Imagine the horrors I went through in high school: not only was I a girl, but I had red hair!
Now I love breasts and sex as much as the next girl, but clearly something needs to be done about the sexualisation of female characters. After a few hits of the hair of the witch I settled down to play Bayonetta, but five pairs of underpants later and I had not even made it past the first level!
I tried Gears of Wars 3, but Agent Scully's breasts were just as big as Marcus Fenix. Like I said I've got nothing against big breasts, but it's how they're used. When was the last time you saw a clearly lactating breast used for breast feeding in a video game? (Games from Japan don't count.)
There is no functionality to a woman's anatomy: and while this might be partly true in reality the burden of a woman's body is lessened through childbirth and beauty. Videogames only feature the former. I'm not suggesting that we see Agent Scully giving birth to a young Mulder Fenix, but at the very least she could be carrying an artificially inceminated locust infestation. It works in the context of the Gears of War canon, while also empowering Agent Scully.
Many have said that Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2 is what female video game characters should aspire to be, and while she is as hollow and vapid enough to constitute a realistic woman I would argue that she fits perfectly into girl next door fantasies: she is fulfilling her place only as receptacle for Gordon Freeman—a soulless protagonist that the player assumes as a perverted identity in which he carries out his gravity-free sex fantasies.
Now many women are indeed receptacles, but I find it offensive that she is one to someone with such a powerful crowbar. Portal on the other hand sets a much better example. We see the metaphor of the portals symbolizing the journey between one world and the next through a vagina However due to the repeated use of the portals (and lack of stretching) I think it's fair to say that it symbolizes penetrative sex and not childbirth, once again missing the mark.
How much was she paid to do that? Naturally she couldn't have been doing for the pleasure, could she?
Of course the problems lie not only in games themselves, but in the media too. From Jessica Chobot licking PSPs, to the fact that most female game journalists look like female game characters, and clearly have never yborn children. Of course surely the fans' and the suits that dictate a games journalist's actions lead to such public displays of sexuality: a possible hypothesis given a woman's tendency to do what she is told.
But perhaps she is in fact empowering herself through sexuality? It's true that for too long a woman's sexuality has been swept under the rug, rather than the rugs so to speak. I remember back in junior high when I licked a boy's copy of Pokémon. I was branded a slut and a hussy: it was humiliating.
And yet a friend of mine would lick copies of Pokémon, Super Mario, and any game any of the boys gave her for two dollars a lick, and she was treated with respect: as if at least she was getting two dollars out of it, because how could a girl enjoy licking a game cartridge? She got the money, but there was something wrong with me for licking a cartridge for pleasure with seemingly no reward!
And God forbid any other young, blossoming women be subjected to the treatment I was given when I was caught with my GameBoy Advance SP in a young boy's mouth just a few years later!
A sexually empowered woman.
But is sexual empowerment worth the cost? Little girls are told to play Petz and Dress Barbie, teaching them that DS screens should be stroked in a demure manner as if patting a pet and not licked or enjoyed in a sexual manner as is the right of every young woman, and yet boys are given a wide range of games to play and allowed to explore their consoles with no shame or interference.
And of course while plastic surgery is encouraged in women and abhorred in men the act of body modification to increase the pleasure of one's buttons: taking them from digital to analogue is looked upon as tantamount to religious heresy.
The dogma of doggy suits is something hard to avoid, and conclusions can be just as hard to find when a young girl's sense of self has been stifled through sexual repression through video games. It's a sad state of affairs indeed.
Some may say that male video game characters are sexualised too, and judging by my first paragraph you may not think I am in a position to judge. But being a bisexual (come at me bros) I can state quite expertly they are, but not to the same degree, and the simple fact of the matter is that men are hypersexual in reality: their sexualisation is merely an accurate depiction of reality.
What men aren't turned on by battle? Well, what real men anyway? 300 accurately depicted the sexual nature of battle, and while the women depicted in it were not sexualised, that is because women do not find battle to be as sexually arousing as men do.
Note that the breasts of the "female" characters (if you can spot them) are larger than their male counterparts' ones. This is because they have become more masculine than the men themselves.
However it's still true that men are less sexualised than women. Female video game characters generally have full, red lips. You might say this is due to lipstick, but it's also a symptom of sexual arousal, and indeed the reason women wear lipstick: so that their lips resemble a gibbon's in-heat-buttocks. Enlarged breasts apart from being a symptom of lactation are also a symptom of sexual arousal.
It puts Agent Scully in a new light, doesn't it? If the fact that she looks like Marcus Fenix didn't give it away, then the fact that she is just as aroused by combat as they are did: Agent Scully is actually a man.
So what to take from this? Is there anything wrong with the merging of the sexes? Wouldn't that mean equality? Of course it would, the only problem is that the women are becoming men, and the men are not becoming women.
