I really hate being a feminist killjoy. I hate feeling like some kind of scold. I really do. It makes me uncomfortable, & I feel like it makes me & my work feel tiresome and reductive to a lot of people. I get that. If I didn't think it was important, I would stop in a heartbeat.
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You can love Lara Croft. But if you don't think that the way she looked had the function--intentional or not--of perpetuating a gaming culture in which men viewed women as objects to whose bodies they were entitled, you're kidding yourself.
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I mean, trust me. I was AMONG DUDES in the 1990s. Dudes thought I was one of them. I know how many, many guys in their teens & early 20s talked abt her, thought abt her. She actively worked to maintain a culture of sexism within video games, gaming sites, gaming magazines, etc.
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And none of this is to say that any individual's enjoyment of those games or of Lara as a character is invalid. Of course it's not. But sometimes we REALLY REALLY want to think that because we liked a thing, therefore it was actually a net good in terms of its cultural impact.
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I loved Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II. And yet, Lara Croft, speaking in broad terms, contributed to a culture in which straight dudes felt that female characters should be designed and women should exist to cater to their desires. Both of these things can be true.
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I mean I think some part of me is still trapped in that goddamn opera house. Holy shit, that fucking place.
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Sometimes ppl respond to arguments like this one with stuff like "Okay, but Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones is considered like the hottest dude ever. It's the same. Male heroes are also supposed to be extremely attractive." And no, it's not remotely the same. Because patriarchy.
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No reasonable person, IMO, is actually arguing for, like, a ban on attractive movie stars, or video game heroes, or comic book characters, or whatever. Nor is anyone really saying that female characters should never be desirable or express sexuality.
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I mean, in my view, Ellie from The Last of Us is attractive, and when she kisses Riley at the end of Left Behind, it was such a huge moment not just because it was an expression of queer love but because it felt like an expression of what Ellie wanted for HERSELF as a character.
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Believe it or not I want MORE of this kind of romantic & sexual expression from female chars in games, & less that feels like a hollow fulfillment of male fantasies. I mean, in TR 1&2, Lara was sexualized, she was what many find sexy, but she wasn't actually SEXUAL, was she?
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Here's a story I'm fond of telling because I think it is extremely revealing. When I started at GameSpot and first appeared in a video, there were NUMEROUS comments to the effect that women on a site like GS should be attractive to the site's core demographic of straight dudes...
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...and that by hiring me, clearly a woman who was not hired because of my perceived attractiveness or desirability to these guys, GS was in effect betraying its customers. This mindset, that women exist in those spaces purely or primarily to please men, didn't come from a vacuum.
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It was an attitude that years and years and years of video games, video game advertisements, magazines, websites, and other stuff had codified: Women in and around games should be desirable to you, the male consumer.
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Other folks, like the great Jeff Gerstmann or Greg Kasavin or Kevin VanOrd, largely got to be valued for their experience, their perspectives, their opinions. As a woman in that space, I was earmarked as having another primary purpose,...
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...one which I utterly failed to fulfill right out of the gate. And trust me, you can draw a fairly straight line from stuff like 1990s Lara Croft to a gaming culture so steeped in patriarchy and male entitlement that I, and women in general, are and were often evaluated this way
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Anti-feminist dudes are flocking to the defense of the Lara Croft celebrator, which kinda proves the point that such arguments only serve to make excuses for sexism.
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End of conversation
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