Women in the world of gaming: an essay on microaggressions
By: Stephanie Fittipaldi
Tags: Roleplaying Game, Feminism, Movies, Sexism, Comics

I’ve been trying to write about this topic for a while now; it’s funny how important things are the hardest to put into words. In such times, I remember Hemingway:

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I urge you to bear with me, dear reader. Mainly because, if there’s someone who couldn’t grasp the feelings I write about today, this someone is probably Hemingway and his stories of tough men as examples of masculinity. More on that later.

I’ll start with my truth. Since I was little, I was passionate about creating worlds and playing with alternative realities — my playtime as a child would always involve mages, dragons, witches, and fairies. I would spend many of my hours thinking of great adventures, unknown planets, kingdoms that required saving. I was (very easily) leaving behind the traditional concepts of being a princess that needed rescue; in these stories, I wanted to be the one who yielded the sword, the one who led the rebellion, and whose abilities were sung as legends for centuries by the court minstrels.

However, I soon realized that I could only be that heroine inside my mind — when I joined the other kids in kindergarten recess, I would fatally hear a “you’re going to be this character because it’s for girls.” As my baby fats were still under the heavy scrutiny of the aesthetic standards of 5-year-olds, I was still relegated to the honorable role of “friend of the beautiful princess in danger.” As I grew up, it was an implicit deal that some games marginally more complex were considered “boy games” to which a girl was rarely invited (or felt comfortable to self-invite).

At the time, I (obviously) didn’t have the criteria to understand what was wrong with these scenarios; I just knew that I didn’t like how those games made me feel. It was as though I was born all wrong; I had the wrong gender, the wrong body, and the wrong face. It took me nearly 30 years to realize that I wasn’t the one who had defined all this.

Of course, despite what I could call a “microaggression-seasoned life”, you may put your violin away; my childhood was very happy, as is my adult life. Still, I need to talk about the contradiction of the difficulty of being a woman in a subculture that embraces the imaginative and fantastic universes but lacks the imagination to recognize another gender as equal. I also think I have to talk about sisterhood.

Time to fasten your seatbelts and hold the nausea because we’re going on a trip (pretty shocking for some and usual for others) through these male and female role constructs in the universe of comics, games, and movies. I want to go deeper into these little rules that have been imposed on me since my early life concerning my appearance — starting with my body.

Let’s first talk about the most consumed medium for mass entertainment: audiovisual. As you pay attention to the biggest blockbusters, is easy to recognize the female figure through times in an evident stereotype: they’re powerful super-heroines (or super-villains); seductive — veeery seductive indeed; and generally their primary role is to support (usually in a romantic fashion) the main character. Of course, some don’t make this list, but I can count them on one hand’s fingers, which doesn’t fit well a planet where over half the general population (and that consumes games/comics/movies) is female.

The Hawk Eye Initiative illustrates the problem of presenting this kind of model-character for children early on. The page makes a satire of the “empowered” poses in which the super-heroines usually are drawn, but with male bodies. It’s glaring how much the female image becomes a relation between sex and power, whereas men don’t need to have sexualized bodies to emanate a powerful aura.

Art from The Hawk Eye Initiative

We are forming girls that think they have to be beautiful and sexy (?!) to defeat monsters and save the day, while boys are already born with the necessary qualities. And if you tell me today we have Wonder Woman and Supergirl as examples, I raise you with the superior frequency which characters like Black Widow have in media productions.

THIS is how super-heroines made for girls look like.

Objectification of our bodies

The issue with objectifying our bodies has an even more disturbing history. Throughout times, it is a known fact that all kinds of people considered “sub-human” have been somehow subject to violation — of their bodies, of their identities, of their rights. Blacks, Jews, LGBTQIA+, women. All had (and still have) dark years of literal and constant aggressions to their mere existence. As much as our current society tries to make amends with these matters — with empowering movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, in actuality, a total and indifferent normalization of violations and microaggressions prevail.

Being even more straightforward on how exactly women are affected by this nowadays, I present you with a little RPG book titled “Falkenstein Castle.” Originally published in 1994, the fantasy-steampunk book imitates the 19th century and its atmosphere, which blends the victorian era with technological modernity. Today, it’s still published in Brazil by Retropunk, maintaining its main characteristics.

I ask you to focus on the fact that it is a book on an imagined universe, considered one of the best games in the genre, sold since the 90s and recommended to groups of 12+ years old.

Being an RPG enthusiast who’s curious about all things victorian and an avid reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, I was rapidly transported to fantasies of playing as a great swordswoman and a historian during the day that made shady deals as an art smuggler by night. I wanted to take over freight ships, fight pirates, and be all that my character (with it’s chaotic-neutral alignments) could dream of.

The reading was going relatively fine until I reached a chapter titled “The Falkenstein Women” (freely translated from publisher Devir, 1998), where the author spits phrases like:

“[…] an intelligent and mannered wife is considered a husband’s reflex; the more accomplished, the better the image the men have. The only place where I found strong resistance to the ingress of women were universities, sports events, the military, and medicine, […]” “In every respect, women in the Castle Falkenstein world still are, intimately, women. It’s as though, by the fact of being accepted as equal, they were capable of maintaining the same qualities that made them feminine: good manners, intelligence, wittiness, and beauty. But don’t let yourself get fooled by flashings and accessories. The women I met here can be tough as steel and are capable of handling a sword or a pistol as well as most men.”

