Because fictional characters do not have the capacity to make choices. Because they are not REAL people.
Power Girl and Starfire did not CHOOSE to fight evil in skimpy, revealing outfits. It is not their PERSONAL CHOICE to wear those clothes. They are fictional characters and their wardrobes are under the control of the author and artist.
Dumbledore did not CHOOSE to stay in the closet as a personal and professional choice because that was his right as a person. He is a fictional character. The fact that his sexuality was left at only vague subtext and only revealed through word of god was a deliberate decision made by the author.
Fictional characters are fictional characters. They do not make their own choices.
Addendum to the rule: for the same reasons, you can not argue that criticism “shames” a character for their appearance or behavior.
And just for the record, seeing what kind of responses this post received before we got to reblog it: NO, the fact that fictional characters tend to grow and take a life of their own still does not mean they have agency.
No matter how developed a fictional person is, they’re still written by a real person (or people) who have their own biases and rationalizations. Just because some “choices” feel natural to the author doesn’t mean they’re objectively plausible “choices” for a character to make within the given narrative.
Sometimes the choice, like (in case of what our blog critiques) decision to wear a sexualized costume to battle, can be explained by specific circumstances. But in most circumstances or with other explanations, the same choice can be plain silly and inconsistent with the rest of established story/worldbuilding.
Because fictional characters do not have the capacity to make choices. Because they are not REAL people.
Power Girl and Starfire did not CHOOSE to fight evil in skimpy, revealing outfits. It is not their PERSONAL CHOICE to wear those clothes. They are fictional characters and their wardrobes are under the control of the author and artist.
Dumbledore did not CHOOSE to stay in the closet as a personal and professional choice because that was his right as a person. He is a fictional character. The fact that his sexuality was left at only vague subtext and only revealed through word of god was a deliberate decision made by the author.
Fictional characters are fictional characters. They do not make their own choices.
Addendum to the rule: for the same reasons, you can not argue that criticism “shames” a character for their appearance or behavior.
And just for the record, seeing what kind of responses this post received before we got to reblog it: NO, the fact that fictional characters tend to grow and take a life of their own still does not mean they have agency.
No matter how developed a fictional person is, they’re still written by a real person (or people) who have their own biases and rationalizations. Just because some “choices” feel natural to the author doesn’t mean they’re objectively plausible “choices” for a character to make within the given narrative.
Sometimes the choice, like (in case of what our blog critiques) decision to wear a sexualized costume to battle, can be explained by specific circumstances. But in most circumstances or with other explanations, the same choice can be plain silly and inconsistent with the rest of established story/worldbuilding.
It seems a popular trend in trying to defend terrible costume designs with random pictures of female wrestlers or MMA fighters. Usually accompanied by some sort of rant about how anyone who questions the perfection of these costumes is the sexist one!
Yes, there are many sexualized costumes in women’s sports. It’s not because the costumes are flawless. Rather it is a sign that female athletes often suffer under the tyranny of Creepy Marketing Guy too.
At the end of the day, justifying sexist double standards in the media by pointing to more sexist double standards in the media only showcases how wide spread the problem is.
More under the cut.
– wincenworks
Showmanship vs Sportsmanship
It’s a public secret that WWE isn’t exactly about competing to see who has the greatest combat skills. WWE and those like it are about over the top stunts, fast paced drama and general entertainment.
If we accept that climbing up on a giant prop so that you can taunt your opponent, call for the crowd to cheer and then drop down with a body slam is not serious fighting behaviour, we should be able to accept they are not wearing serious costumes either.
For reference, compare any rebuttal outfit to what Saori Yoshida wore when she took Gold at the 2012 Olympics.
Rules of Engagement
Unsurprisingly in heavily regulated sports that have to adhere to regulations from sponsors, insurance and law enforcement – they have a lot of rules about what you can and can’t do to each other.
Even in more liberal fighting sports such as MMA or Ultimate Fighting, the opponents are not actually trying to kill or permanently injure each other – they’re trying to force a submission through allowed techniques. Certainly you can’t bring claw weapons, throw fireballs, use grappling hooks or rip their head off at the end of the round.
