“Sex sells.” It’s the go-to maxim by just about anybody who’s in the business of selling you things, and one would reasonably suppose that – perhaps more than anything else, really – should instantly invest the whole idea with some degree of improbability. Right? Wrong.
In an era when consumer scepticism and outrage practically power the internet, if there’s one aspect of the mass-marketing machine that’s evading anything like intelligent, rational enquiry, it’s boobs. Or, to use the proper term, the sexual objectification of women – not exactly a misnomer when you consider that, according to multiple studies on the subject, adverts that show barely-dressed women are much more likely to be remembered for the barely-dressed women, not the product advertised. In one study, less than 10 percent of male viewers were able to recall what an advert was actually about if it included otherwise irrelevant sexual content. By comparison, products advertised without sexual content were accurately recalled around 20 percent of the time – and that’s 100 percent more of the time at that.
Back in 2009, a similar study of the movie industry demonstrated much the same conclusion – but even worse. It was found that a film being rated for sex and/or nudity correlated negatively with its commercial and critical success. So adding sexual content not only meant that a movie didn’t make more money at the box office, it also meant that the movie was more likely to bomb.
The whole point? Rumours of sex and sales and the dynamics between these two things may have been somewhat exaggerated. So why, even now in 2012 when we should know better, do we still have so-called “booth babes” at gaming industry shows like E3? Besides the fact that Mass Effect 3’s ending was obviously, like, a way more important thing to get all angry about.
And maybe that’s part of the problem. In a culture where it’s largely women who are sexually objectified (and who must put up with the consequences of that), it’s very easy for men to say, simply, that women are overreacting about it, and to shut up because Mass Effect 3’s ending is a way more important thing to get angry about, anyway. Besides, those women are paid to be there, so what’s the big deal?
The big deal is the same culture that sexually objectifies women in the first place. How meaningful is a woman’s decision to sign up as a booth babe, really, when she lives in a culture that tells her – that indoctrinates her – from when she’s just a little girl, that the most important thing she can ever be is sexually attractive to men? Her personal and intellectual abilities don’t matter – and it’s a message broadcast loud and clear in the gaming industry, where a woman’s worth is almost always reduced to an object of male viewing and sexual pleasure, while her opinions are met with disregard and derision, even hostility. Basically, women should be seen and not heard.
Oh, it’s not that bad, men who are not subject to systematic dehumanisation invariably clamber to tell us. Except that it is. Recently, feminist blogger and critic Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a web series, Tropes vs Women in Video Games, focussing on the frequently objectionable ways women are portrayed in the media. The response from the internet was tragically predictable – an organised hate campaign. Her Wikipedia page was vandalised, her Twitter account was inundated with threats of violence and death and rape, her YouTube account was repeatedly flagged for terrorism, and multiple attempts were made to ban her Kickstarter project. And all this over something that hadn’t even been made yet.
A few months ago, the gaming reality show Cross Assault made headlines when a male team leader claimed that “sexual harassment is part of the culture”, and defended the use of players’ exhortations to “rape that bitch” in reference to an on-screen fight, as though rape isn’t actually a real thing that happens to real women everywhere, every day, and that the very same language isn’t used to intimidate and terrorise women. You know why Crystal Dynamics’ comments (later retracted) about a scene of attempted rape in the Tomb Raider reboot were so hard to take seriously? Because this is a culture that doesn’t even take the word “rape” seriously.
Elsewhere, websites like Fat, Ugly or Slutty catalogue the gendered abuse women deal with every day in online games, where tedious adolescent insults are swapped for misogynistic commentary, unsolicited sexual advances, and the inevitable rape threats. Always with the rape threats. I know, I’ve had more than a few myself.
Trolls will be trolls, maybe, but there’s also a good argument to be made that toxic attitudes like these are not fomented in some sort of mom’s basement-based, sociocultural isolation, but instead, are only reinforced and maintained by an industry that uses bouncy breast physics as a marketing feature. The subtext on the packaging is unambiguous – women are just things to be looked at and scrutinised and exploited. Sex doesn’t sell products, it sells women’s bodies like meat. How long can we keep pretending that the way women are represented in video games and in the video game industry has nothing to do with the way so many male gamers treat women? Especially when women decide to say something about it. If the prospect of not seeing naked flesh at a video game event is an oppressive one, it’s probably time to rethink, like, everything.
The presence of booth babes at trade shows may seem harmless enough to the casual observer (as it were), but quite apart from the games they’re supposed to be promoting, they’re also promoting a sexist and exceedingly offensive ideology that markets women’s sexuality as a free extra, and as a result, an entire generation of boys and men think it’s okay to tell us “tits or gtfo”. Mom must be so proud.
One of the most elusive themes that video games are grappling with today is some sense of maturity. But how can games ever be anything like mature when women are consistently diminished to hormonal male teenage fantasies by both developers and the industry itself? [Spoilers] They won’t.
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