Ha ha ha, I enjoyed reading this post.
I’m sure you are aware, but I believe the current rash of man-bashing woman-appeasing behavior in the gaming world is due to the “Tropes vs Women” video by Anita Sarkeesian. It’s a stupid video, and a lot of people have pointed out why it’s stupid, so I’m not going to bother. They all managed to provide insightful, well-researched critiques of her work without “harassing” or “threatening” her, but that’s how she labels her detractors all the same. It’s what these people do.
People like John Walker confuse me, because in their eagerness to leap to the defense of women, they don’t seem to fully understand what they are attacking or what they are advocating. He goes on and on about how the portrayal of women in games is so insulting and degrading. Degrading to whom, exactly? He knows games aren’t real, right? It’s fictional characters in a made-up world that is part of an entertainment product. How anything in a fake, non-existent world can be “degrading” to people in reality is beyond me. He makes it out to be some kind of terrible social injustice. You know what is a social injustice? Genital mutilations. Honor killings. Corrective rape. Those are real, degrading problems faced by real women every day.
No one ever plays a game where men act stupid, immature, violent, crazy, oppressive, etc., or where they are injured, tortured, mutilated, or killed; and exclaims “This is degrading to all men everywhere!” Probably because that’s a completely moronic thing to say.
John Walker makes two fundamentally wrong assumptions:
1. Art influences society
2. There is Right Art and there is Wrong Art.
Art reflects life. All attempts to disprove this have failed. There is no evidence that people “learn misogyny” from videogames. Yet that is exactly what he is implying, if not outright stating, and he never makes any attempt to prove it.
Furthermore, this guy wants to be the “Culture Police.” He wants to say what is and isn’t okay in games. Ask him, how does he plan to enforce *his* view of how women *should* be portrayed? The only possible answer is some kind of Feminist Ratings Board (FRB), which reviews all games and bans those which don’t depict women “correctly.” This is the only possible, logical end result of his ideas. There is no other way to enforce your views in art.
So even if they don’t realize it, these people are pro-censorship. And that’s bad. It’s really bad. John Walker doesn’t get to decide what kind of art is right and what kind of art is wrong. The market decides that, and the market clearly doesn’t care about big boobs and skimpy outfits.
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In the early 2000s, feminists used to care about genital mutilations until they realized the women affected desired them. Since then, they have been silent on the matter.John Walker is someone who cares greatly what other people think of him. He wants people to like him. So what happens when a group of people (say the MRA) are vocally against him? How does someone who wish to be liked deal with this? It is by saying the people who disagree with him are not people at all but monsters. He has spent considerable rhetoric dehumanizing those that disagree with him. (This is like pouring gasoline on a fire. He’s better off saying ‘we must agree to disagree’ and that would be the end of it.)