Every word was a slap in the face. I couldn’t be a historian, since women were not welcomed in the universities. And maybe, just maybe, I could be as good of a swordswoman as “most men.” And I clearly should be beautiful and well-mannered, so that it would reflect well on a husband I didn’t even want to have.

I hated that book with all my strength, for telling me I couldn’t be who I wanted because my character wasn’t a man. I continued the unenthusiastic and sexism-seasoned read, finally reaching a part of the text titled “A Fate Worse Than Death”:

“In a real melodrama, the villains never kill attractive women. No, they threaten them with a Fate Worse Than Death, which normally means some sort of undesired romantic or sexual onslaught. An Honored Villain will always try to marry or establish some type of lasting relationship with the heroine. A Villain with no principle will try to force his hand with the heroine, which normally translates to more of a violent possession rather than plain and simple rape, involving a series of forced soap-opera-like kisses, rude touches, and a series of threats of worse things to come. Should the worse happen, it will always be backstage, with the scene fading to black at the moment the heroine that kicked and screamed is beaten, faints, or is physically dominated.”

About this, the first thing I’d like to say is a message to the author — even though I realize the improbability of my essay reaching Mike Pondsmith’s hands. I’d like you to know that all you wrote above are rape and sexual harassment of women, even though you clearly avoided using such terms to lighten the text and make it fly under the radar. Except that I learned at a great cost in my life to never let this kind of thing go. As a person who knows that 75% of women in Brazil have already suffered some type of sexual aggression, I assure you: there is NOTHING fun about this.

Stop normalizing the violation of our bodies. Stop normalizing the construct that women are inferior to men, made for men’s pleasures, or that they’re less of a woman for having characteristics that you deem masculine property.

Source: Pinterest

This book is only one example among thousands of traumatizing experiences imposed on the female gender in RPG tables. In an open letter published in 2015 by the website RedeRPG, women report how they continuously go through situations where their characters’ harassment are narrated in sordid details (freely translated):

“After all, it is not that women don’t fit with RPG. Women don’t fit with sexism. And every time women are treated as trophies to be played by straight male players, it is sexism. Whenever a female character has to seduce and negotiate sexually with other characters as the only possible action to solve an impasse, it’s sexism. Each time the roleplay becomes harassment of female characters or players, it’s sexism. Whenever players or characters are despised for not fitting into the players’ aesthetic standards and sexual fantasies, it’s sexism. Whenever female players are despised and have their ideas ignored by the group, which restricts their participation in certain scenes or types of characters, it’s sexism. Every time a male player is ridiculed for wanting to play female characters or do things considered female, it’s sexism.” “[…]These bizarre things can evolve, since it’s not uncommon the reports of women who had their characters raped in game as, of course, ‘just for fun’.”

It’s absurd to discriminate against women in games created for entertainment in current times.

It’s absurd to discriminate against women in games.

It’s absurd to discriminate against women.

It’s absurd to discriminate.

The “male gaze.”

I believe that, fatally, all this can only culminate in the concept of “male gaze” — a term used to designate female characters that are obvious products of a male vision. The term was coined by Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in 1972. The author says women in movies are reduced to mere objects of the male gaze, without characteristics and personality traits other than those a man expects of a woman, aiming to satisfy the expectation of a male director (as men still compose an alarming 84.9% of directors in Hollywood) and a male public. Basically, men see and women are seen.

Nearly 50 years later and Laura is still right. I was a victim of the male gaze since kindergarten. I continue to be so. All women are. And this normalization does something to you, after so many years. This constant bombardment that straight, white cis males are predominantly superior eventually transforms you. It may make you live speaking quietly, afraid. It may anger you for so long you don’t even know where to direct your frustration to. After all, they “are only kidding,” and you take everything too seriously. It may make you feel crazy, weak, dumb, make you endure violations you think you deserve. It may lead you to believe that they’re right and you’re less — or should pretend to be so as not to scare them.

What baffles me about the translation of the male gaze is how it affects masculinity in men; the same way women are put in sculptural bodies, unreal and sexualized, the ideal of the virile man seems to be a body ripped in muscles (usually shirtless), smeared in baby oil and always with a grim face. Like female bodies, these man are mere constructs that have little to nothing to do with reality — serving only the purpose of the male gaze itself.

Maybe, to this point, you disagree with me. Perhaps you’re certain that the male body is a “female gaze” construct. But then I ask you: with 84.9% of Hollywood directors being men, does it even make sense to think this construct was a female creation?

Source: Vintage Everyday

Laura Mulvey once more raises the topic, saying in her essay that the male body construct for the male gaze originates from a narcissistic scopophilia (the pleasure to see oneself) ideal. YouTube channel The Media Insider made a short video essay on the construct of the gaze and the coldcrashpictures channel have an amazing video about how masculinity presents itself in movies that goes way beyond what I, as a woman, could say.

The fundamental point is that gender roles damage all genders, and being objectified is horrible for all parts. Despite all of that, it is the feminine that keeps systematically paying for it.