I'm not sure I entirely agree with the idea that men and women are equally as discriminated against in society, and while I do agree there are certain unfair societal pressures and biases against men, I definitely don't agree with the idea that they're predominately portrayed in media as the bad guy, that suicide rates or general emotional well-being are direct reflections of discrimination, or that men can't exhibit depression. But disregarding that, I think the idea of just sitting back and accepting the discrimination which continues in this world would be immoral and a step backwards, what's more I think this post glosses over some of the issues that affect video games and the gaming community specifically.
Firstly, while we may be able to find examples of discrimination across all mediums and in all areas of life, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't stamp it out or that it always has to be there. Certainly, we've come a long way considering how certain social groups were once treated, but surely now that we have such strong grounding in the idea that discrimination is wrong, and as we are some of the luckier people in the world, having the ability of free speech and the power to change things (remember there are a lot of people in the world who just don't), why should we not try to step in and fix things when we see people being treated unfairly?
Secondly, while works in many mediums or even the mediums as a whole may exhibit closed-mindedness, stereotyping, and inequality in the way they treat women, no medium seems to go as far in this direction as video games do. There's a shortage of female protagonists, many of the most famous female game characters are known for their bodies more than anything else, and many female characters in games can easily be slotted into one of a handful of stereotypes where they're often eye-candy, operating in the shadow of a male character, background dressing, or similar. That's not to say this doesn't happen to some degree in other mediums, that's not to say every instance of these things happening is bad by any means, that's not to say males get perfect treatment, and that's not to say there aren't genuinely good female characters in some games, but take the major female characters from video games, measure them up to the male characters, and characters from other mediums, and it builds up a stark contrast.
What's more there seem to be a lot of women in the gaming audience who get a major amount of flack because they're women and God help any lady who actually wants to change the ways women are portrayed in games. Would you want to be a woman on Xbox LIVE? I wouldn't and I can certainly think of a lot of other places online where female gamers get plenty of abuse or just plain creeped on.
You say we should look to the history books on this issue and while that can be great for getting some perspective, I can't help but think the people in the history books who've made sure that the worst of the bigotry and discrimination have stopped in most parts of the world would be the last people to say that we should just roll over and accept that entire social groups are going to get shit on. If there's two things the history books can teach us about discrimination I think they're that 1. It can be stopped, and that 2. Good things happen when it is stopped. Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, these aren't the kind of things that should be accepted, they're the kinds of things that should be fought against.
Log in to comment