Samantha McGarry

Blog post

3/25/15

Where the ladies at?

Yet again another sexism issue?! How surprising! This world has so much issues on sexism that so many people are blinded to. One of those topics would be sexism in video games. I have a strong opinion that people do not recognize sexism in society when they are not exposed to it. For example, men and women not recognizing how much sexism is in video games against women. In the reading Women and games: technologies of gendered self, the study that was performed examined individual differences in the consumption of computer games and how gender is represented and shown within gaming.

I thought it was interesting how in the study women were connected to games like Dance Dance Revolution and Sony’s Eye toy. I found this interesting because of how gendered those games are. Women in the study were connected to games that, to me, were more gendered towards women. However, it did not surprise me that this was true. It rather surprised me how not as many females gamers were involved in standard video games. The reason I was surprised was because of the huge stink of sexism in video games, especially lately. 

I started to think to myself, where is the sexism in video games? Is it just the issue of females not being allowed into this “boys club” or is it the displays of women. I would say it is both. However, I started to google video games to really see for myself since I am personally not someone who plays a lot of video games. This is when I came across this poster.

Not only did this poster completely disturb me but also confused me. Two points from this poster that I found confusing were the women. The woman on the right is one: completely degrading women and two: not even featured in the video game. So this character was not on the poster to display the characters in the video game but to attract men and portray the “boys club” imagine. There was no real reason other than marketing to men for this woman character to be on this poster. It really upset me to see multiple posters like this on so many different video game ads. However, I do not know if the other women on posters were also not in the game, but for this game I know the blonde character is not.

The second character that shifted my view on the game was the unattractive women police officer handcuffing the attractive blonde character. I thought this was an interesting way to depict women characters on the poster. I found this as a way of showing sexual and exotic looking women as better or more attractive to men than working, dressed, smart women. 

This was another poster that really drove the idea that women are forced to look sexual and explode women as sexual beings on these posters to be even “part’’ of this boy club. I would say the video game culture takes a huge part of patriarchy. Video games are contributing to the never ending sexist culture because young men are viewing these posters and games and believing that this is the way to treat women e.g. as only sexual beings.