The problem isn’t objectification of women, it’s a lack of non-objectified female characters.
The types of objectification are different, as you touch on. Men are not sexually objectified as often. When they are, they are shown in a position of power or self-direction, with women in contrasting positions of passiveness and submissiveness. This is most visible in advertising because it’s the place where men are portrayed as specifically male rather than as people (with the assumption that all people worth knowing about or portraying must be men).
Your example of random mooks? They’re there to shoot and die and follow orders. You can replace them with robots or ambulatory plants or aliens with no discernable gender. Calvin Klein ads? The men are there to be masculine.
Men are allowed to be short or tall, fat or thin, strong or weak. They can have long noses and bulbous noses and button noses and earlobes that hang down. Women have several molds they can fit—they can be crones or grandmothers, or they can be minor variants of generic white sexy woman at different ages, between fifteen and thirty.
Even when women are portrayed as skilled, intelligent people with their own backstories and interests, you’d be hard pressed to find one that isn’t portrayed in a way to make sexual objectification easy, even if it makes no sense with their story. Amita from Far Cry 4, for instance, is one of two leaders of a terrorist group fighting against an oppressive dictatorship. You’d expect that she’d have scars. You’d expect she’d be too busy to maintain long hair. You’d expect muscles. You’d expect powerful body language. You wouldn’t exactly expect her to have turquoise earrings, wear eyeliner, have immaculately plucked eyebrows, have skin as smooth as marble, and wear a pouty / concerned expression half the time.
The huge problem is that women’s perceived value can never exceed the ease with which they can be objectified.
with women in contrasting positions of passiveness and submissiveness
That may be a cached impression. I doubt my viewing habits are typical, but a competent heroine who kicks ass is rather typical in contemporary movies, I think.
Men are not sexually objectified as often. .. This is most visible in advertising because it’s the place where men are portrayed as specifically male rather than as people
You contradict yourself. Your second sentence basically says that men are sexually objectified.
Besides, a great deal of advertising is dedicated to portraying women as.. .specifically feminine :-)
The huge problem is that women’s perceived value can never exceed the ease with which they can be objectified.
Whenever someone says that, I know I’m in for a long series of lawyery responses based on almost plausible misunderstandings. Life’s too short for that. Goodbye, and don’t forget your fedora on the way out.
Men are allowed to be short or tall, fat or thin, strong or weak.
The traits that make men attractive aren’t primarily based on appearance. Thus it matters less what the traits are like. And men in movies and games frequently display them in large amounts. People will they’re heroes to have unusually positive traits, thus men are unusually strong, courageous, cool under fire, etc. and women are unusually beautiful, as well as unusually pure, nurturing, etc. It is of course possible (but not necessary) to give women high levels in the masculine traits (and conversely). However, removing the positive masculine traits from men, or the positive feminine traits from women will lead to a product no one wants to watch/play.
Amita from Far Cry 4, for instance, is one of two leaders of a terrorist group fighting against an oppressive dictatorship. You’d expect that she’d have scars. You’d expect she’d be too busy to maintain long hair. You’d expect muscles. You’d expect powerful body language. You wouldn’t exactly expect her to have turquoise earrings, wear eyeliner, have immaculately plucked eyebrows, have skin as smooth as marble, and wear a pouty / concerned expression half the time.
I agree this is unrealistic, then again the whole concept of warrior women fighting on par with men is itself completely unrealistic. Audiences tolerate this lack of realism because she at least displays (some) possitive feminine traits. They would also tolerate the more realistic option of having no warrior women. If you made female characters that realistically depict what it would take for women to fight on par with men (i.e., women who look like the Eastern block’s doped Olympic athletes) you’ll find that no one will want to watch/play them.
People will they’re heroes to have unusually positive traits, thus men are unusually strong, courageous, cool under fire, etc. and women are unusually beautiful, as well as unusually pure, nurturing, etc.
Surely a positive trait is a positive trait for anyone to have?
However, removing the positive masculine traits from men, or the positive feminine traits from women will lead to a product no one wants to watch/play.
I see you’ve done a large amount of market research—oh, wait, I don’t.
then again the whole concept of warrior women fighting on par with men is itself completely unrealistic.
No. It’s not. Not even slightly. If you mean it’s contrary to popular narratives, sure—but then you’re not saying whether women do fight, only how well publicized their fighting is. Women fought in the African National Congress. Women fought in the US Civil War. In World War I, the US started officially allowing women into the navy and air force, while Russia had fifteen battalions of women—one of which had the moniker “Battalion of Death”.
