A Metal Bikini Will Not Protect You

Recently in pop culture and media we have seen depictions of powerful women rise in popularity. There was the “nasty women” campaign when Hillary Clinton ran for office in 2016 and the box office hit “Wonder Women” came out in June of 2017. The media slowly has begun to change how they depict powerful and empowering women. However, one area of the media that has not made significant headway is the internet gaming industry.

Now, it is fair to say that far more women go see movies than those who play video games but, it have been recorded that upwards of 44% of video game players are women and this number has steadily been increasing since the early 2000s (Tsai, 2017). For many of these women the female characters/avatars are their first encounter with a depiction of a strong female. While these women may have powers and fight the monsters they are often secondary characters and overly sexualized. This not only affects how female gamers view themselves but how their male counterparts view them.

Female gamers are constantly harassed online. In fact some women even go as far as to hide their gender when playing competitively online to protect themselves from being harassed. Studies have shown that male gamers are more likely to choose a female avatar that is sexual over one that is not as sexual.

The correlation between how female avatars are depicted and toxic masculinity in the gaming community is similar to the connection between violent video games and increased violence in players. In this case when male players are constantly being exposed to and interacting with images of women that are overly sexual they are going to start to view women in real life as sexual objects.

This also creates a culture where male players feel like they have power over female players since male avatars are often more powerful than female avatars. This kind of attitude promotes the stereotype that girls can’t like video games and more importantly can’t be good at them.

In order to change this culture of male dominance and toxic masculinity in gaming culture 3 major things have to change. I call them the 3 E’s; Executives, Execution, and Expectations. Executives refers to higher ups and content creators in the gaming industry because surprise, surprise, they are mostly all men. Having more female content creators would give women a voice in how games are created and how women are depicted. Execution refers to how games are designed. Female avatars need to be designed with realistic proportions and real armour. In short they need human sized boobs and no skirts in combat. Lastly, Expectations refers to how certain online games deal with sexual harassment. Programmers need to do a better job of identifying toxic players and kicking them out of the game. If they show sexual harassment isn't tolerated than gamers are less likely to do it especially if the game is important to them. Trust me when my friend was locked out of his “League of Legends” account because they thought he was cheating, oof, I’ve never seen him so anxious. The 3 E’s are imperative because at the end of the day the truth is women are nerds too and they deserve respect.