I actually find this thread strangely educational, in that I'm being asked to deconstruct a position that I hold that's just so obvious to me that I probably haven't thought about it much for a while. It's kind of disconcerting to see so many people question how such imagery could be sexist when it just seems self-evident.
To me it's demeaning in the same way that a woman dancing nude for men in a strip club is demeaning, ie *obviously*. It's objectification: the treatment of a person as valuable only in their ability to titillate.
I'd thought that civilised people had accepted that a woman presented in a non-sexual context like this - a videogame character whose sex is irrelevant to her role in the game - should be depicted as much as possible as a rounded human being. Instead presenting her as something to be leered at just seems inherently disrespectful to women.
To me it's weird that anyone would question this.
Do you all, for example, reject the idea that the original Lara Croft character model, with her hot pants and gigantic pointy tits, is sexist? Isn't it just *obviously* so?
Sexy imagery is not, self-evidently sexist, and I think what Alex meant was that the character design isn't in-keeping with current western trends (see Control, HZD, TLOU II, Hellblade, Gears 5, Life is Strange, Tomb Raider and countless others). Whatever you think of that trend, he's very obviously right.
The issue is everyone thinking their vision of how certain individuals should be presented is the right one. You'll scarce find two women who agree on what the proper representation for a member of their gender is, let alone two men. Women in twentieth century media were historically presented in quite narrow and distinct terms, and women rightly got fed up with that. Not only this, the reality of those terms was even narrower: women were not only to be presented as attractive and desirable, but to presented as such in line with a specific beauty standards and accepted cultural norms.
It's a lack of variety which, for women, translates into a lack of opportunity in real terms. We don't look at an objectified man and say 'how disgusting' because we know that that is one of many different ways that men are described and understood - the fact that we sometimes see men presented as sex objects doesn't really factor into how we look at the whole gender, we can understand and accept both. Women don't get that; every representation of a woman affects the representation of all women. Too thin, too fat, too masculine, too feminine, too sexualised, too frumpy. It seems like almost every outspoken person on this subject is interested in telling women what they should and shouldn't be wearing (for the good of all women, quite often) or what they should and shouldn't be doing with their lives, as though there's some ideal standard.
I'd imagine what women really want, more than anything, is to choose for themselves and not be called ugly or frumpy for doing it one way or objectified and degraded for doing it another. I'd imagine what they really want to is to get on with their lives without people constantly interfering.
