On GTA V being pulled from Target and Kmart shelves in Australia

One of the most predictable and most frustrating accusations readers would lob at me as a critic of video games who, on rare occasions, felt that the sociopolitical content of a game was as worthy of critique as its graphics and its gameplay mechanics, is that to criticize a game for being misogynistic is tantamount to advocating the censorship of games. It absolutely isn’t, any more than Roger Ebert’s review of Kick Ass, which he called “morally reprehensible,” was a call for censorship, and the fact that the huge distinction between critiquing something and calling for it to be censored is invisible to so many people who play games is troubling. Never were the claims that I was an advocate of censorship louder than in the wake of my review of Grand Theft Auto V for GameSpot last year. If I’d focused entirely on how the guns feel to shoot, or how the cars feel to drive, or how recognizable the songs on the radio are, or how realistic the graphics look, I wouldn’t have gotten such complaints. These aspects are all fair game for discussion in a review. But when I said that the game was deeply misogynistic, I crossed a line.

Now, Grand Theft Auto V (which is getting attention again thanks to a second release with better graphics and other new features for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4) has been pulled from Target and Kmart shelves in Australia. A quick Twitter search using the terms “Target GTA censorship” reveals that, of course, many are decrying the chains’ decisions as acts of censorship, and they’re simply not. The government has not banned the game, or demanded that objectionable material be cut from it. Two retail chains, in response to customer outcry, have chosen to pull the game from shelves. Australians who wish to play the game can purchase it from other retailers. A mild inconvenience for some shoppers, perhaps, but censorship? Hardly. It’s not as if these chains ever carry or are expected to carry every product under the sun. My local Target carries lots of potato chips but not the kind I really like. That’s not censorship. They have also never, ever carried every game that gets released. Nobody cries censorship at the constant reality of the chain just choosing not to stock particular games in the first place, and it’s not censorship if they opt to stop carrying a game for whatever reason—because it’s not selling, or in response to customer request, or for whatever reason.

I neither applaud nor condemn the chains’ decision. They are corporations. For them, this was a business decision, a public relations decision. The chains decided that it was in their interests to comply with the request of the 47,000-plus people who signed an online petition calling for the removal of the game from shelves.

I do, however, applaud the women behind the petition in their efforts to raise awareness and concern about the violence against women in the game, and to take a stand against it. The text of the petition accurately and chillingly states, “This game spreads the idea that certain women exist as scapegoats for male violence. It shows hatred and contempt for women in the sex industry and puts them at greater risk. Women in the industry are 40 times more likely to be murdered by a man than any other group of women. Games like this are grooming yet another generation of boys to tolerate violence against women. It is fuelling the epidemic of violence experienced by so many girls and women in Australia - and globally.”

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Some players have responded to the chains’ decision by pointing out that committing acts of violence against women is not a central part of GTA, that you can play through the entire story and rarely if ever be required to attack or kill a woman. And this is true. Violence against women is not central to GTA V and women are not central to GTA V. Women are marginalized, relegated to a few minor, mostly unlikable roles, while men are centered and depicted as powerful and sympathetic, put-upon by their unfaithful wives, annoyed by their loony aunts. You can’t form a meaningful connection with a female character in the game. But if you want to commit acts of horrifying violence against women as so many of the game’s players do, GTA gives you no shortage of opportunities.

There are those who say that GTA is a game about freedom, a world in which you can go anywhere and do anything. But it’s not. You can’t paint your house, for instance, or cook dinner for your wife. One of the most touted examples of the series’ supposed freedom has long been your ability to pay a woman for sex (which the latest release lets you witness from a first-person perspective!) and then, if you feel like it, murder her and take the money from her corpse. GTA can’t make room for women as well-developed people but it has no trouble making room for them as victims.

Some point to the game’s satirical tone as an indication that the game is actually critiquing your actions. It isn’t. You aren’t meant to feel horrified by your own capacity for violence. You’re meant to enjoy your freedom, such as it is. Want to go beat or murder some transgender people? You can do that! In the fictional American city of Los Santos, you can have a good time giving violent expression to all your misogyny and transphobia. GTA is not a challenging critique of toxic masculinity. It is a powerful reinforcement of it, a celebration of it. If you doubt this, watch some of the videos on Youtube of players enjoying themselves as they spout misogynistic or transphobic slurs while murdering people in the game.

As a transgender woman who knows we live in a world that is hostile to trans people and is just a little bit scared to leave the house every day, and who has experienced firsthand the misogyny and transmisogyny that runs through gaming culture like an illness, you can’t tell me that the fact that GTA V lets players gleefully beat and murder transgender people is harmless, that it doesn’t contribute to a culture that is violently transphobic. You have no options for meaningfully interacting with these people in nonviolent ways. Your only real option for interacting with them at all is through violence. This is poisonous and dangerous, fueling the perception many people in our culture already have that transgender people deserve to be the victims of brutal violence by letting them enjoyably live out their fantasy of visiting brutal violence on trans people.

Defenders of the freedom GTA V offers to commit brutal acts of violence against women after paying them for sex, or against transgender people, are often quick to point out that you’re free to attack anyone in the city, men and women, police and civilians alike, and that in missions, it’s overwhelmingly men—cops, rival gang members, and so on—who you have to gun down. This is absolutely worthy of discussion and critique, but using this as a defense to dismiss criticisms of the opportunities to commit violence against cisgender women and transgender people in the game ignores that in the game, as in our own society, it is not a level playing field.

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We live in a society in which sex workers and transgender people are at tremendous risk of being victims of violence. When you gun down a rival gang member in the game, it is a terrible, violent act, but it is not an act of hate rooted in that character’s gender or gender identity. Seeking out and then killing a sex worker in the game is a virtual recreation of an act of misogynistic violence that all too frequently happens in the real world. I’m not at all surprised that the petitioners, women who have been sex workers and who have a firsthand experience of sexual violence, would be concerned about this. We should all be concerned about it.

And Grand Theft Auto is not just a drop in the cultural bucket. It is a cultural touchstone, a juggernaut, earning billions of dollars and played by tens of millions of people. A great many of those people, despite the latest installment’s Mature rating in the US and its rating of R18+ in Australia, are teenagers, or younger. In my days as a high school English teacher, I spoke to many young people who laughed about the fun they had having sex with women in the game, then killing those women to get their money back. These young people weren’t inclined to reflect critically on their actions because the game does not invite or encourage such reflection. To them, it was just a good time, a fun game, another piece of media sending the message that masculinity is violent and that women are disposable. I don’t believe that Grand Theft Auto is going to make most players steal cars or commit murder. But I absolutely believe that all of us absorb messages about what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman, from the media we consume. 

As a game critic, you deal with the gaming media that exists, as it exists. You try to engage with it honestly and you hope that you contribute something to the ongoing cultural discourse, that maybe readers will find their perspective on a particular game or on games in general informed or enriched or challenged in some way by something you’ve said. You hope that you encourage people to engage with games thoughtfully and critically. I feel like that’s about all you can hope for.

Motivated by their own experiences with violent misogyny, the women who launched the petition that led Australian Target and Kmart stores to pull GTA V from their shelves wanted to make a different kind of change. And for that, I don’t blame them at all.