Hey, look! It's another infuriating goddamned illustration from Ashley Davis! I'm going to kick her in the ovaries.
This week, the (ironically) full, original cast consisting of Tiff Chow, Aaron Linde, and Jim Sterling finally came together to talk about sexism in videogames. Our topics of discussion included:
-A sonnet, a Spore, and an outtake
-Do girls have better things to do than play games?
-Muscled, hardass male protagonists: just as sexist as Lara Croft types?
-Contradictory female strength and sexual portrayal in Metal Gear Solid? It can't BE!
-Should men and women be portrayed with total equality, or by acknowledging realistic gender weaknesses?
I'm pretty happy with this week's episode, and I hope you are as well; there's a pretty good balance of actual discussion and absolutely horrendous, awful imagery (especially during the Games of the Week segment) to make this a pretty standard Podtoid episode.
It was incredibly hard to choose a best question this week, but I'm nonetheless going to go with Scary Womanizing Pig Mask's. Send me an email and you'll get yer $25.
[The song is "Shine," from the Mirror's Edge trailer.]
Contest:
2:08 PM on 06.19.2008
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Thanks to everyone who replied to my twitter question before the podtoid recording. I got a lot of good perspective on what to talk about, so props to you guys!
Also lol at the apparent claim big tits are inherently sexist. Apparently nature is misogynist.
Well there, I think its important to consider that Otacon, as a character/job role has the archetypal expectation of physical/emotional weakness (or arguably, no expectation). He's a scientist.
When you get to Meryl, one of two female soldier characters, Meryl has this emotional conflict, which is sterotypical, and even cliche.
Talk about sexism/racism is in relations to a trait compared against the stereotype, taking into consideration the arguable supporting factors around it. Any character can be anything, have any size chest, have any type of emotion. But, considered in context of other things (Soldier are ideally not having emotional breakdowns, women are so often attributed with emotion as a negative, women are so often portrayed as being emotional, mysoginistic rhetoric doesn't believe a woman can handle military duty), yes, emotion is something we decry, in this specific (not generalized) instance.
@wardrox Curious, what do you mean by *feminine brains*?
There isn't a clean, sex-defined line, it's more gender-defined (gender being socially defined as oppose to the biologically defined sex).
So when I say "feminine brain" I was meaning brains with typically female qualities. The BBC made a little test which is meant to tell you your brain gender which is quite interesting. If you google for "brain gender" or something along those lines you can probably find some of the research papers.
In MGS3, The Boss was pretty great, but Eva was still kind of a glorified bond chick.
;-P
Just kidding, good show guys. I'd ramble my ass off too if I were on a podcast so I shouldn't talk. You guys do well in getting your points across in the end. Maybe its just my stupid male brain that can't process the higher pitched chattering I'm so used to blocking out, lol.
Also, why does everyone forget to mention Elena Fisher from Drake's Fortune when talking about believable female characters? She's a good example of a female video game character done right.
Looking back, I don't know what I was thinking.