On the Realism of Sexism 9

It is a truth wide­ly acknowl­edged that Arkham City’s script is, to use the prop­er buzz­word, “prob­lem­at­ic.”  Female char­ac­ters are uni­ver­sal­ly referred to as “bitch,” the ambi­ent ban­ter between mis­cel­la­neous hench­men in respect to the game’s female char­ac­ters is always sex­u­al­ly charged, and nasty under­cur­rents of sex­u­al vio­lence run through­out.

When sev­er­al writ­ers (most thor­ough­ly the Film Crit Hulk) point­ed this out, the Internet leapt into action in an attempt to defend the game’s script (why is any­one’s guess, as it would be a tan­gled, incom­pre­hen­si­ble mess even if it was­n’t creepy). The usual tired argu­ments made their appear­ance: “it’s not that big a deal, you’re just over­sen­si­tive,” “Catwoman uses sex appeal as a weapon, of course the badguys think she’s sexy,” etc.  But by far my favorite is the claim that such per­va­sive gross­ness is defen­si­ble because it is “real­is­tic.”

The argu­ment sug­gests that as Arkham City’s vil­lains are vio­lent crim­i­nals, locked away behind the bars of a hell­ish prison, and haven’t seen a woman in a long time, it’s entire­ly to rea­son they would be focused on sex and con­stant­ly threat­en sex­u­al vio­lence.  It’s bad, but it’s how it would real­ly be!

This is prob­a­bly true.  But this fact does not make the dia­logue any less rep­re­hen­si­ble from an artis­tic stand­point.

It’s prob­a­bly true that a real-life Catwoman or Harley Quinn would be sub­ject­ed to gen­dered insults and threats of sex­u­al assault to an extent that a real-life Batman would­n’t.  So much as a cur­so­ry look around the Internet will show you count­less exam­ples of gen­dered insults and threats of sex­u­al vio­lence made from men to women, even in much less pro­nounced cir­cum­stances.

So why are we made uncom­fort­able by Arkham City if it is an accu­rate reflec­tion of an unpleas­ant truth?

Because Arkham City is not a game about sex­ism or sex­u­al vio­lence or any­thing along those lines.  Despite the ubiq­ui­ty of such themes, the game never address­es any of these issues.  The per­va­sive, prob­lem­at­ic aspects of the dia­logue remain an ele­phant in the room, albeit an ele­phant with the sort of mus­tache that qui­et­ly gets the FBI’s atten­tion.  So it would be quite a stretch to sug­gest that the mak­ers of Arkham City were try­ing to make some sort of delib­er­ate, socially-conscious point about rape cul­ture or sex­u­al­ized vio­lence against women or what-have-you.  It’s more like­ly that they sim­ply lath­ered it on like a layer of mor­bid frost­ing in an attempt to make the game seem grit­ti­er or, again, more “real­is­tic.”

But this leads us to the most obvi­ous weird­ness about the real­ism argu­ment: Arkham City is not a game that could rea­son­ably be accused of car­ing much about real­ism.  Everything about the game is heav­i­ly styl­ized and large­ly divorced from real­i­ty.  Villains con­coct elab­o­rate and befud­dling schemes, char­ac­ters behave in con­trived and arbi­trary ways, and the game’s insis­tence upon tak­ing itself seri­ous­ly despite its pre­pos­ter­ous premise (a major American city rounds up all of its insane and crim­i­nal ele­ments, walls them up in an old part of town and then, like, breaks out the pop­corn) ren­der it thor­ough­ly unreal­is­tic.  It is, after all, a Batman story.

So for “real­ism” to sud­den­ly be intro­duced into the equa­tion at the last minute seems more than a bit con­ve­nient, and when the only things in your game that are laud­ed as real­is­tic are those which con­tribute to wor­ry­ing social nar­ra­tives about sex­u­al vio­lence against women, peo­ple start to ask ques­tions.  Why is this the only thing you want to be real­is­tic about?

See, “real­ism” has long been cited as an excuse for mechan­i­cal or nar­ra­tive struc­tures which are skewed against women or other mar­gin­al­ized groups.  Perhaps the most egre­gious exam­ple of this line of rea­son­ing I have ever seen came in the form of a com­menter on the DayZ forums.  Not long after the game’s cre­ators imple­ment­ed the abil­i­ty to play with a female avatar, this com­menter let loose a series of sug­ges­tions for mechan­i­cal dif­fer­ences that he felt ought to be imple­ment­ed between male and female avatars.  Female avatars, he sug­gest­ed, should be less adept with firearms,1 able to hold fewer items, and, in return, would be bet­ter at cer­tain domes­tic camp activ­i­ties.2  It would, he argued, be more “real­is­tic“3 that way, since women tend to be phys­i­cal­ly weak­er than men, but bet­ter at small­er, dexterity-focused activ­i­ties.

This is obvi­ous­ly an extreme exam­ple, but it high­lights the prob­lem: by hid­ing under the guise of “real­ism,” we can enforce wor­ry­ing social nar­ra­tives (in this case: women should stay in the home while men go do what they want).  By using a thin veneer of truth (women gen­er­al­ly have less body mass than men, women are at greater risk for sex­u­al assault), we can obscure delib­er­ate or uncon­scious sex­ism and then argue that all we’re doing is being hon­est about the way things are.

And this is the crux of the prob­lem, because it’s good to be hon­est about the way things are.  But in writ­ing a game (or a book or a movie or…) you need to under­stand what it is that you’re writ­ing about and choose your sub­ject mat­ter accord­ing­ly.

