Sexism - The Tool for More Hits.

Hello again everybody Zombie is back with another blog post he wanted to share with you guys and this one comes courtesy of an article I recently read for no named site. The piece I'm talking about is called "Ground Zeroes, Women, and Why They Don't Get Along" I highly recommend you don't give these guys the hits and ignore it.

Now I read this article to see what the writer had to say on the subject matter and after reading I felt such a strong negative reaction to what that I just felt compelled to make this.

This article had to do with Ground Zeroes and it's treatment of women, now yes video game women tend to be portrayed as helpless damsels, overly sexualized objects, or just the plot device that gets the ball rolling. Point is gaming hasn't been doing the best of jobs when portraying women, but where I draw the line is when sites like this use that as a driving force for their sexist claims.

I'll be heading into spoiler territory here for Ground Zeroes so be warned, the complains raised where around the fact that the character of Paz was horribly tortured, beaten and even raped by the main villain Skull Face and his men. They said that all these horrible things where done to her simply as a driving force to make the player hate the villain and that it is devaluing her character.

So here's what I got to say on that, first off, so what if they are their to make you hate Skull Face? How else is the player suppose to dislike the guy, how else am I going to have the feeling that this is personal? If he tried to blow up the planet? Sure but that's lazy writing right there.

Kojima wanted us to hate Skull Face, wanted us to wish him dead and the way you do that is by taking a character we know, with invested interest, a character we give a f#$% about and have him do unspeakable things to them to spur us into action. If it was Chico or Miller or any male character we knew you wouldn't say shit or praise Kojima for his boldness but because Paz is a woman it instantly means sexism.

Another reason why this article is full of it is because he claims this devalues Paz as a character especially since the tapes where you hear the bulk of her torture tend to be long. Why this is bull is because believe it or not her getting tortured and raped makes her a stronger character for it.

One thing that the guy who made it didn't seem to grasp was Skull Face was trying to get information on Big Boss from her, he wasn't doing all that because he likes it but because he wants info. Now why this empowers her is because even after the torture, even after the beatings and even after the rapes she never told him anything.

He had to resort to drastic measures to get the info out of her and she just took it, endured it all because she didn't want anything bad to happen to the people she cared for. "Gasp". It would be one thing if Skull Face had no real reason to do all that or if she broke down after the first second of her torture but she didn't so her getting tortured for the sake of the plot didn't devalue her, instead it made her stronger.

Finally another thing he's added and what a lot of people who have issues with the ending added is the infamous vagina bomb Paz had, now I'm not a woman but I can understand if they do feel disturbed about a video game shoving a bomb in a girl's uterus. Here's the thing though it wasn't the first option and it's the option that made sense.

Skull Face wanted to blow Big Boss' up with the bomb inside Paz but the one he placed inside of her was just to visible for anyone to ignore and as stated in one of the tapes and by just logic you couldn't fit two bombs in the same place. So what other place to store a second bomb but there, again not saying it's not messed up for a woman but at the same time you can't say it's there for the hell of it.

Now don't get me wrong people I'm not trying to defend Ground Zeroes cause I like it or anything because look I think the series has had it's fair share of bad female characters. I agree that Quiet's design is a sexualized one not only that but Meryl was a poorly done character at least in 4.

Seriously you want to talk a female character who's devalued how about her in MGS4. In both MGS1 & 4 you know she loves Snake or has a thing for him but at the end she marries Johnny and now why this devalues her is because of this.

Johnny who she has shown nothing but contempt for tries to propose to her in a gun fight because he has loved her for a long time and at first her reaction is sane by rejecting his offer. Sadly what doesn't make a lick of sense is that she turned him down just so SHE could propose to him instead, and here is where her character loses face.

Up and till then she was always a strong female character trying to find herself and her place while also maintaining a sense of independence and strong sense of duty. But here we have all that wiped away for the sake of rapping shit up, she's never liked Johnny, she never went out with him and just saw him as a co-worker plus she was already in love with someone else.

So with all that she still wants to take a major step in her life and wants to spend the rest of her life with that guy and for what? Because he looks handsome or is it because he saved her ass? So ultimately we got to choose between she's a terrible female character because she falls for any pretty face or because she'll jump on the d$#@ of any guy who saves her from something. Either way she's a terrible female character that devalues her.

Question is did Paz go through a similar thing for the sake of the plot? For the long answer refer to the top, short answer no. That's why the article is terribly written and is a prime example of one many articles that tries to talk about sexism and points fingers on certain games.

Again I'm not ignorant and think there are no offensive games that demean women (looks at Duke Nukem Forever) but at the same time I know when a game isn't doing it and when pricks try to spin it so it comes off like it does just to grant them hits.

Sexism is a serious claim and one that shouldn't be thrown around lightly because when you do you piss of gamers and they don't start to distrust articles that claim certain games do it so when a game that actually does have sexism in it comes around. No one will bother reading it because pricks like guy who wrote the article used it as a way to get people to visit his site.

Well that's what I got thanks for reading.