"The warrior woman character is touted as empowering, but what it actually represents is taking a male character and giving them breasts and long hair."
To make it clearer why this isn't a crazy argument:
Society has labeled a variety of traits as "masculine". These traits are also typically the ones associated with positive role models. Assigning these traits to women is, in the abstract, a Good Thing, because it weakens the strength of the impression that those traits really are masculine. The problem with the
usual implementation of the Warrior Woman character* is twofold.
The first problem is that it relies upon the "masculine" label in order to function - if your warrior character is interesting because she's a woman as well, that implicitly reinforces the original label, which interestingly applies no matter how many examples there actually
are in media. It's kind of like how Drow society is Lawful Evil despite most recorded examples of Drow heroes being Chaotic Good rebels. Basically you're
still subtly saying that these ideals are masculine, just that people with women's bodies can attain them by abandoning a feminine identity, which is only good by comparison to "You can't ever be this awesome at all." It's a commendable step forward, for sure, but it's not enough to call the work complete.
The second problem is that the usual execution brings in the standard objectification tropes (EDIT: In my experience). It's a slightly different issue when you've got a female hero, of course, because as the hero they're still displaying some kind of agency in most cases, which is definitely a Good Thing. And I actually don't want to get in the way of anybody's cheesecake that much, because sexy things are generally great. It's more that when you have sexiness
automatically attached to a heroine, but not necessarily a hero, it implies that those things are an automatic part of womanhood, instead of the optional traits they ought to be.
Mind you, I've only done the barest skimming of Sarkeesian's work, and am hilariously unqualified to discuss her arguments specifically. It's entirely possible that she is engaging in maddening doublespeak, and in this case all I can do is attempt to avoid guilt by association.
*Or similar "slap traditionally male archetype onto female character" roles.
>6 New Replies goddammit you guys