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[EnigmaticHat]

Spoiler: Perceived injustice (click to show/hide)

Bottom left Texas one has me cracking up

Totally forgot to add, the point of adding this image was just to highlight how erroneous the belief that woman are the only sex idealized. Strong, broad and tall man with chiseled jaw and deep eyes? Sound familiar?
I just don't like "& you also" arguments, they seem rather... Empty.

You do realize that romance novels are primarily smut written for straight women, right?

Anyway, it isn't about women being idealized.  The problem is that women default to sex objects* while men default to whatever role in the story they have.  At risk of putting words in other people's mouths, when people complain about women never being ugly, its an extension of the complaint that they're always there to appeal to men.  There are certainly male characters designed to appeal to women, but the majority of them aren't.

*Its a little more complicated than that, especially because many writers and such have gotten better about portraying women.  But the tendency is still there.  Video games especially have a thing where if there is a female character there's a significant chance they'll be stripperific regardless of their role in the story.  To clarify, since I know someone's going to misinterpret this, my problem isn't that sexy women onscreen are bad.  Its that women are typically relegated to a small number of archetypal roles (eye candy, love interest, warrior woman) while men get to be more or less anything.  This is part of why the Bechdel test is a thing.

[Descan]

DIVERSITY!

[Neonivek]

when people complain about women never being ugly

I don't quite think it is that women are never ugly... But rather their general range of appearances is extremely small to the point where the vast majority of females are this ultra-sexy big breasted super model look often with very little in terms of clothing.

To the extent where characters like Alex from Half-life 2 are an outright exception to the rule.

[EnigmaticHat]

Yeah, that too.

[AlleeCat]

when people complain about women never being ugly

I don't quite think it is that women are never ugly... But rather their general range of appearances is extremely small to the point where the vast majority of females are this ultra-sexy big breasted super model look often with very little in terms of clothing.

To the extent where characters like Alex from Half-life 2 are an outright exception to the rule.

And people still faun over her like she's the epitome of attractiveness.

[Soadreqm]

And people still faun over [Alyx] like she's the epitome of attractiveness.

Well it's not like she's ugly. She just, you know, doesn't look like a stripper. (Doing a Google image search for "alyx" just now revealed that some people have taken steps to rectify this. ) Plus, she's a likable character, which probably goes some ways to facilitate the fawning.

For ugly women, I guess there's the "evil witch" archetype. They're kind of evil, though. And I can't really even recall a lot of examples with evil witches in actually important roles. Ravel Puzzlewell was badass, but who else is there?

[Max White]

Well there is at times the wise old crone type figure. They are like the evil witch except not evil... And my god how I want to play as one of those in a game now. That would be awesome. Kind of like Yoda, but without the speech patterns.

[Descan]

Just lots of cackling.

[Max White]

Somebody get Hayao Miyazaki on the line. We need him to animate this game... In 3d... Somehow!

[Mech#4]

Well there is at times the wise old crone type figure. They are like the evil witch except not evil... And my god how I want to play as one of those in a game now. That would be awesome. Kind of like Yoda, but without the speech patterns.

A game where you play as Granny Weatherwax? Couple that with a system to play as Nanny Ogg and Magrat (or Agnes) and I can see an adventure game being formed.

[Neonivek]

I could never see a game where you play Granny Weatherwax... she is too competent so to speak.

And while Point and clicks don't have to be filled with nothing but unlikely heroes (though IMO Point and clicks are the best for them), they do have to actually use their wit.

Mind you in terms of female main character representation I cannot think of a Genre outright better then Point and clicks. Perhaps Japanese visual novels (for creepy reasons) but otherwise no.

Note: I sort of consider visual novels, interactive fiction, and point and clicks to be cousins.

[Reelya]

Also, relevant:

Spoiler: Perceived injustice (click to show/hide)

Bottom left Texas one has me cracking up

You do understand these are basically written porn, right?
Are you saying that video games don't need diversity in characters because they amount to nothing but porn?

Apparently there are a lot of women who have a thing for some what ugly scarred guys. I never even knew! Maybe I should get hacked across the face leaving that scar over eye thing that Kratos has going.

