“Amazing.” “My god, look at that.”
“Good night nurse!”
“Ooh! That’s definitely stimulating my economy.”
In the late 90s, developer Rare wanted to replicate
the success of their landmark 1997 shooter GoldenEye,
but didn’t want to make another James Bond game.
Instead, they began work on a science fiction spy thriller
called Perfect Dark.
For the game’s star,
they wanted to create a striking new type of special agent
who wouldn’t just live in James Bond’s shadow,
so they drew inspiration from figures
ranging from Joan of Arc to The X-Files’ Dana Scully.
Her name was Joanna Dark.
A few years earlier, Eidos Interactive’s Lara Croft
had rapidly become one of the most famous
and recognizable game characters of all time,
so it was reasonable to think that an action game
with a female protagonist could be a smash hit.
Alas, Joanna Dark never reached quite the levels
of fame occupied by Lara Croft,
but Perfect Dark was still a big success.
Let’s take a look at a commercial for the game:
"Welcome to 2023.
Big businesses now merge with alien nations.
An ancient war is being fought under the sea.
The president is about to be cloned
And it’s your job to try and save the world.
So you’ve got an important decision to make:
What are you going to wear to work?
From the team you brought you GoldenEye for N64,
meet special agent Joanna Dark in Perfect Dark,
where you’ll find out that the only person man enough
to handle a job like this
is a woman.”
Can you imagine an ad exactly like this,
only with Marcus Fenix or Master Chief,
getting out of bed naked,
taking a sexy slow-motion shower,
putting on his sexy underwear,
and the narrator saying
that he has an important decision to make:
what is he going to wear to work?
"Welcome to 2016.
There’s a war out there...somewhere.
You’re not sure where, exactly.
Anyway, the important thing is,
you’re Special Agent Jake Grimshadow.
It’s your job to save the world.
The only question is: What are you going to wear?
…. WAIT... WHAT??
A commercial like that would never happen,
nor should it.
But Joanna is treated differently
than her male counterparts.
Even though Perfect Dark is a first-person shooter
and, as a result, you rarely see her in the game itself,
by focusing on her getting dressed,
this ad encouraged players to think of Joanna’s appeal
as being rooted in her sexual desirability
rather than her skill as a special agent.
A character’s clothing is one of the first things we notice.
It’s an important part of our first impression
of who that character is, and as such,
it’s a way for designers
to immediately communicate to players
what is most important and noteworthy about them.
Female heroes in video games might be special agents
or soldiers or treasure hunters by trade.
They often find themselves in dangerous,
physically demanding situations,
fighting off bad guys and saving the world.
They are typically performing activities that call for
practical or protective clothing.
But when we look at the types of outfits
that female characters are made to wear,
we can see that they are often
both sexualized and completely absurd.
Ivy from the Soulcalibur games is a bold warrior
who finds herself in battles
where sharp, deadly weapons are being used
and protective armor would be a must,
but the clothing she wears--or lack thereof-
-is not exactly intended to keep her safe.
Cammy from the Street Fighter series
is a British special forces operative
whose thong leotard does a better job
of calling attention to her butt
than of offering any kind of protection.
Jessica Sherawat from Resident Evil: Revelations
is a member of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance
and regularly faces deadly infected mutants in combat,
but her outfits appear to be designed for...
yeah, I don’t even know.
And this is just a small fraction of the vast number
of female characters who are forced into
impractical and objectifying clothing while in dangerous situations.
“You’ll learn respect!”
“You’re a fool to come back here.”
“All right, let’s begin!
“And instead of donning a shirt plate,
you dash into battle, shirt open, navel and…
whatnot exposed!”
Because clothing can shape our first impressions of a character
and has a tremendous influence
on our sense of who they are
every time they are on screen,
sexualized outfits can contribute to what’s called
the hyper-sexualization of female characters.
Hyper-sexualization in the media occurs
when a character is designed to be valued primarily
for their sexual characteristics or behaviors.
In hypersexualized characters, these attributes
are highlighted above all else
and made the center of attention,
while everything else about the character is made secondary.
Games and other media often work
to frame this sexualization as a positive thing for women.
They blur the distinction between female sexualization
and female power, and as a result,
sexualized female characters are sometimes celebrated
for being perceived as “owning” their sexuality
in a way that is empowering.
But it isn’t actually empowering
because the sexuality these characters exude
is manufactured for, and presented as existing for,
the presumed straight male player.
Bayonetta is a quintessential example of such a character.