In World War II, the Soviet Union again accepted women as volunteers, but they assumed women would be poor fighters, so high command seldom sent them into battle. In response, many of them deserted, sneaked to the front, and fought clandestinely. This despite the shit heaped on them by their commanding officers, sexual harassment, and rape.
If you’re asking whether women fought in a particular war, the answer is almost certainly yes.
Oh, but you said “on par with men.” You must have known about these examples, conducted a review of the combat performance of all-women and mixed gender units, and compared that with the performance of all-men units, right? And you controlled for combat experience, considering commanding officers tried their damnedest to relegate women to background roles?
Audiences tolerate this lack of realism because she at least displays (some) possitive feminine traits.
Women tolerate this because it’s the best representation they can find—but there’s less tolerance over time and more demand for women in all roles. The passivity varies between annoying and sickening—mainly because it’s constant. The extremely narrow range of body depictions no doubt contributes to the body image problems that many women face.
But the games industry is ridiculously male-dominated. The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn’t crone, seductress, or fair maiden—you’ll get that in a handful of indie studios.
If you made female characters that realistically depict what it would take for women to fight on par with men (i.e., women who look like the Eastern block’s doped Olympic athletes)
Ah, yes, because some random terrorist group desperate for warm bodies to throw at their enemies only takes men who look like the Eastern block’s doped Olympic athletes. After all, when the US was conscripting people in the World Wars,
you’ll find that no one will want to watch/play them.
Why do you believe this? Do you even have any market research available?
Surely a positive trait is a positive trait for anyone to have?
Two replies:
1) That’s not how humans are wired.
2) The statement isn’t even true, e.g., “move fast, break things”, is good advice if you’re running an internet start up, but bad advice you you’re running a nuclear power plant.
I see you’ve done a large amount of market research—oh, wait, I don’t.
Have you?
Not even slightly. If you mean it’s contrary to popular narratives, sure—but then you’re not saying whether women do fight, only how well publicized their fighting is. Women fought in the African National Congress. Women fought in the US Civil War. In World War I, the US started officially allowing women into the navy and air force, while Russia had fifteen battalions of women—one of which had the moniker “Battalion of Death”.
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women’s fighting ability is lower then men’s.
Women tolerate this because it’s the best representation they can find—but there’s less tolerance over time and more demand for women in all roles.
You’re conflating two different meanings”demand”:
1) demand in the economist’s sense, i.e., what someone would actually buy.
2) demand in the sense of complaining about the issue on internet forums.
I agree that there’s been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it’s generally from people who wouldn’t be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
But the games industry is ridiculously male-dominated. The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn’t crone, seductress, or fair maiden—you’ll get that in a handful of indie studios.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact. Granted you do have the problem that there are fewer women programers.
Ah, yes, because some random terrorist group desperate for warm bodies to throw at their enemies
The statement isn’t even true, e.g., “move fast, break things”, is good advice if you’re running an internet start up, but bad advice you you’re running a nuclear power plant.
So what traits are useful depend on what you are trying to accomplish, right? Except you’re trying to make it be about biology.
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women’s fighting ability is lower then men’s.
Yay, an unbacked assertion! This is so fair—you can spend a quarter second regurgitating an unstudied belief while I have to spend an hour hunting down sources. You know, people who actually care about finding the truth will generally help out with this research. People who merely want to maintain their current opinion won’t, and will instead just try to identify their opponent’s sources to find every possible flaw. I generally hoped to find more of the former here than the latter, but I’ve now been disabused.
Anyway. We’re already talking about exceptional people, so this distribution question isn’t relevant unless you’re arguing that women with decent fighting abilities are as rare as comets on Earth intercept courses.
You’ve offered no evidence of women being bad at fighting. We can start from first principles, then. Hand-to-hand combat with little to no training? I’ll put odds on a guy; these contests generally come to raw strength, and untrained, men have more strength. Combat with firearms with training? Women mass less on average, so they probably have more trouble with recoil. But the US Marine Corps accepts both men and women who weigh 91 pounds, so low mass must not be an insurmountable issue. Women unused to physical labor might have difficulty hauling standard combat gear, but then, men would too. The risk of pregnancy is real (and since transgender people are also discriminated against in the military, there’s no concern about male soldiers becoming pregnant), but birth control is widely available these days. On the other hand, talking about Far Cry 4, nobody seems to carry more than their rifle and a couple pounds of random accoutrement.
