these female roles that are viewed as strong and empowered embody many masculine identified traits, maintaining a patriarchal division of gender roles.
This is a questionable assertion in itself, and I don't feel Anita actually ever proves this is so. It also invalidates much of her game points, like her promotion of "Dinosaur Planet" as empowering for women. After all, Krystal whooped ass in that promo, which is clearly a man thing (according to Anita). By her reasoning in this article, pretty much any action game with a female lead character reinforces gender roles, even if desexualised completely. That just doesn't matter to Anita. Macho women are bad and maintain the patriarchy.
A key aspect of patriarchy is maintaining the illusion that men and women fit within predetermined gender norms and that these norms are biological and fixed. Stereotypical gender-specific attributes are often identified in opposition to one another with the “masculine” traits valued over “feminine” traits. For example, masculine identified traits such as being strong and in control are valued and feminine identified traits such as being weak and out of control are devalued.
Umm, if it's shown as normal for women to "kick-ass" doesn't that totally disprove the idea that "kicking-ass" traits are "biologically determined and fixed"?
Ok, so "strong and in control" are male traits (according to Anita), and are no fundamentally more desirable in a hero than "weak and out of control", which Anita calls "feminine traits". Personally, I think "in control" is a positive for
everyone, and showing more women "in control" doesn't reinforce male power AT ALL. "Strength" vs "Weakness" can be viewed as "able" vs "unable". Being ABLE to do something will ALWAYS be better than NOT BEING ABLE. This is brainless cultural relativism to the nth degree - the idea that losing is as a good as winning, being shit at things is just as good as excelling, and we should never say that a competent person is better than an incompetent person because it will hurt someone's feelings.
So Anita holds that "in control" vs "out of control" and "strong" vs "weak" fundamentally have the same value, and only the patriarchy causes these to be differently valued traits. But read further to where Anita is unhappy about females being presented as dis-empowered or "out of control"
at all, showing that they're negative values
in her own value system.
(Inness) observes that the role reversal remains too shocking, that tough female characters possess attributes that remind the viewer that these tough women are still women after all. Inness argues that tough women who become the heroes are often still represented at some point in the narrative as feminine, whether it’s through hair and clothing, or displays of nudity or motherhood. Although she does not argue that fully “masculine” women are the solution to the lack of strong women, she does identify these “feminine” markers as problematic.
Anita doesn’t want any change. She just wants something to complain about. She’s not happy when female characters are restricted to their gender roles, she’s not happy when female characters display masculine traits, and she’s not happy when female characters have stereotypically feminine traits alongside stereotypically masculine traits.
During the single season Firefly was on air, Zoe is hardly seen outside of the rigidity of the warrior, except when her heterosexual identity is reinforced in sex scenes and even then, arguably, she is still playing the warrior.
Zoe from Firefly comes in for quite a bit of Anita's hate. She's too masculine, she is heterosexual, she takes the initiative in her relationship with a man. Maybe if she'd been a lesbian and talked things out rather than being an action-type, Anita would have been happier. How the hell Anita can make Zoe taking the lead in her relationship with a man a as a
negative, I really cannot not understand, unless she's on a "complain-a-thon" rather than balanced scholarship.
Through this examination, I found that even women who embody masculine traits sometimes appear disempowered, out of control and ridiculous, as if Hollywood is saying that women are not strong enough, capable enough or smart enough to be the heroes. These characters are paltry facsimiles being signified as strong through the validation of male-dominated archetypes, but at the same time diminished in this way so as to not appear equal.
I argue that women who do emulate traditional masculine behaviour should not be framed as out of control and foolish.
Umm, Anita were you not just saying that it was a
bad thing that "weak and out of control" wasn't valued? Now, it appears that her
own personal value system says these are bad things. How can she slam others for devaluing things she herself thinks are bad? So it's ok for HER to say "weak and out of control" are automatically negatives, but if a dude thinks that then he's a patriarchal asshole?
I've included this next bit with the relevant quote tree:
These characters and storylines do not exist in a vacuum, they are created by a team of people from the creators to the writers, producers and the directors. Clothing and appearance, casting decisions, names and backgrounds of characters, screenplays, lighting, set design, editing footage and camera angles are all chosen for specific reasons. It is easy to get caught up in the fantasy of the story and forget about the people behind the scenes. As Suzanna Danuta Walters (1995) puts it, “Even particular kinds of editing, shots, and staging devices are implicated in the process of making (patriarchal) meaning”
Editing is The Patriarchy at work. No, I’m serious, that’s the point that Anita Sarkeesian is trying to make here. Look at the quote she uses.The use of continuity editing – the attempt to project a sense of continuity in space and time – makes editing appear ‘invisible’ so that the spectator is encouraged to read the film without effort. Continuity editing bridges time and space to create an illusion of events unfolding naturally. It is this cinematic appearance of naturalness that, so often, serves to reinforce the ideologies of “women’s place” presented in films as somehow “natural,” too. (Walters, 1995, p. 69)
Editing is The Patriarchy. Continuity is The Patriarchy. The passage of time is The Patriarchy.
Everyone knows the drill by now. It’s always the patriarchy. The fact that neither Walters nor Sarkeesian actually explains how continuity editing reinforces the women’s place is totally irrelevant.
Also, wouldn't the same "editing reinforces women's roles as shown as natural" also reinforce the "warrior women" as natural? After all that is what is shown. And Anita just argued that editing reinforces
whatever is shown.Finally, we have Anita discussing her answer to the problems. This is a sample quote:
For example, many people could work together in order to ‘save’ the day through a process of collective decision making (while watching the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like if all the potential slayers got to participate in decision making instead of Buffy taking command in a traditional military structure), or the evil villain could be representative of the actual systemic problems that plague society as opposed to the singular individual.
so, feminism in action films is exemplified by people sitting down to democratically resolve issues. The space vampires are about to destroy the Earth, so we need a good sit down with a cup of tea to discuss this pressing problem, everyone gets a say, then we vote on a resolution, with the hero merely a facilitator who's voice is not valued more than anyone else.
Okay...lol...Anita's answer is to take "Buffy" but rather than have a action-packed finale, all the women sit down for a nice round-table discussion of the issue and vote on the correct response to the Big Bad. Perhaps they vote to have a leaflet campaign letting people know that they are against the elder vampires? Or, preferable from Anita's point of view, is lose the vampires, and instead frame the whole story as social justice warriors vs the evil capitalist patriarchal system itself? this totally ignoring that individual enemies in fiction are often "stand ins" for relevant social issues because it's just not practical from a story-telling POV to have an enemy that's an "institution". How do you film the downfall of patriarchal capitalist society in an action film without personifying this in a particular bad guy? I'd argue that taking down a "faceless system" has less emotive and screen impact than taking down a mouthpiece for those views.
This sounds like absolutely fucking riveting TV she's got planned for the future.
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Topic: Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' (Read 313913 times)