When the camera caresses her body
as it does in the opening scene of Bayonetta 2,
establishing the player’s relationship with the character,
she is frozen in time,
the passive object of the male gaze.
The camera is putting her and Jeanne
on display for the player,
breaking them down into what the game
is communicating is most important about them:
their sexualized parts.
And when Bayonetta starts moving,
it’s the player who has the power
to control her sexuality as a weapon throughout the game,
both literally and figuratively.
She has an assortment of special moves
called “torture attacks” which involve devices
meant to suggest BDSM and that look like something
you might expect to see
in an exaggerated stereotype of a sex dungeon.
But these sexualized moves
have nothing to do with sex:
they just obliterate her enemies.
And a number of her attacks literally leave her naked,
because, you see, she’s attacking the enemies
with her hair and her hair is also her clothing
so when she’s using her hair to attack her enemies
it can’t be covering her body and…
In these ways, the game deliberately links
Bayonetta’s sexuality to power,
selling a version of sexual objectification
that we’re all supposed to feel good about
and find “empowering.”
Every aspect of Bayonetta’s existence,
from the way the camera is magnetically drawn
to her sexualized body parts
to the pole dance reward for completing the game,
is expertly designed to be sexually affirming
and satisfying for a presumed straight male audience.
If it seems like I’m frequently repeating the fact
that the player is presumed to be a straight male,
that’s because it’s vital to remember.
This presumption influences and shapes
so many creative decisions that are made
in the development of many games.
“Let’s see, target market - mostly male,
18-24 years old, interests - senseless violence,
high tech weaponry, pain, humiliation…
hey! Maybe this’ll do the trick.”
In fact, this connection between objectification
and empowerment is extremely damaging.
It’s harmful to women because rather than
asserting that women have intrinsic value as people,
it communicates that the kind of power available
to women comes from men finding them desirable.
And it’s damaging to men because it suggests
that women who are liberated and empowered
are also women whose sexuality is always available to men.
When we conflate the sexualization of women
with power for women,
we internalize this harmful myth
and begin to think sexualization is the only way
to achieve gender equality.
But the truth is that sexualization doesn’t actually
bring us any closer to equality.
In her book Enlightened Sexism,
Susan J. Douglas sums up the issue.
”Under the guise of escapism and pleasure,
we are getting images of imagined power that mask,
and even erase, how much still remains to be done
for girls and women,
images that make sexism seem fine, even fun,
and insist that feminism is now utterly pointless--
even bad for you.
True power here has nothing to do with
economic independence or professional achievement:
it has to do with getting men to lust after you
and other women to envy you.”
Some gaming fans have come up with all sorts of
ridiculous defenses for the sexualized costumes
female characters are often made to wear,
like the idea that they dress in these outfits as a tactic
to help them distract their male opponents.
It’s not unheard of for developers
to sometimes rely on this harmful logic, too.
The superintelligent AI companion Cortana
from the Halo franchise
has always been depicted as naked,
and when asked about why this is,
franchise director Frank O’Connor said,
"One of the reasons she does it is to attract and demand attention.
And she does it to put people off so they’re on their guard
when they’re talking to her
and that she has the upper hand in those conversations.
It’s kind of almost like the opposite of that nightmare
you have where you go to school in the nude,
and you’re terrified and embarrassed.
She’s kind of projecting that back out to her audience
and winning intellectual points as a result."
Meanwhile, male AIs in the Halo universe do wear clothing;
the idea of them trying to “win intellectual points”
by walking around naked is ridiculous.
But we rarely question
the extremely widespread association
of sexualization and power
when it’s applied to female characters.
Usually, the games themselves don’t go into much detail
to explain or justify why
female characters are sexualized.
Players are simply meant to unquestioningly accept
the impractical outfits these characters are wearing.
Sometimes, however, as in the case of Quiet
from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,
developers build convoluted and absurd tales
about a character’s past into the game
in an attempt to justify their blatant sexualization.
“She, uh, refuses to wear clothes.
The last staff member who tried to dress her -
breathing through tubes.
Other than that, she’s completely cooperative.
She understands English, she never speaks, sweats, or breathes.”
“What?”
“Well, not with lungs at least.
She breathes through her skin.
Clothing would suffocate her.
Showers are okay, but she can’t be submerged.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s drinking. Through her skin.”
So you see, she can’t wear clothing
because she breathes through her skin!
These ludicrous narrative justifications don’t “make it okay.”
Regardless of whatever absurd explanation
a game might provide,
it should go without saying that
the only real functionality of outfits like this is to
titillate the presumed young straight male player base.