Terri of Geek Feminism Blog says
You’re probably all familiar with the inverse law of fantasy armour for women: the less the armour covers, the more it somehow miraculously protects. Liz Walsh writes and draws the entertaining web comic Tao of Geek and I quite enjoyed her story about Naomi campaigning not for sensible armour for women, but in equal cheesecake for her male barbarian character.
The story starts here and if you don’t have a whole lot of time, you should at least check out the final punchline here.
Two good ones from the middle of the series (click to see them full-size at Tao of Geek.)
Further on in the series Walsh makes not one but two points in dialogue. A couple of passers by say “We don’t want female characters covered up” and “We like looking at pretty women” and Walsh’s character Naomi replies “No one’s saying you don’t! I don’t want to cover up women, I want to have sexy armor for all.” To which the uncomprehending passers-by repeat “We like looking at pretty women.”
Oh, and extra credit for the slash-fic reference here. (Note: Hmm… I wonder if slash fiction, which can be barkingly pornographic, continually flies under the bogus Rules of Desire is because even though both authors and readers are overwhelmingly female nearly all the the sex in slash fiction is between male characters.)
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As for the slash fiction… I
Submitted by Shadow (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-16 17:24.As for the slash fiction… I think it’s mostly because, like you say, that there’s a lot of female writers and those females tend to write male pairings, while the male writers I’ve run into so far tend to write female pairings, when it comes to slashfic. It is quite possible this tendency has to do with an interest and fascination of the opposite sex and interactions between someone of the opposite sex.
Of course I’ve never done a deaper study of slashfic and their authors, so I won’t know for sure; this is just a guesswork based on what I’ve seen to this date.
I will have to check out the comic in question, but now will probably be a bad time. ;)
From what I’ve heard, some of
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-16 22:16.From what I’ve heard, some of these game designers have realized by now that A.) Quite a lot of women play MMOs, B.) Scantily-clad female imagery is a turnoff for a lot of them, and C.) You don’t need to do “skimpy” or “slutty” to attract men, “cute” and “exotic” work almost as well – and those go over very well with women too. Result: While the “chainmail bikini” look hasn’t completely gone away, things are starting to move away from that.
You still probably won’t see “male beefcake” very much outside of adult-only games any time soon, though.
...Hmm. That third comic has
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Wed, 2010-03-17 13:01....Hmm. That third comic has me making Theories Unsupported By Any Sort of Facts.
Okay, so, Two Rules of Desire, right? Which means that media usually have designated Hot Woman characters, and they usually look very similar (skinny, big breasts, etc.). But the media usually don’t have dedicated Hot Man characters.
Turn-ons are to a certain degree conditioned by early-life experience, yes? Fetishes and so on. So you could argue that, overall, guys are conditioned to a certain type of attractiveness, while different women end up finding different kinds of men attractive (Vin Disel and your typical anime prettyboy are both very attractive to different groups but they don’t look similar— like, at all).
Which makes it very difficult to create a ‘sexy man’ character in a video game. To create a ‘sexy woman’ all you have to do is give her an anatomically improbable waist and breasts larger than her head. To create a ‘sexy man,’ it’s… well, sexy to /who/?
I just appreciate any game
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Wed, 2010-03-17 19:53.I just appreciate any game that lets me play as a woman at all. When a game lets me play as a woman with a realistic body shape (Fallout 3 and Saints’ Row 2 are my current favorites for this; Saints’ Row even let my character be heavyset without turning her comedy-obese) it’s particularly awesome.
And the funny thing is that I wouldn’t consider either my Fallout or my Saints’ Row character unsexy. They’re a pair of hotties and they’re absolutely fantasy objects for me; they’re just hot in a different way, one that interests me more than huge-tits-no-waist “hotness.”
Considering the tremendous variation in straight male preferences for women—guys who like athletic builds or petite women or BBWs must feel a little weird when constantly presented with huge-tits-no-waist—“ah, they’re all straight males” doesn’t even adequately explain game-bimbos. I guess it’s one part a holdover from when resolutions weren’t high enough to signify attractiveness except by stereotype, and one part a feedback effect where developers “give the people what they want” and the people accept it because they’re used to it.
To be fair, I also like playing the rare (although much less rare) male characters who aren’t built like gigantic thugs. A boulder-biceped linebacker is just as much of a lazy stereotype as huge-tits-no-waist.
From what I’ve read, those
Submitted by testcardgirl (not verified) on Fri, 2010-03-19 20:21.From what I’ve read, those who ascribe to the “Rules of Desire” completely gloss over the issue of female desire when dealing with slashfic. I’ve seen two different takes on it: fanboys who assert that girls ruin their fandom by doing stupid icky things like writing about characters being gay, and the more academic approach of trying to explain slashfic as being like romance novels, because you know those women sure like the romance novels.
I wonder if women’s love of
Submitted by Laura Fox (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-23 07:23.I wonder if women’s love of slash fic (and prettyboys more broadly; the kind of character referenced in the strip is not always depicted as gay) can skate past the “rules” if men concerned with such things don’t consider it a legitimate image of masculinity. If they see it just as women desiring a silly fantasy of their own creation, then real men aren’t being desired, and why bother prohibiting or condemning women’s desire that you can just scoff at?
[I think it’s an excellent point. The slash-fantasy character in the comic isn’t on the average man’s “masculinity” radar so yeah, women fantasizing about men like that doesn’t count. For men. Who assume women are moved by male standards of male attractiveness rather than their own individual ones. Thanks, Laura. —fl]