Its international womans day this  week, and as such, I wanted to write a post on women in nerd culture and what its really like, from my experiences and perspective as a woman in nerd circles. This might seem exaggerated to some people but I will only put in something I can 100% corroborate. Perhaps you’ll be enlightened reading it. Maybe it’ll highlight things that you never even noticed happening. Or maybe you’ll dismiss it as grade A BS, whichever you do, please read to the end. I’ll be making this into a multiple part series, this one will be focusing on Video Games.



What is Nerd Culture?

For this purpose, im defining Nerd Culture as Video Games, Anime, Films, TV and Books, they don’t necessarily have to fall under the Sci-FI and Fantasy Genre. Although for this post im going to mostly focus on video games and anime, as you often cant talk about one without talking about the other.

Sexualisation of women in video games

Now, come on, don’t act like you’re surprised to see this heading. I see some eyes rolling but lets talk seriously for a moment.

Lara Croft – Tomb Raider Series

One of the most famous women in video games is Lara Croft. Lets look at her character design over her history.


What do all of these have in common? (lets ignore the last one for this purpose) exposed skin and boobs. Along with that, lets look at her body shape. “Perfect” woman shaped. Known amongst the fashion and greater female community as an hour glass figure. Next lets look at whats shes wearing. Boob tubes or tank tops with, generally very short shorts. The problem with her design is that it doesn’t make sense. The only practical thing about her whole design is that she has her hair tied up. She traipses through caves and ancient ruins. Its not practical to be wearing tiny shorts, exposing her skin to all kinds of cuts and scrapes, and also sacrificing pockets. I mean come on. Also I cant imagine that gun holsters are comfortable against bare skin, I imagine there would be some kind of chaffing.
Lara Croft is an independent woman, shes strong and powerful and dressed provocatively. This is something that game designers thinks appeals to men, and honestly, it does otherwise it wouldn’t be so darn popular.

Princess Zelda – Legend of Zelda Series


These ones might seem harmless, theres no bare skin exposed right? What could the women complain about this time? Well let me tell you, because I am a woman who likes to complain. What do they all have in common. Long hair, dresses. This is the ‘princess’ stereotype that we see across so many games. These characters are shown as perfect. Zelda is a special princess, granted. She is often shown as doing things for herself, going against this stupid stereotype that they’re damsels in distress. But lets talk about one Zelda game specifically. Wind Waker, design from 2002, if you didn’t know. She has two designs, one where she is a pirate, Tetra, and another when she is revealed as the princess. In the first half of the game, Tetra is self sufficient, doesn’t know shes a princess, shes a pirate and has no qualms about it with a ship crew of men who are all under her command. Around half way through the game we discover that she is a princess and she undergoes a transformation where she is then promptly locked in a room and is left to be ‘abandoned’ by Link for her own good to keep her safe from Gannon. We see her later at the end where she has been captured and Link must go and save her. She isn’t shown fighting. Why does she undergo a massive personality transplant? Tetra (pirate Zelda) is shown fighting for what she wants and often is doing things for Link that he cant do for himself. This is a bad thing. Most people wouldn’t have even looked at WindWaker in this way, and honestly it took me a few years before I realised that. It says to girls who played the game growing up that princesses are all useless and need a man to save them. Let me tell you, men as a general, are pretty darn useless.

Princess Peach – Mario Series


We all know what Princess Peach looks like. Blonde, pink dress wearing ditzy character who keeps getting kidnapped. Honestly after all these years you would think she’d invest in some castle security but no. her character again confirms the stereotype that I mentioned above that girls are subservient and are all waiting for a man to come and rescue them. Women don’t need bullshit from you guys let me tell you.

Velvet Crowe – Tales of Berseria


Here we have an interesting character from a game only released in 2016. Her clothes are almost non existent and her hair is long, almost touching the floor. She is shown wearing a little armour which is nice I have to admit, and honestly you should play this game its part of my favourite games series. Anyway shameless game selling out of the way, lets talk aesthetics. She is tall, thin and has boobs that don’t look natural to me. Her personality is vengeful and honestly you can tell by looking at her character design. In a moment ill talk more about this series and their designs on women and the ways you can tell what kind of characters they are just by the visuals.  Again Velvet is shown as a perfect hour glass figure and lemme tell you, that shit is harmful to young girls, only seeing characters designed as ‘perfect women’ and them being hour glasses.

