On Having a Feminist “Agenda”

Yesterday, in praise of Emma Watson’s speech at the UN and in criticism of feminist voices that have engaged in serious feminist critique of video games, a major game designer tweeted this:

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But here’s the thing: we will not, we cannot, actually move toward gender equality without having a kind of agenda to do so. This is not to take anything away from Watson’s speech, which, it seems to me, was meant to rouse people, to galvanize them, to get them excited about participating in a movement that, one hopes, will guide people to take concrete steps toward the realization of a more equitable society, and which served this purpose admirably. But in the speech, Watson herself references the famous statement about how all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. It is not enough to simply nod in passionate agreement with Watson’s speech and then walk away, smug in the belief that, because you already believe in the notion that women should be afforded the same respect and the same opportunities and the same privileges as men, you are not part of the problem. 

I considered myself a feminist in some vague sense for a long time, but sadly, I don’t think that I really understood the importance of actively opposing patriarchy and actively critiquing culturally dominant ideologies about gender until I ran up against these forces simply by existing and trying to do a particular job as a transgender woman. Immediately when I started working for GameSpot and appearing on video for the site, numerous comments appeared from male readers arguing that they were the site’s customers, its target demographic, that the site should always put their desires first, and that for them, the role of women in games media is primarily to look appealing for them. By hiring me and putting me, a transgender woman who did not meet their criteria for attractiveness, on camera, the site was in dereliction of duty. The site was betraying its customers. Men, of course, could look like complete schlubs. Men were valued for what they had to say about games. Women were not. I knew then that I would never be valued by viewers in the same way or for the same reasons that my male colleagues were. And I knew that part of dismantling the culture that led young men to think of women in this way required encouraging people to think critically about how gender is portrayed in media.

It might be easy to say that this attitude is the natural stuff of immature teenage boys who will simply grow out of it. It’s not. It is culturally constructed and ubiquitous. On his most recent show, John Oliver skewers the Miss America pageant. My favorite moment comes at 5:08, when we see Donald Trump tell a reporter that she wouldn’t have her job if she weren’t beautiful. 

And yes, it’s crude and insulting. It might also be true. Women often are required to be attractive in ways that men are not in order to get roles in front of the camera, not just in games media but in all sorts of media. And how telling and terrifying is it that “the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women” is the Miss America pageant, which requires women to parade themselves around like specimens for a scientific appraisal of their attractiveness? The fact that women are objectified and marginalized and often valued primarily for how attractive they are to men is a culturally constructed reality, not an inevitable, “natural” one. It is both reflected in and fueled by media, movies and TV and games and magazines and beauty pageants, and the reality cannot be changed without the culture also changing. 

So, yes, it is true that I had something of an “agenda” as a game critic. I think that every critic could be said to have an agenda that is shaped by his or her experiences and worldview. In this interview, the creator of a new website states that the site is for “all gamers, as long as they aren’t pushing a socially political message. Because obviously there are people who game who have social messages that they want dispersed around, but we’re not in that business.” When asked if a review that criticizes a game’s depiction of rape would belong on the site, she replied, “That’s the sort of social message we’re trying to avoid.” But being committed to not engaging with the sociopolitical meanings in games is just as much of an agenda and just as much of a political statement as being committed to thinking critically about those meanings. It is an agenda blindly supporting the ideologies present in media, letting them sail on by uncriticized, un-remarked-upon, still consumed but not critically consumed, just thoughtlessly absorbed. 

So I don’t know what the game designer whose tweet, or those who reacted in vehement support of that tweet, are thinking. Perhaps they are envisioning some road by which we arrive at a world where women are truly afforded the same respect as men in our society but that also lets us continue to live in a world in which representations of women in games and on TV and in movies are so limited and are so overwhelmingly created specifically for male consumption. Perhaps they want to be able to treat women as sex objects in games without thinking twice about doing so, without ever feeling bad about it, while simultaneously saying that they believe in gender equality. But I’m sorry. It takes work. It takes action. We can’t get there from here without an “agenda,” and part of that agenda means challenging the poor, limited, limiting portrayals of women in so much of the media we consume, and demanding better.