Weight Classes
This is usually more an objection when we talk about body types or lack of muscle, but there’s always no shortage of people rushing to post images of conventionally attractive young women who are professional fighters – thus insisting that all warrior women should conform to these standards.
This overlooks a rather critical aspect of the above rules of engagement – that in order to keep competitions within the many rules fair, fighters are sorted into weight classes. Professional fighters need superb discipline and go to great lengths to balance performance vs weight – because they need to in order to be allowed to fight in their weight class.
Unsurprisingly, height is also and advantage so in many of lighter weight classes the contestants tend to be of slim build and a few invariably fall within the conventional beauty standards.
Sponsorship
The lighter weight classes are particularly important, because for any combat sport event to get big tournaments with professional fighters, promotions, photo shoots, etc they need sponsors. The bigger the sponsors, the bigger the events. WWE’s sponsors include Disney and Mattel. And this is where the tyranny of Creepy Marketing Guy comes in.
Companies sponsor events and fighters in order to boost their image and promote themselves. That means the marketing department gets involved and so does the flawed mentality that sex sells – this effects both the events and the individual fighters.
Now before we continue – I need to stress here that the problem is not the women who benefit from these opportunities and/or enjoy these aspects of the sport. The problem is that the circumstances create additional barriers for women who do not fit or feel comfortable within the constraints.
Journalists and brodudes alike constantly try to justify this focusing on sound bytes or photos of successful female athletes who seem to be okay with it – that’s not fair to the women who dropped out because of these issues or the women who succeed.
The upper limit for the absolute heaviest weight class for women that receives sponsorship for national and international events is 66 kgs or 145 lbs. For men, it’s 120kgs or 265 lbs AND occasionally they experiment with super heavyweight – a division with no upper weight limit at all.
To put this in perspective: Fighter/actress Gina Carano was a champion fighter in the heaviest divisions of Mixed Martial Arts. She tended to weight 140 – 143 pounds during her fight career and once had to publicly strip naked to make her weigh in. This is her with regular sized, just plain actor, Ewan McGregor in Haywire:
This is her generously allowing The Rock to lean on her while he takes a nap:
On top of that, if you want to be a professional fighter you’re going to need a very rigorous training schedule, be able to travel, take time off to heal up after fights, etc. So it’s in your best interests to attract sponsors who will pay you to do all of that.
The downside is, marketing guys will tend to want you to pose for their promotions and fight wearing items of clothing that they pick for you to wear during promo shoots. It also means that marketing guys additional funding options such as interviews, cover shoots, etc tend to want to focus more on “isn’t she sexy!?” rather than “isn’t she a badass!?”
So long as society remains comfortable with this idea that women aren’t worth giving attention to unless they’re sexy, there’s never going to be any shortage of examples like this. That doesn’t make any one example okay.
It seems a popular trend in trying to defend terrible costume designs with random pictures of female wrestlers or MMA fighters. Usually accompanied by some sort of rant about how anyone who questions the perfection of these costumes is the sexist one!
Yes, there are many sexualized costumes in women’s sports. It’s not because the costumes are flawless. Rather it is a sign that female athletes often suffer under the tyranny of Creepy Marketing Guy too.
At the end of the day, justifying sexist double standards in the media by pointing to more sexist double standards in the media only showcases how wide spread the problem is.
More under the cut.
– wincenworks
Showmanship vs Sportsmanship
It’s a public secret that WWE isn’t exactly about competing to see who has the greatest combat skills. WWE and those like it are about over the top stunts, fast paced drama and general entertainment.
If we accept that climbing up on a giant prop so that you can taunt your opponent, call for the crowd to cheer and then drop down with a body slam is not serious fighting behaviour, we should be able to accept they are not wearing serious costumes either.
For reference, compare any rebuttal outfit to what Saori Yoshida wore when she took Gold at the 2012 Olympics.
Rules of Engagement
Unsurprisingly in heavily regulated sports that have to adhere to regulations from sponsors, insurance and law enforcement – they have a lot of rules about what you can and can’t do to each other.