Tales of Symphonia Series

As I said above, im going to talk a little about this series and their designs of women.


Lets take these two characters first. The first one is Sheena and the second is Marta. As you might have guessed, Sheena is the elder of the two and her character is generally hot headed but logical. Marta on the other hand is hormonal and impulsive, and if im honest a little whiny.


Above we have two more characters. Collette and Raine. Collete is angelic (and is actually an angel) wears white and has blonde hair blue eyes and dresses conservatively. On the right we have Raine. She is the mother figure of the game and is a healer and teacher, if you hadn’t already guessed.
My point with these four characters (out of many I could have chosen yes I admit that) is that often in Japanese games (And yes, I’ll be talking about Anime too in a moment) you can tell the personality of a female character based on the way they dress, if I were to show you some men, and don’t worry, I will, its much harder to discern their personalities or even their role in the game just based on their character design, for example here are four men from the series





The four characters above have quite different personalities. And yet their character designs are similar in lots of ways, weapons, mostly covered, hair doing weird gravity defying things.
Another thing in this series which is not very good is how the ‘non human’ characters are shown. All the ones that are shown to be female are all shown as humanoid characters or fairies. The male ones are much more varied. Why is it that even non human female characters needs to be overly sexualised?

Anime’s influence on Japanese Games.

I told you I’d mention it at some point. One can’t talk about Japanese games without talking about anime. A traditional anime girl has MASSIVE tits which let me tell you aren’t possible. They defy physics. Along with that, the subservient girl usually has big eyes and a soft voice and OWO~~ whereas the badass girl usually has longer hair, smaller eyes and a sharp glare. This translates a lot into games, which I hope you can see in the above examples. Especially if you compare Velvet to Colette. I’ll be talking about anime and cartoons more in my next post, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

 

Attitudes from Gaming.

In a world where the gaming ratio of men to women is almost equal why is it that these sexist designs are still allowed to be perpetuated? Along with making games ‘for women’ such as Animal Crossing. These casual games that are aimed towards girls are relaxing, have no intricate plot lines, no pressure. Why is it that game designers think that women only want to play these kinds of games? Whilst yes, I enjoy these kinds of games more than I’d probably like to admit, I also enjoy playing RPGs and FPS.
This is by far not an exhaustive list of ridiculous female character game designs, but im moving onto another point now which you’ll likely think is bullshit too. Rape culture amongst teenage male gamers, encouraged through games such as GTA and the gaming community of COD.
Now yes, before you start throwing swords at me and getting at me with torches and pitchforks, not all men are rapists, id never say such a thing, and not every man who plays these games contributes to the attitude, as always it’s the small minority which ruin everything for female gamers such as myself.

The online environment is awful for female gamers. Rape jokes and death threats are sent almost constantly, along with comments about how ‘you must be letting your boyfriend play and just talking through the headset for him’. The rape jokes and death threats usually start if you beat a group of boys. And I do mean boys, because its 16 year olds, and younger, who are making these disgusting comments. And yet the wider male community doesn’t do anything to stop this. ‘its just banter’ etc. The community has normalised being dicks to women. Which translates into real life and its where the stupid ‘white knight’s’ and ‘nice guys’ come from. Because they see this happening and they assume that being nice to a girl instantly means you get a girlfriend. But we’re not going into that right now. Right now we’re talking about the casual sexism that impressionable kids are encountering. It’s toxic for boys and in some cases, traumatising for girls. I don’t play competitive online games anymore. Nor do I ever EVER go into chatrooms or use a mic to communicate with other players.

For some reason, guys think that if you’re joking, its okay to say whatever the fuck you like. Let me tell you. It is NEVER acceptable to joke about raping a woman or a woman being raped. Risking sounding like the RadFems talking about how guys like video games because they’re all rapists, I think the opposite is true. This casual sexism which is often the stepping stone to doing something ridiculous is perpetuated by these toxic chatrooms.

This attitude that women can’t be good at video games is complete and utter bullshit. I know girls who will school your ass at any fighting game you like. I personally have grown up playing games with my brother, otherwise I likely never would have been introduced into this world of gaming because even now games are marketed almost solely towards teenage boys.

I’ll finish the post off by saying :
Men you have a responsibility to push for game designers to fix these issues.

none of the images above belong to me and can be found by doing a quick google search of their names

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