I am not a Feminist

*I am not intending to offend anyone by writing this blog post, just voicing my opinion/ reaction to these topics. I acknowledge that these are very big issues in society and affect many people but I have no had a major affect by these issues which shapes my opinions*

I understand why gender and sexuality is becoming a more prevalent issue in todays day and age. There are many more Gay Rights Movements, Feminist Movements and many more that take place everyday around the world. However, gender and sexuality in video games does not bother me. For me when ever I have played video games I like to think about the overall objective for a game rather than the minor details, such as what a girl is wearing for clothing. When I have played a video game being a main character as a male, I never look at their clothing and let that dictate my gaming experience. I believe that once you begin to focus on those details is when it begins to take away from the overall game. However, I completely acknowledge and understand why this is such an issue in our culture today for many reasons, for example the rape culture. But this is not something that personally bothers me in any way shape or form. I think that if a female feels confident enough to wear little clothing out in public to show off her body then she should be able to. If a girl in a video game “wants” to wear little clothing to show off her body, then she should be able to without it causing an uproar.

I have done several research projects and papers in the past on eating disorders and confidence not only on females but also males. From previous reports that I have done it has shown that there is an increase in eating disorders and body dissatisfaction in females as there is in males, but the same issues are still occuring in males and a lot of these issues are are coming from media and video games. The article titled The Misconception of Masculinity in Games, is very important because it acknowledges that women are typically the main focus of these issues, which I agree, but that these issues are still occurring within the male population as well.

“While the media is oh-so-heavily occupied on entertainment’s negative influence on women and how they view their bodies, here is an interactive medium predominantly aimed towards males that features a more unrealistic and unattainable view of the male physique than that of any supermodel” (Perez 2011).

This is something that I COMPLETELY agree with!!! Often times supermodels are shamed for their bodies and said that they starve themselves to get the body that they have. Sure, it might be the case sometimes, but many other times, those supermodels work very hard, eat healthy and have other healthy habits in order to maintain their bodies. When I was in 6th grade I was made fun of and people used to say I never ate and would make myself throw up because I was a smaller, and skinner sixth grader than a lot of people. Meanwhile what many of them didn’t know is that I was in three sports and at McDonalds every single day (i’m not exaggerating). However, males cannot just wake up one morning and look like haulk. Where some supermodels are naturally smaller and skinner than other people. The whole supermodel issue is addressed far more than it is with males which makes no sense to me. Both are often portrayed wrong, but there shouldn’t be more focus on females then males. This was even noticeable in the groups presentation, most of their presentation was focused on females and males were mentioned briefly. One thing that made me a little upset is when the group was presented, they showed many pictures of girls and along with one of the pictures, the presenter said “Girls don’t actually look like this unless they get plastic surgery”. Again I don’t think this is true because people come in all different shapes and sizes and some girls actually do look like the video game characters. Another interesting aspect to this article is under the subtitle of “We make things go boom. Yay.” This is not something that I have previously thought about when thinking about gender and sexuality in video games. I have always thought about how men and women are portrayed in a physical aspect but not so much as the kinds of things that they are doing.

The article “Why I’m afraid video games will continue to “bury its gays” was very interesting to me. This brought up a lot of good points to consider when thinking about gender and sexuality in video games. I did not previously know that “The killing of queer fictional characters is such a prevalent trend across television, film and video games that it has been given its own trope: bury your gays” (Chan 2017). I did not know that this was happening within television, film or video games and I think that it needs to be stopped now. I was excited to read that the video game “Life is Strange” are using girls as protagonists but I would have hoped that it would have had a more positive representation of the LGBTQ community.

References

Perez, Ryan. “The Misconception of Masculinity in Games.” VentureBeat, VentureBeat, 17 Mar. 2011, venturebeat.com/community/2011/03/17/the-misconception-of-masculinity-in-games/.

Chan, Khee Hoon. “Why I’m Afraid Video Games Will Continue to ‘Bury Its Gays’.” Polygon, Polygon, 4 Aug. 2017, www.polygon.com/2017/8/4/16090980/life-is-strange-death-lgbtq-characters.