Contrast Arkham City to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which is also full of ref­er­ences to or scenes of sex­u­al vio­lence or gen­er­al degra­da­tion of women.  Martin’s female char­ac­ters are rarely far from the threat of rape, regard­less of sta­tion or class, and this per­va­sive worry is made far more explic­it than it ever is in Arkham City.  But, although I hard­ly mean to sug­gest that Martin’s work is immune to fem­i­nist cri­tique, the dif­fer­ence is that Martin actu­al­ly deals with these prob­lems, rather than sim­ply allow­ing them to serve as creepy win­dow dress­ing.

A Song of Ice and Fire is part­ly about life on the mar­gins of an oppres­sive soci­ety, about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of bas­tards and women and dwarfs, and about what sorts of things the mar­gin­al­ized have to do in order to sur­vive.  Most of the great movers and shak­ers in Westeros are not point-of-view char­ac­ters, and a sur­pris­ing amount of that great mov­ing and shak­ing hap­pens off­stage.  So when some vil­lain threat­ens to rape Brienne, it is not mere­ly a throw­away line, but rather a real dan­ger.

A Song of Ice and Fire’s real­ism is not sim­ply an excuse to say naughty things.  Instead, it is real­is­tic so that it can ask ques­tions and inves­ti­gate ideas around very seri­ous vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and injus­tices in the real world.  Arkham City does­n’t want to deal with these ques­tions or ideas.  It wants to be a game about Batman, and that’s fine!  Great, even!  I love Batman!  But the sort of per­va­sive, wor­ry­ing sex­ism that is found in Arkham City has no place in a story which is just about Batman.4

The real world is fre­quent­ly an ugly place, and it is unde­ni­ably true that racism, sex­ism, homo­pho­bia, trans­pho­bia, and var­i­ous other ‑isms and ‑pho­bias are per­va­sive, inescapable facets of every­day life for many, many peo­ple.5  Thus, you would not be entire­ly inac­cu­rate to say that any story which fea­tures a woman who is never the vic­tim of sex­ism is unre­al­is­tic.

But all sto­ries are unre­al­is­tic.  All sto­ries are guid­ed by an author’s hand, with some kind of struc­tured begin­ning and end.  Things hap­pen in sto­ries because some author decid­ed they should; there is no ran­dom chance in sto­ries.  This is very much not how the real world works.  Similarly, all games are unre­al­is­tic, because any sys­tem of mechan­ics that attempts to model a sit­u­a­tion will nec­es­sar­i­ly include abstrac­tions in order to be playable.

This is fine, because what makes a great game or story is not real­ism so much as inte­ri­or logic and con­sis­ten­cy.  Bastion is some­what less “real­is­tic” than Call of Duty: Black Ops, yet it’s more inter­nal­ly coher­ent and has far more inter­est­ing things to say about the human con­di­tion; it’s a “truer” story, and a much bet­ter game.  Some sto­ries do need to be real­is­tic, or obvi­ous­ly rec­og­niz­able as sim­i­lar to the real world, but real­ism is not itself a mea­sure of qual­i­ty.

The only things stop­ping women from mov­ing through mod­ern soci­ety much the same as men are soci­etal atti­tudes and cul­tur­al road­blocks.  When we say that it’s hard for a woman to suc­ceed in a tech career, we are not refer­ring to any­thing inher­ent to the con­cept of Womanness which makes pro­gram­ming dif­fi­cult, we’re say­ing that the pre­vail­ing cul­tures in tech com­pa­nies are male-centric and misog­y­nist.

Art and enter­tain­ment help shape these same soci­etal atti­tudes.  If we con­sis­tent­ly treat women dif­fer­ent­ly in art, it sends a mes­sage that women are to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly in the real world.  Artists and enter­tain­ers thus have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­sid­er the ram­i­fi­ca­tions and impli­ca­tions of their cre­ations.

If you’re will­ing to thor­ough­ly and respect­ful­ly engage with issues of oppres­sion or sex­u­al vio­lence (or homo­pho­bia or racism or…), go for it.  There’s no rea­son videogames can’t or should­n’t engage with these issues.  In fact, I’d real­ly like to see more games try.  But if you’re not going to do that, there’s very lit­tle rea­son to fur­ther under­score or strength­en exist­ing, unjust nar­ra­tives and modes of think­ing in the name of shab­by “real­ism.”6

Far bet­ter to cre­ate some­thing which might, in some small way, help to make real­i­ty less “real­is­tic.”

1. You hear this kind of hog­wash all the time, cit­ing “recoil” and “lower body mass” and that sort of thing.  I’d wager that half the guys that say this sort of thing have never shot a firearm in their lives, and if even a tenth of them can out­shoot my wife, I’ll eat my hat. [↩]
2. DayZ, if you don’t know, is a game almost entire­ly about shoot­ing zom­bies and car­ry­ing around inven­to­ry.  It’s not real­ly about build­ing fires at your base camp. [↩]
3. His word. [↩]
4. This is not to say that a Batman story could­n’t deal with these issues (though that would not be my first choice), just that such a story would not be just “a Batman story.” [↩]
5. One would prob­a­bly be right to say that such things are always present for all peo­ple, but some are lucky enough to be able to ignore them. [↩]
6. This does not mean that a story which is not large­ly about these issues should­n’t make ref­er­ence to them at all, but they should­n’t be fun­da­men­tal parts of the expe­ri­ence if they’re not going to be dealt with. [↩]