If you’re 20-something, or male, or into modern popular media (especially as put forward within the realm of gaming), you should drop whatever plans you have for your next hour or two of leisure time and check out Ms. Sarkeesian’s web series Feminist Frequency, which makes a specific task of analyzing and criticizing the media (especially the games) that we know and love from a critical, unabashed feminist perspective.
Ms. Sarkeesian is insightful, and her criticisms and her perspective are as necessary and healthy to gaming as a culture as they are seemingly unwelcome.
In case you don’t know, they’re very unwelcome. So unwelcome, in fact, that hers is considered by many a textbook case of over-the-top, gratuitous online harassment, and if reports are to be believed, she has received a number of death threats. Let’s be clear here: this woman has received death threats for saying that there are some things about pop culture that she does not very well appreciate.
As a blogger, as an activist, and as a contributor to gaming culture as a whole, Anita Sarkeesian is one of the most valuable people on the planet to the cultural value of gaming and the cultural relevance of gamers who would like to have deeper, more meaningful games and deeper, more meaningful discussions about those games. Hers is an effort that is not misguided, and is effective in bringing out a great number of the persistent problems with the representation of women in gaming and other popular media. I applaud her work and her personal fortitude.
Feminism, and especially the inclusive, insistent and thoroughly critical feminism espoused by Sarkeesian and others like her, is a healthy force in modern social discourse. The values, perspectives, insights and complaints that Sarkeesian raises in her videos are, furthermore and similarly valuable, wholesome, intelligent and revolutionary in the best sense of the term. I agree with and actively support Sarkeesian and the wider causes of Feminism, and LGBTQ rights, with no qualifiers, no detractions and with full support for those who feel that the arrangement of media and social constructs in the modern age grow increasingly restrictive, diminutive inhibitive as one moves away from the “normal” conception of the straight, cis-gendered, white male.
I say all of this to emphasize that what I am about to say is not a criticism or a diminution of the more enlightened perspective that Anita Sarkeesian brings to gaming. That is indispensable.
Nonetheless, I believe, as an ardent supporter of that perspective that everywhere and always those of us who espouse that perspective should use only the best argumentative means available to us. Ours is an uphill struggle, and it is important that in our cooperative exercise of conversational and critical faculties, we criticize one another. The only way to make what we’re saying more palatable, more relevant and ultimately more successful is to address with a careful lens how we are saying it.
The Root Issue
Sarkeesian’s primary continuing series is Tropes Vs. Women, in which she (generally) first labels a specific trope (Trope : a common or overused theme or device : <the usual horror movie tropes>) points out a plethora of examples of the trope in question, usually in gaming. From the examples provided, she will go on to explain how the particular trope as a systematic plot device contributes to the degradation or objectification of women in the examples. These facts being established, she will go on to elaborate on instances of the trope to explain how the implementation in specific games is harmful or degrading. These tasks being accomplished, she has a fortunate habit of suggesting alternate paths, or citing examples of games and other media that specifically turn the trope on its head.
This is all well and good, and as it stands there are a number of strengths to this method.
As a criticism of the trope specifically, and of the general social structures or manufactured beliefs that the tropes support and/or put forward, the method is strong. Furthermore, as a method of artistic activism, her series could be seen as a 2-3 hour guide on how to avoid common, often accidental misogynies when one is engaged in the process of creating art.
Nonetheless, the form and content of the videos often directly criticizes the media in question for having used the trope. This, very specifically, is a problem in Sarkeesian’s message.
She is in the right when she criticizes Max Payne and a plethora of other games for using the “Damsel in the Refrigerator” to motivate the plot action. She is in the right when she cites the degrading picture of feminine capability put forward by the tiled, over-worn use of Princess Peach in essentially every Mario game ever. The problem, however, is that her criticism does not stop at the specific implementation of the trope elements in the particular piece of media being addressed.
The common implication, which she states explicitly in a number of videos, is that the use of the trope in question as a device in the plot is a blot on the creativity and value of the work in question. This is a mistake.
Criticizing a game (or a show, or a book) for objectifying female characters or presenting femininity (or any other natural, not-evil human traits, for that matter) is valid. However, the use of a trope is in some cases necessary to achieve a particular meaning.
[SPOILER WARNING for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ubsoft’s Far Cry 3]
One of the best examples of this is, of all things, Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. There are three primary female characters in the novel, Frankenstein’s mother, a serving-girl named Justine and Frankenstein’s own adopted sister/fiancee/wife, Elizabeth. None of these three are particularly deep as characters, and their place in the narrative novels makes them less involved, changing human beings and more alabaster statues of femininity. Furthermore, all three of them die, and the primary, perhaps the only, plot function that their deaths serve ends up to be little more than character development on the part of Frankenstein.