Okay, let’s look at how these women are actually performing. Turns out there isn’t much data—commanding officers tend to be squeamish about sending soldiers to fight when those soldiers happen to have breasts. But the First Battalion of Death seemed to perform well in the small amount of action they saw. During trench warfare, when soldiers in their region were ordered to push forward, most of the male soldiers refused, while the Battalion of Death went on without them and advanced the line several trenches. The regiment’s commander praised the First Battalion’s bravery in his reports. (And then the Bolsheviks executed Cpt Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the First Battalion. She chose the victorious side, but she was captured two years before the revolution succeeded.)
The Soviet Union in World War II drafted women. They sent most of them into medical or antiair specializations; all nurses and 40% of doctors were women, and Griesse and Stites report that antiaircraft roles were strongly dominated by women. Officially, women made up about 8% of the Soviet army. (Incidentally, a book I have about this notes that memoirs on this topic are notoriously unreliable—and then it uses someone’s memoirs to try to claim that most women didn’t serve in direct combat. The irony.) There were several bomber units that were staffed mostly or fully by women—the 588th, known as the night witches, operated obsolete biplanes for lack of proper equipment, producing 23 Hero of the Soviet Union awards for its 110 crewmembers. Their physical conditions were gruelling, heavy on missed sleep and missed meals.
On the ground, there were no Soviet infantry or armor units that were primarily or fully staffed by women, but there were many women who served as snipers and became quite decorated for their work. (By the way, our previous complaint about recoil? The Soviet Union during WWII issued a large number of PPSh-41s to their soldiers. These used 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridges, which are designed for pistols. Same power as a pistol in a 3.6kg rifle means far less recoil. If you weren’t using that, you were using a bolt-action rifle—so the recoil just determines whether you get a bruise on your shoulder, rather than throwing off your aim.)
Still, even in desperation, there was typically official pressure to keep women out of combat roles in pretty much every country. Germany in WWII had a blanket ban on them due to their ideology—specifically, that women exist to produce and rear children and manage homes, nothing else—and had enough troubles allowing women into industrial roles that they’d taken up during the previous World War and subsequently been mostly pressed out of. The NVA accepted women in non-combat support roles for the most part, allowing them in antiaircraft roles at the start. The Communist uprisings preceding the war had much higher gender representation -- 40% of commanders of the PLAF were women, along with 60,000 regular soldiers and many more irregulars. Men in the PLAF claimed that women were inferior fighters, which is unsurprising—putting a female name on a resume reduces the perception of the person’s competence by a significant margin, and it’d be odd if this only applied to resumes where the only feminine thing present is a first name.
There is a general trend in guerrilla groups (remember we’re talking about Far Cry 4? That game where you’re helping a guerrilla group?) is to have high female representation. The Sri Lankan military reports that approximately a third of the Tamil Tigers are women. The Tamil Tigers are relatively effective; the Sandinista front won. Apparently it isn’t a huge disadvantage to have women in your armed forces.
Women fighting on par is unrealistic? The fact that only one member of the Golden Path is a woman is far more unrealistic.
I agree that there’s been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it’s generally from people who wouldn’t be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
Turnabout is fair play—no, you’re wrong, spend an hour researching this.
The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn’t crone, seductress, or fair maiden—you’ll get that in a handful of indie studios.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact.
An indie studio can do it because there are fewer people involved and the owners can be more selective in their hiring practices. A large studio doesn’t have those advantages and has had enough turnover that the effects of the initial hiring practices are mitigated.
The types of objectification are different, as you touch on. Men are not sexually objectified as often. When they are, they are shown in a position of power or self-direction, with women in contrasting positions of passiveness and submissiveness. This is most visible in advertising because it’s the place where men are portrayed as specifically male rather than as people (with the assumption that all people worth knowing about or portraying must be men).
Your example of random mooks? They’re there to shoot and die and follow orders. You can replace them with robots or ambulatory plants or aliens with no discernable gender. Calvin Klein ads? The men are there to be masculine.
Men are allowed to be short or tall, fat or thin, strong or weak. They can have long noses and bulbous noses and button noses and earlobes that hang down. Women have several molds they can fit—they can be crones or grandmothers, or they can be minor variants of generic white sexy woman at different ages, between fifteen and thirty.
