A Female Gamer’s Thoughts on Feminist Frequency Season 1

I recently wrote a piece entitled Leave Chun-Li Alone. It explored the criticisms surrounding the character, particularly the idea that she was designed purely as the object of the male gaze (the implication — intended or not — being that she had little independent value as her own character). As I explained in that piece, and contrary to the critiques, I saw Chun-Li as a character I could look up to and admire.

Ever since I wrote that piece, I’ve been getting questions about Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency fame. My friends wanted to know what I think of her and her show. Truth be told, I remember harboring a negative view of Anita and her show when I first stumbled upon both in 2016. After watching her videos, I found that I disagreed with many of her views about women in gaming. I also I didn’t like the fact that had her comments turned off on those videos. In fact, Feminist Frequency was the very first piece of media that I reviewed in my (now defunct) blog.

Why did I feel so strongly about another person’s criticism of fictional women? Possibly because I felt connected to them, and still do. I’d been playing video games since I was a child and I looked up to many of the women she spoke about. I love seeing a woman that represents me on the select screen, such as Chun Li. In fact, I was playing the remake of Tomb Raider during the time I found the Feminist Frequency videos.

I remember Sarkeesian claiming that she’d received death threats and become the subject of online bullying which included doxing and pictures of her being attacked by male heroes from the games she’d criticized. After doing a quick google search of her name, I noticed that every article I clicked on insulted men who play video games. One article called them ‘hordes of threatened males who preferred darkness’. While I don’t agree with harassment on either side, I find it odd that she would further kick the hornets nest by name-calling those who’d allegedly frightened her enough to cause her to leave her home. I believe Sarkeesian is using the publicity she gained to further her career. During my search, I found articles with her being hailed as the woman who’d survived gamergate. I also remember seeing her proudly promoting her show as ‘the show that ruined your favorite video games’. She ruined nothing for me, but if I had never played a video game before, she might have.

I hadn’t watched her videos since my original viewing in 2016, so I decided to revisit the first season of her show, this time armed with a pen and paper to see if I still felt as strongly. The first video that I watched was about the damsel in distress trope. In the video, she heavily criticized Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda. I have played little Legend of Zelda, but Super Mario Bros is one of my favorite franchises, so I was shocked to find that I partially agreed with her points about Princess Peach. I would enjoy seeing a platformer starring Princess Peach where she protects her kingdom from Bowser while using a unique set of power-ups or maybe where she decides she’s had enough and wants to rule his kingdom herself.

But I didn’t entirely agree with Sarkeesian’s assessment. For one thing, I don’t believe that Mario and Bowser are fighting for “ownership” of Princess Peach, as Anita claims. Bowser was originally motivated to kidnap the Princess in order to gain control of her kingdom, while Mario is fighting to free her (and thus, to save her kingdom). In Sarkeesian’s view, Princess Peach solely exists for the purpose of being kidnapped and holds no other value as a character.

Sarkeesian brings up other games, like Shadow of the Damned, to further discuss the trope. I believe this is a poor choice to use in demonstrating this trope. There are hints peppered throughout the game that Paula is the Unbreakable Huntress, which means she once hunted monsters herself. She was later defeated and tortured by one. Despite that, she remained unbreakable, or at least unbreakable, until the events of this game. She is revealed to be the final boss and a monster herself, which means she was evil from the start and not a damsel in distress. She uses this point to lead into one about violence against the women being rescued in games. While I’m sure most people don’t agree with violence against women in general, these women are made into villains. Should female villains be treated differently because they are women? What about the games that feature woman on woman violence, such as The Last of Us 2?

She moves on to a trope she calls the Ms. Male character but focuses most of her attention on Ms. Pacman. She shows clips from old commercials and magazine ads that have been selected to fit the narrative she’s attempting to craft. Ms. Pacman was introduced during a time when games weren’t story-driven. Ms. Pacman had little a personality, but neither did Pacman nor Pacman Jr. She talks about how makeup and hair bows are worn by Ms. Pacman so that gamers can tell her apart from her husband, but in the 80s there wasn’t much else developers could do to make her stand out. The game designers created these characters with female players in mind, and while the thought of playing as a character who wears pink and has a more feminine look may offend Sarkeesian, I gravitate towards them.

I can’t help but wonder why Sarkeesian finds the feminine look of characters so offensive. She wants women to be represented in games, but then harshly critiques their appearances, all while wearing makeup herself. While she may not enjoy playing as a character who wears makeup, I can relate to that character in a way that I couldn’t relate to the male counterpart. I wear makeup, and I enjoy dressing in clothes viewed as feminine, like dresses. I also found all the female characters mentioned in her criticism to be just as strong, or stronger than their male counterparts.

In her other videos, she talks about women being shown as background decoration and female NPCs being used to further the gameplay for the protagonist, but all NPCs are there to help the protagonist and face the same dangers. She focuses her attention on video games that portray crime and comments about the protagonist being encouraged to murder women, but many of the games displayed in her video take points away for killing extra people. In fact, in the Hitman clip featured the mission is to save the women from being trafficked.

She also claims that game developers offer women as a reward in gaming, heavily featuring the game Splatterhouse and the optional pictures that you can pick up. When I played the game, I only picked up one piece of a photograph and it did not penalize my gameplay. She also shows a clip from Dead Rising where the player forces Frank West to take a picture of a woman only to have it labeled erotica. You can also get the tag erotica from taking pictures of men, zombies, or in places such as the game’s adult store, and taking these pictures is completely optional.

The last thing I want to bring up is Sarkeesian’s discussion of the alternate costumes in Resident Evil. Alternate costumes are optional, and I rarely play the game using them. I know many gamers do, but that doesn’t mean they are using the costumes she’s displaying nor does that mean they’re choosing them to ogle the female characters. She makes a big deal about the way the women are dressed and their professions without saying much about the men in the game. I found this to be problematic because it’s usually not the ladies of Resident Evil gaining attention for their bodies, but the male character Chris Redfield. His body drew so much attention that developers changed his appearance in later games.

While I don’t think Sarkeesian deserved the hatred thrown her way, I also don’t agree with a lot of the points she attempted to make. I will never agree with the use of someone else’s clips without their permission, as many have accused her of doing. I don’t think she should gloss over the way male characters are dressed/portrayed if she plans to comment so heavily on the women featured in the same game.

I find it difficult to believe that she played all the games she comments on since most of the things she comments on are surface-level complaints. I understand that she’s a feminist who’s trying to prove that games are sexist, but she rarely presents the way men are portrayed for comparison. Perhaps more balance in the arguments she makes would benefit her overall cause.

Originally Published On Medium.