Those types of novels aren't anywhere near porn levels. I could link to some written porn to show you the difference. Well, it does basically contradict the notion that males aren't objectified in games partly to appeal to the female audience. Those types of novels are directly targeted at a female audience (i doubt many guys would buy that for their girlfriend), and they clearly display the same type of objectification as seen in games and movies, for both genders. What it might indicate is that the objectification itself isn't the primary thing preventing lots of women playing action games. Romance novels use quite similar artwork in terms of body proportions etc, and sell an absolutely enormous quantity of stock directly to female audience. Sure, there are some women who say they'd play more of these types of games if there was less objectification, but of course, we need quantitative data rather that single-point anecdotes. Being a touchy subject doesn't revoke a requirement to ask for a complete data set, e.g. representative surveys of women, both gamers, and non-gamers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games

Differences between the genders

Some differences between gamers may also have to do with fundamental taste differences between the sexes, and a few game genres have traditionally seen higher female gamer percentages than the others. There has been persistent female interest, for example, in action-adventure games. This has more recently translated into an interest in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Women have also been shown to prefer role-playing game to first-person shooters. While male audiences prefer fast-paced explosive action and combat, women tend to prefer in-game communication[8] and interpersonal relationships (character development and plot dynamics). In-game activities may also differ between the sexes in games with less linear plots such as the Grand Theft Auto series. It has been suggested that developers can learn what girls want in a game by observing similarities in how different girl teams will react to and modify a game if given the opportunity.

Regardless of how this difference occurs, it makes sense to make more games that appeal to different demographics, rather than the other option of trying to force all existing products to be "gender neutral". That second option will only shrink the overall market by reducing the scope of games (all games produced will need to be shoe-horned into gender-neutral rather than having a wide palette to choose from). So, the answer is more diversity in the market between different products, rather than trying to destroy, ban or neuter existing products. The studies quoted above imply that a mere facelift and female-friendly protagonist isn't going to make a large number of women play any edition of Call Of Duty for example. By the time you've made the changes needed to make it have 50/50 gender appeal you'd basically be better of just making a totally different game.

[Frumple]

... all I can say is the ones I've given a shot must have been repeated exceptions to the rule, then (all four or five of them, but still...). Romance novels I've ran into have all had chunks of 'em that read like they're straight out of erotica. I mean, literally. I've read both sorts, and it's like... put the relevant sections side by side and I wouldn't be able to tell which was which. It boggles my mind at times (also totes impressed by how some rampant romance fiction readers can get all indigent about stuff that admits what it is, ha). I've trudged through fanfiction lemons less explicit than that stuff

[Reelya]

Really? I had no idea ... I guess things have changed since the day's of my mum's Mills And Boons novels. But still, the objectification is pretty much the same for both sexes in both genres, one aimed at women, and the other one aimed at men.

One could now argue that sexual objectification itself should be lower for both sexes in video games (the "porn" analogy that Max made), but that's basically shifting the goalposts from the original claim that women were objectified for men and men were objectified purely as a power-fantasy for males. Both are in fact idealized in a way that appeals to the other gender. There may be other, good arguments about how objectification is skewed (e.g. dialogue, clothing), but physique itself isn't a very good one. I don't think many people of either gender would be interested in playing a woman with a world-class female body-builder-level physique.

[Willfor]

Men are objectified inside/on the covers of Romance novels because the marketing / publishing arm of that market is heavily steered toward one thing: Mass appeal to the people who they think are reading it, women. But even in the romance -- because it's such a huge fucking portion of genre book sales -- you can find titles that appeal to their male readership. Even crossovers into other genres. There are definitely options out there for men who want to read stories where men are not denigrated.

I'm not going to say it's perfect, it really does need to change to. However, the only reason this is still problematic is because there is a massive drive by publishers to keep it this way because their marketing teams tell them that it's impossible to sell to men, so you can actually find in this rare unicorn sighting of an entertainment market that tries to go after women.

Once again, the people in charge of the money for the industry are being problematic, and mostly trying to target a single demographic when there is money to be made from all comers.