I'm sure that, by now, y'all have heard of or actually seen Damsel in Distress which deals with the trope of, well, female video game characters becoming quest targets
( Read more... )
It's always kinda hard to figure out why sexism exists because a lot of the time, it's not perpetrated maliciously, you know? People don't wake up and think "man how can i flip off women today" (unless you're David Hopkins). But when you live in a society that has tons of tiny messages supporting and furthering sexist thinking, you start to internalize that and it manifests itself in ways you might not intend or plan. That doesn't mean that people doing sexist things or making sexist media are necessarily bad people, but it can mean that they aren't considering some of the ramifications of their decisions for their female characters might have. If you're used to seeing women as sex objects, considering that's how 90% of media portrays them in advertising and the like, then you're not going to think very hard about portraying a woman as a sex object in whatever it is that you're making. That doesn't necessarily make the person doing sexist things a bad person, but that also doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't sexist and/or harmful.
One thing I think people can do to help kind of avoid this trap is to analyze these unconscious trends, really think about what they're doing, and think about how it might come off to others... which I think was in part the goal of these videos, to show these harmful trends that other people might take for granted and get people to start thinking about them, where they come from, why they exist, and how they can hurt people, if that makes sense. :o
One thing I think people can do to help kind of avoid this trap is to analyze these unconscious trends, really think about what they're doing, and think about how it might come off to others... which I think was in part the goal of these videos, to show these harmful trends that other people might take for granted and get people to start thinking about them, where they come from, why they exist, and how they can hurt people, if that makes sense. :o
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment