Cheryl-Anne Boccadoro
The issue of sexism in the media has been brought forward for a few years now. The psychological marketing trick of ‘selling sex’ while clearly effective, is taking a mental toll on society. These false and negatively portrayed images of women are being thrust upon our subconscious through various forms of media; music videos, commercials, billboards, magazines, etc. I do not think that this content was created maliciously to shame women, but it certainly needs to be combated by showing that you can sell products without portraying women in demeaning ways.
In my opinion, the effects of this marketing tactic are especially problematic when displayed through the medium of video games. Video games are known to be typically dominated by “a majority of adults [aged] 18 and older (53%)” (The Virtual Census 2009), we know that they are also exposed to younger males below the age of 18. If they are constantly seeing these positively portrayed white male characters and rarely seeing a minority character or woman character portrayed positively, it is bound to at least subconsciously influence their real-life perceptions of people. This is why I think that video games should be shifting to a more gender and race neutral appearance.
When I was watching the TEDxWomen 2012 video of Anita Sarkeesian I was most surprised by the intense virtual combat against her campaign to question the issue of gender and video games. I was shocked by the intense amount of disgusting and harsh threats she had received and just the sheer amount of effort people went to in order to destroy her mission. I would never have been able to forecast that volume of hatred toward this campaign in this decade. It was funny how the gamer world was described to appear as a ‘boys club’ in which females are discouraged to join and pushed out. It’s just crazy how immature that portrays the males of the gaming community to be acting so negatively and vulgar towards the issue.
The article Women and Games discusses the level of play and also the different genre of games that women play. It described three sort of categories that women fall into in relation to games. First is a female gamer with similar reasoning to playing games as male gamers; they find pleasure in the dominant and competitive components in playing video games. The second category is female gamers who use games as an escape or distraction from reality. The third find video games a waste of time and therefore rarely indulge in them. I would probably identify myself as the middle ground, or at least I used to. It’s funny because my whole life i’ve noticed video games to be mostly a male-dominated facet of entertainment. I have enjoyed playing video games (yes, even aside from DDR and Guitar Hero) but never to the extent that my brother or other males seem to enjoy them. I used to go on flash game websites when I was younger and found that the amount of harassment towards female users with more feminine account names got far more harassment. I know some females would choose to pick more masculine account names in order to avoid harassment. I’d find that as a female on even those sites you would receive sexual harassment or just mean harassment and rarely anything beyond that. I sort of normalized it when I was younger, ‘that’s just the way it is’ sort of mentality. But now I really see the misogyny in it.
