K, no. I did no such thing. You switching quotes around like this is rather frustrating. I interpreted
this statement:
"The latter is a statement that its very existence is hurtful to segments of society, and implies that as a result of this we would be better served on the whole for it not to exist. For these reasons I feel that both of these forms of statement are de facto censorious, and furthermore that both are inherently aggressive positions and should be responded to as such."
to be a condemnation of criticism. Granted, it was too broad of me to characterize it as a condemnation of
all criticism. Nevertheless, you certainly did describe certain forms of criticism as "de facto censorious." And I do not agree with that descriptor, nor I see any meaningful difference between that type of criticism and the type you say is acceptable.
So while I admit I misread some parts of your post, of the two misreadings you are accusing me of, one I took to be a hypothetical, and the other is you substituting an entirely different remark from another part of your post and acting as if I were responding to
that even though I wasn't.
But now I'm doubly confused. You say above that you were actually endorsing the position that the trend of sexualized female characters can have marginalizing effects, and yet below that you claimed that criticism based on causative arguments that such works do harm to society (of which that would surely qualify) are censorious and should be fought.
What gives? I'm not trying to be clever here; I honestly don't see how you can reconcile these viewpoints. Is it acceptable to criticize negative depictions in media for the marginalizing effects they have at large or not?
Alright, I don't think we're really in any sort of disagreement on a lot of things, here, and I suspect that maybe we got some wires crossed and this whole conversation turned out way more hostile than it really ought to have. I'm going to try to backtrack a bit, because I think we've got quite a bit of common ground that got lost in the shuffle.
I readily call myself a feminist, and I think that men who play video games have a dramatically greater variety in portrayals of their gender within the medium than women do. Examples of female characters within video games are far more narrow in the variety of depictions they represent than are male characters, and it's entirely valid to observe this, to criticize it, and to advocate for increased variety in these portrayals and for them to have greater importance within the medium. I don't think that you and I are in any sort of disagreement so far.
The state of video game portrayals of women, in aggregate, and the paucity of variety in those portrayals is the emergent result of video game developers being largely male and, by extension, of them making games primarily inspired and informed by the sorts of games that made them take an interest in the medium, which were themselves originally made by development teams which were largely male. As an emergent system, however, I don't think that any individual developer bears a responsibility to actively erode the extant state of these portrayals.
I'm rather fond of bell hooks, and she makes a significant distinction between the ideas of representation and self-representation. What I think is probably the best overview of the concept is in her book
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, in which she discusses how she feels that the (majority white) American feminist movements of the time (the book was originally published in 1981) did a poor job of adequately representing the needs of black women -- even if they proclaimed a sincere intent to do so -- and the importance for black women to represent themselves rather than to rely on the larger feminist movement as a result. She also touches on the concomitant importance for black women to represent themselves in matters of racial representation rather than to allow black men to dominate such discourse. I agree with this, and believe that self-representation of minority groups is, ultimately, the only long-term solution to the situation we are currently faced with in regards to the overall picture of comparatively poor female representation in video games.
I've got a background in theater, and during my time working there was a rather well-entrenched culture of responding strongly in opposition to any behavior which was or was tantamount to an attempt at de facto censorship. It was the bounds between criticism and such attempts that I was explaining in my original post. I will confess that there was a practical component to this opposition; it's generally trivially easy for an individual with malicious intent to severely disrupt a theatrical production and disrupt the ability of the audience to experience the show or, worse, to injure a performer. I'm amenable to the idea that the blanket oppositional response to statements which cross certain boundaries in the context of theatrical productions may be overly reactive when applied to mediums like video games where the separation between artists and audiences are far greater, but I still think that the ideal of free expression and the fecundity of ideas that it enables is sufficiently valuable that de facto censorious statements warrant strong opposition.
Finally, add all this together, and you've got my position, which I'm going to condense into a handy Cliff's Notes version right here:
1. Video game portrayals of women are quite bad on the whole, and this state of affairs doesn't really do anybody much good.
2. Extant video game developers are predominantly male, and therefore the bulk of female portrayals resulting from such an environment are inevitably going to be portrayals of a minority as interpreted through the lens of the majority, and I don't think that this is good enough because I value self-representation.
3. The only meaningful and acceptable long-term solution to the problem of poor female representation in video games is, therefore, to incentivise increased female participation in game development. This can take many forms: democratization of development tools and publishing channels, eroding barriers toward women engaging in STEM education and careers and encouraging such engagement, and identifying and eliminating structural aspects of video game development which serve to alienate women are three examples I can think of off the top of my head.
4. As an emergent system, no individual bears ultimate responsibility for the poor quality of female representation in video games, and so castigating individual examples of poor portrayals doesn't serve much purpose, and my admittedly subjective perception is that it constitutes a significant amount of the conversation on the subject. If people find it edifying to single out games and designers for excoriation then that's their prerogative, but as someone who wishes to see a greater breadth of expression through the medium of video games I'm frankly opposed to the practice.
5. Censorship is not the exclusive domain of government forces, and conflation of media consumption with anti-social or undesirable behavior or allegations of causative harm stemming from media both constitute forms of de facto attempts at censorship. Even if not as egregious as de jure censorship, such attempts warrant strong opposition. Note also that there is a large difference between such attempts and media criticism in general.
6. Expressions of sexuality are a perfectly natural part of the human experience. No individual bears any responsibility to abrogate such expression through media even if the effects of a preponderance of one type of such expression on a large scale have an unintended negative effect.
And that's pretty much everything I have to say about the subject. Hopefully now that I've gotten this monkey off my back I can finally curb the endless masochism that drives me to post in these threads.