Hoo boy. I’ll try to reply as nicely as I can, and keep my criticism as gentle as possible. Hopefully, it will be taken in kind and maybe not fall on deaf ears.
“Propaganda” is an interesting choice of words when defending your own biases.
You say these things as if the argument was to remove the choice of having “beautifully feminine heroes”, for your definition of “beautifully feminine”.
Anyone who actually pays attention to the video @erjoh linked – which shouldn’t be so hard, given that it’s only one minute long – will understand that the argument is not to remove choices, but to add new choices that are simply not present in the vast majority of video games.
You know what’s really, really sad? So many people don’t understand the point of diversity and inclusion.
And by “sad”, I don’t mean it in an insulting way, as in “you’re a sad person”, but rather that it genuinely makes me feel sad. It makes me sad, because I’ve lived through some stuff and I’ve seen some other stuff, and this kind of thing actually touches my feelings.
Let me tell you from my own personal experience: the point of being inclusive is to feel represented. It’s an implicit validation of who you are in a world that often makes you feel bad for who you are.
Let’s dive into some examples.
When I was a kid, I was really, really nerdy. I’m still a nerd, but when I was a kid, that was a bad thing to be. A lot of kids made fun of nerds. People with interests like mine were outcasts.
On top of that, I was – and still am – an “aspie”, i.e. someone with an Asperger’s syndrome. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years, but back then I had a really hard time recognizing sarcasm and certain other forms of humor. When I was really engaged in a topic and someone said something as a joke, I would often fail to understand and respond earnestly, which would end up in people making fun of me.
And then I finished my first 8 years of school and went to a high school that specialized in maths and natural sciences. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who were like me.
I was finally in a place where it was okay to be like me. Not just okay, but good. I was accepted and even valued.
It was heaven.
Slight change of topic, to something related: if you’ve never seen a show called “Penn & Teller: Fool Us”, I highly recommend it. Seeing magicians perform tricks is a lot of fun, and the variety of magic on that show is incredible.
If you binge-watch it on YouTube, you’ll start noticing something after a while: many of the magicians appearing on the show talk about role models and inspiration and representation. It’s not all about women in magic, either. People talk about seeing magicians from their own country, or old magicians, or young magicians. The first magician from India to appear on “Fool Us” later got a whole bunch of people contacting him on social media to say how happy and proud they were to see someone from their country on that show.
Let’s change the subject again, to a different point of view on the same topic. Let me tell you about something that completely blew my mind when I moved to Chile.
One day I was sitting down in the food court of the shopping mall close to my office, eating my burger, when I saw something I had never seen before. There was a person tidying up tables, picking up plastic trays that people left, cleaning up, and so on. And that person quite visibly and obviously had the Down syndrome.
A lot of people might read this and go “so what?” But to me, that was absolutely unbelievable. You see, where I come from, they used to call those people “rеtarded” or “mongoloids”. They used to put kids with Down syndrome – and autism and other similar conditions – in a different class, separated from everyone else. From an early age, they were separated from the rest of the society and they remained separate for the rest of their lives.
For the first time in my life, I was seeing a person like that living a normal life and taking part in the society. And they were happy.
I bring these things up because they all share the same powerful notion: acceptance of oneself.
People who have a knee-jerk reaction to diversity and inclusion are people who either never felt excluded, or they somehow got convinced it’s okay to feel excluded. The latter, I think, is much worse.
It’s not okay to be excluded just because you’re different in a harmless way.
Which brings me to quotes like this one:
How many of those women want to look “sexy” in a very specific way that you defend, because they’ve been taught all their life that this is how they should aspire to look and that it’s a kind of failure to not look like that? How many of those women want their character to look “slutty” because if they actually dressed “sluttily” in real life they would be criticized, or downright ostracized, or even assaulted by men who take a certain kind of look as an invitation to behave in certain ways?
And if that wasn’t enough, every time someone makes a conscious effort to help change the way things are and to make women of all shapes and sizes feel it’s okay to be the way they are, there’s a bunch of men who never had to deal with a tiny bit of shіt these women – hell, all women – have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, popping up and yelling about “propaganda”.
On the contrary, they’re breaking the tradition and that’s what bothers you. Western game developers used to make games primarily for adolescent men and the design used to reflect that.
I’m sorry, this is going to be harsh, but there’s no nicer or gentler way to respond to this: your argument is, essentially, the same as “all lives matter”.
Let me offer a rebuttal:
A push towards diversity often involves putting more focus on those who are underrepresented. It shouldn’t take a lot of empathy to understand that.
Reminds me of something from the north of my birth country. In Vojvodina, they would describe desirable women as “lepa, bela i debela”, meaning “pretty, white, and fat”, because a portly woman was considered beautiful.
Using “fat” to describe beauty is something completely alien to what we see in most video games. Because “fat is ugly”, just like “flat is ugly” or “blondes are the most beautiful”. That last stereotype might not have as many proponents as it used to, but you don’t have to go too far back. Read Agatha Cristie’s “The Mysterious Mr. Quin”, for example. The very first story features a blonde woman dyeing her hair dark, and the main character wondering why, because the reverse is what is usually done.
I’ll end this post by saying that when I play a female character in a game, I absolutely prefer to make it generously busty, with a sizable bottom, and a flat tummy. I love playing a character that fits the stereotypical Western ideal of sexy women.
That’s my choice. I’m not ashamed of it.
But I also understand it’s a shameful, childish behavior to kick and scream because I want my choice to be the only one people can make.
I hope that after reading this maybe – just maybe – some of you might come to understand how calling that video “propaganda in favor of the uglification of women in videogames” is a way of telling every flat-chested woman that she’s ugly and should feel bad about that, and how that can be hurtful.