Even in more liberal fighting sports such as MMA or Ultimate Fighting, the opponents are not actually trying to kill or permanently injure each other – they’re trying to force a submission through allowed techniques. Certainly you can’t bring claw weapons, throw fireballs, use grappling hooks or rip their head off at the end of the round.
Weight Classes
This is usually more an objection when we talk about body types or lack of muscle, but there’s always no shortage of people rushing to post images of conventionally attractive young women who are professional fighters – thus insisting that all warrior women should conform to these standards.
This overlooks a rather critical aspect of the above rules of engagement – that in order to keep competitions within the many rules fair, fighters are sorted into weight classes. Professional fighters need superb discipline and go to great lengths to balance performance vs weight – because they need to in order to be allowed to fight in their weight class.
Unsurprisingly, height is also and advantage so in many of lighter weight classes the contestants tend to be of slim build and a few invariably fall within the conventional beauty standards.
Sponsorship
The lighter weight classes are particularly important, because for any combat sport event to get big tournaments with professional fighters, promotions, photo shoots, etc they need sponsors. The bigger the sponsors, the bigger the events. WWE’s sponsors include Disney and Mattel. And this is where the tyranny of Creepy Marketing Guy comes in.
Companies sponsor events and fighters in order to boost their image and promote themselves. That means the marketing department gets involved and so does the flawed mentality that sex sells – this effects both the events and the individual fighters.
Now before we continue – I need to stress here that the problem is not the women who benefit from these opportunities and/or enjoy these aspects of the sport. The problem is that the circumstances create additional barriers for women who do not fit or feel comfortable within the constraints.
Journalists and brodudes alike constantly try to justify this focusing on sound bytes or photos of successful female athletes who seem to be okay with it – that’s not fair to the women who dropped out because of these issues or the women who succeed.
The upper limit for the absolute heaviest weight class for women that receives sponsorship for national and international events is 66 kgs or 145 lbs. For men, it’s 120kgs or 265 lbs AND occasionally they experiment with super heavyweight – a division with no upper weight limit at all.
To put this in perspective: Fighter/actress Gina Carano was a champion fighter in the heaviest divisions of Mixed Martial Arts. She tended to weight 140 – 143 pounds during her fight career and once had to publicly strip naked to make her weigh in. This is her with regular sized, just plain actor, Ewan McGregor in Haywire:
This is her generously allowing The Rock to lean on her while he takes a nap:
On top of that, if you want to be a professional fighter you’re going to need a very rigorous training schedule, be able to travel, take time off to heal up after fights, etc. So it’s in your best interests to attract sponsors who will pay you to do all of that.
The downside is, marketing guys will tend to want you to pose for their promotions and fight wearing items of clothing that they pick for you to wear during promo shoots. It also means that marketing guys additional funding options such as interviews, cover shoots, etc tend to want to focus more on “isn’t she sexy!?” rather than “isn’t she a badass!?”
So long as society remains comfortable with this idea that women aren’t worth giving attention to unless they’re sexy, there’s never going to be any shortage of examples like this. That doesn’t make any one example okay.
While we’re sort of on the subject of unlockable outfits, I wanted to bring up Sherry from Resident Evil 6. Sherry was originally from Resident Evil 2, where she was a young child.
Pretty standard stuff. For Resident Evil 6, Capcom surprised fans by bringing her back as a (really awesome) playable character, where she became an agent for homeland security after being inspired by Claire Redfield’s actions in the second game.
Her design looks great, and it makes practical sense. This still holds true for later in the game, where all the characters have an outfit changes due to the game skipping six months ahead in the story.
And then…we get to these outfits.
The one on the left is an unlockable outfit that players can use in the Mercenaries mode, essentially a survive to the end with an increasing amount of zombies type of minigame. The developers thought it would be cool to give Sherry her original outfit…and I guess they meant the actual outfit, because wow that is really small.
The context of the one on the right is even worse, and pretty disgusting (RE6 story spoilers to follow:) at one point, Sherry and her partner, Jake, are captured by the villain organization and are experimented on for six months. Apparently they had absolutely nothing for Sherry to wear while in the facility, so they took a few rags and tied them together. Meanwhile, her partner was just shirtless with some sweatpants on.
