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.
The literal definition of sexism is discrimination against women on the basis of sex alone. Or it could also be defined as the generalisation of one or more traits or temperamental factors across the entire population of individuals who subscribe to that category (i.e. female), either positive or negative -- stereotyping fits within this definition.
In which case, it's not clear at all that overtly sexualized imagery is inherently sexist.
If the imagery in question was intended to represent all women, and thus was in itself presenting a stereotypical view of women, then yeah I could see the sexism argument having merit. But in this case, we have a singular fictional character who is ostensibly intended by the author to represent only this fictional character. How then can it be sexist?
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.
This raises a much more interesting point to me about the objectification of people in a broader context.
I must ask the question. Is objectification inherently bad?
If you consider a sports star, for example. Michael Jordan is known and valued in the minds of people exclusively for his ability to play basketball. That follows logically the definition of objectification.
It's therefore not clear to me at all, why it's ok for people to objectify Michael Jordan, and not so for someone working in the sex or erotica industries.
Realistically, we objectify people in plenty of different contexts and applications, i.e. we value them only for what they can deliver/do rather than who they are. But that's simply an artefact of societal limitations.
We can't know everyone on a personal level, only those within our personal relational circles. Thus everyone outside of those circles are objectified by us to some extent.
Likewise, considering the subject of sexual objectification, if the parties involved are so consensually, e.g. many women involved in the sex industries are driven by voyeuristic fantasies that provide themselves with heightened sexual arousal at the thought of being desired by the men who partake in the spectatorship of the sexual act. How are we to argue for them on their behalf that they are being demeaned when not only do their consent to being sexually objectified, they even enjoy it?
To conclude that sexual objectification is universally demeaning to the people being objectified is to project your own personal subjective biases and views on sexual conduct onto others. The fact is, some women may feel demeaned by being sexually objectified, but clearly not all women do, and therefore concluding the practice is demeaning is simply siding with one group over the other.
In the case, however, like we're discussing here where the subject of any sexual objectification is a fictional character, any argument about the imagery being demeaning or objectifying appears entirely moot. Who is being objectified? Who is it demeaning to? A fictional character that doesn't exist? That would be absurd an argument to make.
Therefore, you must be therefore arguing that the objectification of a fictional character is demeaning to real women, or will result in the objectification of real women.
To the former point, context is everything. Unless the fictional character is intended to depict a particular real-world group or individual, the argument holds no weight. Equally, to the latter point, you'd need to provide real-world data showing a clear correlation in human behavioural studies to even begin to be taken seriously with an argument like this, and to my knowledge, no such studies have been conducted (because it would be notoriously difficult to construct in a way that gives meaningful results).
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.
This appeal to "civilised people" is a bit of a poor taste attempt at gas-lighting.
Social commentators in the post-modern era have said a lot of things about female representation in gaming. Not much of it has been actually backed up by any sort of quantitative analysis.
Therefore, simply accepting qualitative opinion on female representation among the fictional characters of a media art form, without seeing any empirical evidence to support the broadly speculated conclusions, is actually the complete opposite of what a sceptical civilised society should be doing in the modern era.
If someone posits that seeing overtly sexualised imagery in games might be mal-affecting the ability of boys in society to properly relate with girls in real-world society, that amounts to merely a hypothesis, that MUST be substantiated by quantitative study and analysis in order to determine the veracity of the claim. This hasn't happened.
So in the absence of any evidence to support the broad sweeping conclusions of social commentators, we're now trying to enforce artificial rules governing the representation of fictional male and female characters in games on their developers....? That doesn't seem at all rational nor civilised to me.
Games are an art form, more similar to visual art and books than even TV and film. The characters are purely fictional, even down to their visual design. Thus the idea that the representation of a fictional female form would have any impact at all on the way in which real-world humans view other real-world humans seems like a reach. Thus, I see no reason to try to force artists to try to make their artistic designs conform to a set of artificial rules based on real-world issues when these designs do not exist in the real-world and never will. Why should we force an artist to draw a character who conforms to realistic norms?
It's censorship of artistic expression. In a civilised society, why would we want to do that?
To me it's weird that anyone would question this.
Only because, as you admit in the first part of your post, you're probably imbibed a lot of the discussion from social commentators and activists in this area, never really thought deeply about or scrutinised their reasoning, and thus never considered that there can be a very rational and well reasoned opposing viewpoint... and there are.... there are many.
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?
Of course!... Her design isn't sexist at all. How can you possibly define sexism in a way that encompasses her design? Unless you so expand your definition such that it becomes so all encompassing as to be meaningless.
Isn't it just *obviously* so?
Nope, and I hope that by now after all I've written above you can see why that is.