Even when women are portrayed as skilled, intelligent people with their own backstories and interests, you’d be hard pressed to find one that isn’t portrayed in a way to make sexual objectification easy, even if it makes no sense with their story. Amita from Far Cry 4, for instance, is one of two leaders of a terrorist group fighting against an oppressive dictatorship. You’d expect that she’d have scars. You’d expect she’d be too busy to maintain long hair. You’d expect muscles. You’d expect powerful body language. You wouldn’t exactly expect her to have turquoise earrings, wear eyeliner, have immaculately plucked eyebrows, have skin as smooth as marble, and wear a pouty / concerned expression half the time.
The huge problem is that women’s perceived value can never exceed the ease with which they can be objectified.
That may be a cached impression. I doubt my viewing habits are typical, but a competent heroine who kicks ass is rather typical in contemporary movies, I think.
You contradict yourself. Your second sentence basically says that men are sexually objectified.
Besides, a great deal of advertising is dedicated to portraying women as.. .specifically feminine :-)
Says who?
Whenever someone says that, I know I’m in for a long series of lawyery responses based on almost plausible misunderstandings. Life’s too short for that. Goodbye, and don’t forget your fedora on the way out.
Sorry, don’t wear hats :-P
The traits that make men attractive aren’t primarily based on appearance. Thus it matters less what the traits are like. And men in movies and games frequently display them in large amounts. People will they’re heroes to have unusually positive traits, thus men are unusually strong, courageous, cool under fire, etc. and women are unusually beautiful, as well as unusually pure, nurturing, etc. It is of course possible (but not necessary) to give women high levels in the masculine traits (and conversely). However, removing the positive masculine traits from men, or the positive feminine traits from women will lead to a product no one wants to watch/play.
I agree this is unrealistic, then again the whole concept of warrior women fighting on par with men is itself completely unrealistic. Audiences tolerate this lack of realism because she at least displays (some) possitive feminine traits. They would also tolerate the more realistic option of having no warrior women. If you made female characters that realistically depict what it would take for women to fight on par with men (i.e., women who look like the Eastern block’s doped Olympic athletes) you’ll find that no one will want to watch/play them.
Surely a positive trait is a positive trait for anyone to have?
I see you’ve done a large amount of market research—oh, wait, I don’t.
No. It’s not. Not even slightly. If you mean it’s contrary to popular narratives, sure—but then you’re not saying whether women do fight, only how well publicized their fighting is. Women fought in the African National Congress. Women fought in the US Civil War. In World War I, the US started officially allowing women into the navy and air force, while Russia had fifteen battalions of women—one of which had the moniker “Battalion of Death”.
In World War II, the Soviet Union again accepted women as volunteers, but they assumed women would be poor fighters, so high command seldom sent them into battle. In response, many of them deserted, sneaked to the front, and fought clandestinely. This despite the shit heaped on them by their commanding officers, sexual harassment, and rape.
If you’re asking whether women fought in a particular war, the answer is almost certainly yes.
Oh, but you said “on par with men.” You must have known about these examples, conducted a review of the combat performance of all-women and mixed gender units, and compared that with the performance of all-men units, right? And you controlled for combat experience, considering commanding officers tried their damnedest to relegate women to background roles?
Women tolerate this because it’s the best representation they can find—but there’s less tolerance over time and more demand for women in all roles. The passivity varies between annoying and sickening—mainly because it’s constant. The extremely narrow range of body depictions no doubt contributes to the body image problems that many women face.
But the games industry is ridiculously male-dominated. The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn’t crone, seductress, or fair maiden—you’ll get that in a handful of indie studios.
Ah, yes, because some random terrorist group desperate for warm bodies to throw at their enemies only takes men who look like the Eastern block’s doped Olympic athletes. After all, when the US was conscripting people in the World Wars,
Why do you believe this? Do you even have any market research available?
Two replies:
1) That’s not how humans are wired.
2) The statement isn’t even true, e.g., “move fast, break things”, is good advice if you’re running an internet start up, but bad advice you you’re running a nuclear power plant.
Have you?
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women’s fighting ability is lower then men’s.
You’re conflating two different meanings”demand”:
1) demand in the economist’s sense, i.e., what someone would actually buy.
2) demand in the sense of complaining about the issue on internet forums.
I agree that there’s been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it’s generally from people who wouldn’t be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact. Granted you do have the problem that there are fewer women programers.
warm body =/= capable fighter
So what traits are useful depend on what you are trying to accomplish, right? Except you’re trying to make it be about biology.