This is also the point of the story where the clothing swap happens, and even though the outfit is fine, the changing cutscene is shot in a veeerrrryyy particular way.
Resident Evil has some particularly great women, but recently they’ve been going a little downhill with how they’ve been treating them (and the franchise in general.)
Some say we shouldn’t criticize bonus video game character outfits (unlockables/DLCs/pre-orders), because they’re optional and therefore even more in the vaccum of “just fiction”/”just fanservice” than the default character looks.
We gotta keep in mind that optional costumes, unlike, say, fan mods, are still intended by the developers to be the part of the experience, sometimes even the selling point for some specific edition of the game. It’s just as valid to be critical of them as of the game’s marketing, even if (or rather, especially if) they’re not faithfully representing the game as a product.
As @femfreqputs it in their newest video, the double standard of defaulting unlockable female outfits to “sexy” is especially harmful when the character is otherwise appropriately dressed for her job. And Sherry is just one heroine on the long list of Resident Evil’s capable-women-turned-eyecandy.
edit: Something’s very wrong with tumblr lately and it has been repeatedly deleting the first two paragraphs the-midnight-doe wrote. Apparently they didn’t make it into a single reblog of this post, of which I’m sorry both to the submitter and the rebloggers.
While we’re sort of on the subject of unlockable outfits, I wanted to bring up Sherry from Resident Evil 6. Sherry was originally from Resident Evil 2, where she was a young child.
Pretty standard stuff. For Resident Evil 6, Capcom surprised fans by bringing her back as a (really awesome) playable character, where she became an agent for homeland security after being inspired by Claire Redfield’s actions in the second game.
Her design looks great, and it makes practical sense. This still holds true for later in the game, where all the characters have an outfit changes due to the game skipping six months ahead in the story.
And then…we get to these outfits.
The one on the left is an unlockable outfit that players can use in the Mercenaries mode, essentially a survive to the end with an increasing amount of zombies type of minigame. The developers thought it would be cool to give Sherry her original outfit…and I guess they meant the actual outfit, because wow that is really small.
The context of the one on the right is even worse, and pretty disgusting (RE6 story spoilers to follow:) at one point, Sherry and her partner, Jake, are captured by the villain organization and are experimented on for six months. Apparently they had absolutely nothing for Sherry to wear while in the facility, so they took a few rags and tied them together. Meanwhile, her partner was just shirtless with some sweatpants on.
This is also the point of the story where the clothing swap happens, and even though the outfit is fine, the changing cutscene is shot in a veeerrrryyy particular way.
Resident Evil has some particularly great women, but recently they’ve been going a little downhill with how they’ve been treating them (and the franchise in general.)
Some say we shouldn’t criticize bonus video game character outfits (unlockables/DLCs/pre-orders), because they’re optional and therefore even more in the vaccum of “just fiction”/”just fanservice” than the default character looks.
We gotta keep in mind that optional costumes, unlike, say, fan mods, are still intended by the developers to be the part of the experience, sometimes even the selling point for some specific edition of the game. It’s just as valid to be critical of them as of the game’s marketing, even if (or rather, especially if) they’re not faithfully representing the game as a product.
As @femfreqputs it in their newest video, the double standard of defaulting unlockable female outfits to “sexy” is especially harmful when the character is otherwise appropriately dressed for her job. And Sherry is just one heroine on the long list of Resident Evil’s capable-women-turned-eyecandy.
edit: Something’s very wrong with tumblr lately and it has been repeatedly deleting the first two paragraphs the-midnight-doe wrote. Apparently they didn’t make it into a single reblog of this post, of which I’m sorry both to the submitter and the rebloggers.
Far too often I see people jump at feminists who criticize sexist designs on female characters with, “They’re just showing how confident they are in their sexuality! We need more sex-positive women!”
Yet, these characters never in the game ever make any hint of their sexuality, whether it be through flirting, being unashamed of their sexual behavior, defending the sexual choices of others, or wearing revealing clothing as casual wear (i.e. not wearing battle armor that exposes their entire chest.)