Those familiar with Sarkeesian’s work will note multiple instances of “The Damsel in the Refrigerator”, a female character being sacrificed in order to provide character development for the male.
What’s more, a fourth instance of the trope can be easily found in Frankenstein’s destruction of a second, female monster during the process of its creation. This instance, although the female being in question is not yet alive when it happens, is a destruction of what otherwise would be a female companion, which once more accomplishes little more than providing character development for the monster, a male character.
So really we have 4 instances of “The Damsel in the Refrigerator”, each one more damning than the last - the first dies of essentially natural causes, the second is executed falsely, the third is killed while not yet living, and the fourth is murdered in her bed, with narrative implications that she may have also been raped, and all of this for the character development of Frankenstein and his monster.
But it’s not that simple.
In her article, Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein, Anne K. Mellor proposes that this continual and growing destruction of all things female in Frankenstein, and the disaster that follows from said destruction, is perhaps the key to the narrative itself.
Frankenstein, she writes, rejects the female aspects of life which are embodied in friendship and mutual care when he isolates himself for the sake of his studies. Furthermore, his creation of the monster is itself a kind of severely misguided effort to usurp female creative power, and his act of destroying the female monster exhibits a complete lack of maternal responsibility and motherly care for the creature he has created. Read thus, the novel as a whole can be quite effectively read as a cautionary tale about the self-destructive Romantic ideals of “great men” who act through tremendous willpower and erase all feminine impulses from themselves. Frankenstein, as a novel, is in this reading an exhortation to, if not wholeheartedly embrace, at least healthily accept femininity as half of the human impulse.
Sarkeesian’s model of criticizing media as much for utilizing a trope as for the implementation thereof runs into some serious problems here. The potent, important theme of the destructiveness of the “great man” ideology finds expression in the plot of the novel through the increasingly gruesome deaths of female characters.
YES, female characters die.
YES, it is primarily for the advancement of male characters that this happens but
NO, taken in full context, it does not amount to a degradation of women and
NO, the fact that Shelley used a trope does not devalue the deeper message of the text.
Another example of the flaws of this critical method can be found in the wide-ranging critique of Ubisoft’s masterpiece, Far Cry 3.
The game has been widely criticized for its use of tropes, especially of “Whitey Saves the Day”, and furthermore for having an unbalanced and unreasonable depiction of South-Pacific Islanders. I will not argue here that these tropes and problems are not present, although I think they are more rightly said to be subverted, but these examples bring us to an important point.
The problem with Sarkeesian’s critical method is that it seems, at times willfully ignorant. A trope, like imagery, symbolism and metaphor, is a narrative tool. It is a means by which those who create media create expectations in those who experience media. When Jason Brody falls in with Natives fighting for their liberation against Pirates who are also Slavers, “Whitey Saves the Day” is clearly in use, objectifying both the whitey in question as a superior outside force and the natives in question as unwilling or unable to save themselves. However, the more important thing is that the setup creates a set of expectations, namely, the player will help along a group of noble savages and be victorious against an unambiguously evil outside force. The trope is deployed, but it is then subverted by constant narrative callbacks to reason, contrasting Jason’s ever-increasing violence with the domestic and humane sanity of his friends. We are essentially asked by the game whether the liberation of a people from slavery is worth the degradation of the self into a cyclical pattern of increasing violence.
Ultimately, my point is that in Far Cry 3, as in Frankenstein and many other great works of art, tropes and expectations are utilized as a narrative tool, and frankly that narrative tool is morally ambiguous.
Yes, certain tools, like the “Damsel in the Refrigerator” are a good deal more prone to abuse and degrading, misogynistic misuse, much in the same way that sports cars are a good deal more prone to abuse and violent, irresponsible, criminal misuse. But still, the potential for frequent misuse does not disqualify the act of using a tool as immoral or intrinsically degrading.
As with guns, this does not mean that tools should have unfettered use. It does not mean that we should use these tropes whenever we want, and if anything it does mean that when we use these tools, writing stories and making games, we absolutely must be careful and creative, doing our best collectively and individually to avoid creating media that is harmful.
BUT, we must also be willing to use these tools when we must. If it is necessary to tell the story that we want to tell, the way we want to tell it, we should be careful, we should be sensitive, and we should be intentionally very well aware of what we are doing, but we must also be willing to do what we must to tell the story we have to tell.
Come back tomorrow, and we will discuss further some glaring problems in Sarkeesian's criticisms, this time dealing with the content of her recent comments on (more accurately against) Christian myth.
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