogynistic, aren't inclined toward violence, aren't confused about how to treat fellow human beings with dignity and respect. I do not mean to use these examples to indict the medium or to insult fans of Hitman, Dead Island, or Duke Nukem. I only mean to use this tiny platform to draw attention to a few disturbing episodes that should be discussed and not swept under the rug.