Instead, anytime there are “sex-positive” women in gaming that are vocal about their sexuality and confidence in such, they are almost always a villain. Yet, I never see these people defend these characters, or take note that the only time that a woman in a game is confident in her sexuality, it’s because she’s an ~evil seductress~, and the game developers use it as an exploit rather than a character trait.
How about instead of shouting at feminists that point out the needlessly and nonsensical revealing clothing on female game characters that it’s supposed to be because they’re “sex-positive”, you instead take the energy and criticize game developers that everytime there is a “sex-positive” women in gaming, she’s evil and it is instead seen as a character flaw?
I’ve alludedbefore that it’s possible to create a female character who dresses skimpily to express how sexually liberated and confident about her own body she is… possible in theory, at least.
Also, as I mentioned in my Stafire-design-through-years article, character’s personal affairs DO NOT excuse what costume she “chooses” to do her job in, particularly when that job is FIGHTING. Especially while warrior men who are equally, if not more, sexually empowered, somehow don’t go around fighting crime in sexy male underwear. And again, a loincloth* on someone like Conan or Kratos is not the same as battle lingerie.
I feel like a large part of the FemShep fandom was that while much of the attire in Mass Effect is questionable – FemShep actually comes pretty close to meeting the “sex positive, not sex toy” criteria. Regardless of the options you pick, she’s competent and complicated.
When she goes into battle she’s kitted with armor, guns, badassery and the potential to be saintly or scary… then when you’re in the safety of your ship you can pick an outfit for her and go talk to your favorite crew member:
Making her vastly more sex positive and personally empowered than pretty much any other female protagonist… even if her outfits are not perfectly equal to BroShep’s and tend more towards hideous than hot.
(For those asking: We have the explanation for Quiet’s ridiculous outfit, and information on how her character is handled… a post will be forthcoming!)
Far too often I see people jump at feminists who criticize sexist designs on female characters with, “They’re just showing how confident they are in their sexuality! We need more sex-positive women!”
Yet, these characters never in the game ever make any hint of their sexuality, whether it be through flirting, being unashamed of their sexual behavior, defending the sexual choices of others, or wearing revealing clothing as casual wear (i.e. not wearing battle armor that exposes their entire chest.)
Instead, anytime there are “sex-positive” women in gaming that are vocal about their sexuality and confidence in such, they are almost always a villain. Yet, I never see these people defend these characters, or take note that the only time that a woman in a game is confident in her sexuality, it’s because she’s an ~evil seductress~, and the game developers use it as an exploit rather than a character trait.
How about instead of shouting at feminists that point out the needlessly and nonsensical revealing clothing on female game characters that it’s supposed to be because they’re “sex-positive”, you instead take the energy and criticize game developers that everytime there is a “sex-positive” women in gaming, she’s evil and it is instead seen as a character flaw?
I’ve alludedbefore that it’s possible to create a female character who dresses skimpily to express how sexually liberated and confident about her own body she is… possible in theory, at least.
Also, as I mentioned in my Stafire-design-through-years article, character’s personal affairs DO NOT excuse what costume she “chooses” to do her job in, particularly when that job is FIGHTING. Especially while warrior men who are equally, if not more, sexually empowered, somehow don’t go around fighting crime in sexy male underwear. And again, a loincloth* on someone like Conan or Kratos is not the same as battle lingerie.
I feel like a large part of the FemShep fandom was that while much of the attire in Mass Effect is questionable – FemShep actually comes pretty close to meeting the “sex positive, not sex toy” criteria. Regardless of the options you pick, she’s competent and complicated.
When she goes into battle she’s kitted with armor, guns, badassery and the potential to be saintly or scary… then when you’re in the safety of your ship you can pick an outfit for her and go talk to your favorite crew member:
Making her vastly more sex positive and personally empowered than pretty much any other female protagonist… even if her outfits are not perfectly equal to BroShep’s and tend more towards hideous than hot.
(For those asking: We have the explanation for Quiet’s ridiculous outfit, and information on how her character is handled… a post will be forthcoming!)
