Sexuality, Games and Mulvey

I now understand how the topic of sexism in gaming can provoke vomit-inducing rage. While initially unaware that this type of sexism extended past the usual Giganta-Breasts and online ‘tomfoolery’, the extent to which the sexism can become angry and fetishised was shocking. Watching the Anita Sarkeesian video hit me right in the feels.

In particular, the example of the Dead Island: Riptide dismembered and largely endowed torso reminded me of Laura Mulvey’s writings on the ‘gaze’ of cinema. The theory is that there are three ‘gazes’ in cinema, that of the viewer, the camera and the characters. In classical cinema, the gaze is gendered in the way that the male protagonist is the ‘bearer of the look’, while the female protagonist connotes ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. All three gazes of the camera, audience and the protagonist combine into one single gaze which looks at the woman object. This is obvious in film as well as in video games. A typical shot introducing a female romantic character in a film consists of a tilt up from the feet to a mid-shot from breasts upwards. This focuses on the ‘areas that count’ should we say, while showing the elongation of the body and mimicking the way anyone would look an attractive woman up and down in the street. This can be seen in the trailer for Hitman Absolution. The shots of the women focus and linger on the usual sexualised areas. The problem I had with this portrayal of violence against women was the way in which the violence was sexualised and fetishised.

 In Mulvey’s work, she discusses the phenomenon of ‘Fetishistic Scopophilia’. Scopophilia is the way in which ‘looking’ is a source of pleasure. The premise in film is that a female character is a threat to a male character, specifically a ‘castration threat’. The female form is a representation of this fear of castration and disempowerment of the male. In response to this, there are two defences the male can take: that of ‘Voyeuristic Sadism’, as in the punishment of the female for the potential disempowerment, or in the way of ‘Fetishistic Scopophilia’, he can ‘disavow’ the castration threat by turning it into a fetish for their exploitation.

We can see both of these at work in the Hitman trailer. These women are punished for their participation in the action which could have (literally) removed his manhood. The fetishistic scopophilic aspect of this is the lingering of the gaze on the slow-motion shots of these women being killed and visually violated in a sexual way.  While I may be taking the trailer out of context, and I may be simplifying Mulvey’s work a bit, it cannot be denied that the sexualisation of violence in the media hints at the way that rape and violence against women is still not seen as ‘that big of a deal’.

Boobs are great every once in a while, but there are some serious issues that have to be addressed with all this ‘monstrous femininity’ malarkey. Sexuality shouldn’t be scary or horrific or fetishised, though only in  a fantasy world would there ever be a gender-neutral game space.

-Sophie McGuinness

Laura Mulvey (1975). "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6–18

Some links:
Confronting online sexist abuse:

http://www.notinthekitchenanymore.com/

Not that I wrote about it, but still interesting: ALIEN as a rape series

http://www.cracked.com/article_18932_alien-film-franchise-based-entirely-rape.html