How many blog posts have I begun by divorcing myself from my status as a "female gamer", instead expressing a preference to be seen as a "human being who may have an alternate perspective in some cases due in part to her gender?"
Those of you who have followed SVGL for ages and ages (and there are a good many of you I know of -- thanks for hangin' around!) know I'm pretty much the biggest diehard Metal Gear Solid fan ever, and that Solid Snake is one of my favorite heroes. I feel like him sometimes; I step up often to handle things that maybe aren't "who I am," because people ask me to do it and because I'm the only one who can, and because it's my job.
You've probably seen my Bayonetta piece by now. My god, do I love Bayonetta. When its release was met with a big round of guilty handwringing and/or judgmental tsk-tsking over how sexy is the titular heroine, I couldn't quite stomach it, and wrote for GamePro about how Bayonetta doesn't need to be sexless to be a positive female portrayal.
I felt pretty good about my stance, too, and then my good friend Kieron Gillen, to whom I've always looked up, took me to task (or my working environment to task, really) gently thus:
That the biggest name in female videogame criticism finds her natural instincts to write apologia for almost anything sexual in games – as brilliant as she is at that – seems an odd warping of the deck. Or, now I think about it some more, perhaps entirely natural. What could be more popular with a generally male readership than a female journalist saying it’s all okay?
That the biggest name in female videogame criticism finds her natural instincts to write apologia for almost anything sexual in games – as brilliant as she is at that – seems an odd warping of the deck. Or, now I think about it some more, perhaps entirely natural. What could be more popular with a generally male readership than a female journalist saying it’s all okay?
I hope he meant "biggest female name in video game criticism", rather than to isolate "female videogame criticism" as a separate field (let's assume he did). Anyway, it's a fair perspective, as is that of the RPS commenter who accuses me of "moving the goalposts when it suits [me]."
Yeah, I do. Sometimes I find something okay, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes what I find okay will not be okay with others. I write subjectively, as should any critic (objectivity is an illusion that plagues our work). I recognize that there is sexism in Grand Theft Auto IV, for example -- but as that game presents a cynical world where both men and women are morally ambiguous if not disgusting humans, I found the game not sexist but the fiction depressingly faithful. I got a lot of mail from people who really hated that I took that position, as if I ought to instead have elected to make of the game an occasion for feminist championship.
Maybe I could have. I know a lot of people hate my writing because I am often defending sexuality; I am accused of pandering to my male readership. Maybe I am. We've all gotta work, right? But I still maintain I don't especially care about gender issues more than any other facet of media criticism. These are simply the articles of mine that get the most traction; this is the use others most commonly have for me. It's not my natural instinct.
My instinct, if any, is simply to react strongly against the tendency many people (or groups) have to distract from creative endeavors by using them as an occasion to highlight or invent victimization for themselves. I find those grievances to be ungrounded more often than not.
Anyway. Read the Bayonetta article. I won reviewer Tae Kim over to my point of view a little bit too: Here's his response. And here's something I'd like to know -- if the article had from it the "I" removed, if it were written by a man asserting that the stylistic content made Bayonetta's looks "acceptable," would you have bought the argument, or did it need to be billed as a "female perspective?"
[Bayonetta and Jeanne picture is from here, although I dunno who drew it. I like it because it is sexy, although messing around at the link will yield you some stuff that is less sexy and more certainly NSFW.]