Yay, an unbacked assertion! This is so fair—you can spend a quarter second regurgitating an unstudied belief while I have to spend an hour hunting down sources. You know, people who actually care about finding the truth will generally help out with this research. People who merely want to maintain their current opinion won’t, and will instead just try to identify their opponent’s sources to find every possible flaw. I generally hoped to find more of the former here than the latter, but I’ve now been disabused.
Anyway. We’re already talking about exceptional people, so this distribution question isn’t relevant unless you’re arguing that women with decent fighting abilities are as rare as comets on Earth intercept courses.
You’ve offered no evidence of women being bad at fighting. We can start from first principles, then. Hand-to-hand combat with little to no training? I’ll put odds on a guy; these contests generally come to raw strength, and untrained, men have more strength. Combat with firearms with training? Women mass less on average, so they probably have more trouble with recoil. But the US Marine Corps accepts both men and women who weigh 91 pounds, so low mass must not be an insurmountable issue. Women unused to physical labor might have difficulty hauling standard combat gear, but then, men would too. The risk of pregnancy is real (and since transgender people are also discriminated against in the military, there’s no concern about male soldiers becoming pregnant), but birth control is widely available these days. On the other hand, talking about Far Cry 4, nobody seems to carry more than their rifle and a couple pounds of random accoutrement.
Okay, let’s look at how these women are actually performing. Turns out there isn’t much data—commanding officers tend to be squeamish about sending soldiers to fight when those soldiers happen to have breasts. But the First Battalion of Death seemed to perform well in the small amount of action they saw. During trench warfare, when soldiers in their region were ordered to push forward, most of the male soldiers refused, while the Battalion of Death went on without them and advanced the line several trenches. The regiment’s commander praised the First Battalion’s bravery in his reports. (And then the Bolsheviks executed Cpt Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the First Battalion. She chose the victorious side, but she was captured two years before the revolution succeeded.)
The Soviet Union in World War II drafted women. They sent most of them into medical or antiair specializations; all nurses and 40% of doctors were women, and Griesse and Stites report that antiaircraft roles were strongly dominated by women. Officially, women made up about 8% of the Soviet army. (Incidentally, a book I have about this notes that memoirs on this topic are notoriously unreliable—and then it uses someone’s memoirs to try to claim that most women didn’t serve in direct combat. The irony.) There were several bomber units that were staffed mostly or fully by women—the 588th, known as the night witches, operated obsolete biplanes for lack of proper equipment, producing 23 Hero of the Soviet Union awards for its 110 crewmembers. Their physical conditions were gruelling, heavy on missed sleep and missed meals.
On the ground, there were no Soviet infantry or armor units that were primarily or fully staffed by women, but there were many women who served as snipers and became quite decorated for their work. (By the way, our previous complaint about recoil? The Soviet Union during WWII issued a large number of PPSh-41s to their soldiers. These used 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridges, which are designed for pistols. Same power as a pistol in a 3.6kg rifle means far less recoil. If you weren’t using that, you were using a bolt-action rifle—so the recoil just determines whether you get a bruise on your shoulder, rather than throwing off your aim.)
Still, even in desperation, there was typically official pressure to keep women out of combat roles in pretty much every country. Germany in WWII had a blanket ban on them due to their ideology—specifically, that women exist to produce and rear children and manage homes, nothing else—and had enough troubles allowing women into industrial roles that they’d taken up during the previous World War and subsequently been mostly pressed out of. The NVA accepted women in non-combat support roles for the most part, allowing them in antiaircraft roles at the start. The Communist uprisings preceding the war had much higher gender representation -- 40% of commanders of the PLAF were women, along with 60,000 regular soldiers and many more irregulars. Men in the PLAF claimed that women were inferior fighters, which is unsurprising—putting a female name on a resume reduces the perception of the person’s competence by a significant margin, and it’d be odd if this only applied to resumes where the only feminine thing present is a first name.
There is a general trend in guerrilla groups (remember we’re talking about Far Cry 4? That game where you’re helping a guerrilla group?) is to have high female representation. The Sri Lankan military reports that approximately a third of the Tamil Tigers are women. The Tamil Tigers are relatively effective; the Sandinista front won. Apparently it isn’t a huge disadvantage to have women in your armed forces.
Women fighting on par is unrealistic? The fact that only one member of the Golden Path is a woman is far more unrealistic.
Turnabout is fair play—no, you’re wrong, spend an hour researching this.
An indie studio can do it because there are fewer people involved and the owners can be more selective in their hiring practices. A large studio doesn’t have those advantages and has had enough turnover that the effects of the initial hiring practices are mitigated.